HIDEYOSHI

Toyotomi Hideyoshi is Japan's greatest success story. Born in a farming village, so poor that no one wrote down the year of his birth, mocked for a face people said looked like a monkey's, he rose to rule the entire country. He became the emperor's regent, built a castle covered in gold, and was worshipped as a god after his death.

That story is true. This book tells all of it — and what the legend leaves out.

He won his first great victories by starving castles into surrender and drowning one in an artificial lake. When his lord Oda Nobunaga was murdered, he raced two hundred kilometers in ten days and destroyed the killer. Then he quietly took Nobunaga's place. He lost a battle to Tokugawa Ieyasu, and won him over by sending his own mother as a guarantee. He took the swords from Japan's farmers so that no one could ever rise as he had. And in his last years, he sent two great armies into Korea and ordered the deaths of his own nephew's wives and children to clear the way for his infant son.

He died begging his great lords to protect that son. Within seventeen years, the boy was dead and his family was gone.

Told as a narrative history from beginning to end, with a cast of characters, a map, and a travel guide to the places you can still visit today, this book follows Hideyoshi from a village in Owari to his tomb on a mountain above Kyoto. It says plainly what the records show, what historians still debate, and which famous stories are only legends.

Inside, you'll find:

- The poor boy with no recorded birthday, and the famous warm sandals that probably never existed
- The sieges of Miki, Tottori, and Takamatsu, won with hunger, money, and water instead of assaults
- The Great Return: two hundred kilometers in ten days to avenge Nobunaga
- The two-year-old heir at Kiyosu, and the rival who died in the snowy north with Nobunaga's sister
- The only major battle he lost, and how he won the war anyway
- The golden tea room, the sword hunt, and the tea master he ordered to die
- The invasion of Korea, the admiral who stopped it, and the Mound of Ears that still stands in Kyoto
- The nephew and the son, and the last letter of a dying man
- A guide to visiting the places in this story today, from his birthplace in Nagoya to the castle he drowned in Okayama

If you want only the cheerful monkey of the old stories, this is not your book. If you want the real story of the farmer's son who rose higher than anyone in Japanese history — and what it cost — turn the page and meet the real Hideyoshi.