This book is, first of all, a novel, a created view of how a man's life might have turned out. Kanaye Nagasawa did exist, and the story Nagasawa is based on true events and real characters. From historical records, we don't learn about the conversations people had with one another, what fully each character's personality was made up of and what emotions were felt by each.

As an author, I have interpreted the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual experience of the man, Kanaye Nagasawa. Further, they were interpreted by me, a middle-class Caucasian American living in the twenty-first century. The samurai, Nagasawa, who was born into the nineteenth-century chaos that was the changing country of Japan, experienced the world in a different way than I do. Readers are warmed, therefore, that they will discover as much about me and my projections as they will about Nagasawa's.