The Bamboo Sword

When American steamships chug into Edo Bay for the first time, it is into the forbidden waters of mid-19th-century Japan, and Japan's samurai prepare for war. Thirteen-year-old Yoshi longs to join the fight to expel the foreign devils . . . But how?

Forced to flee, Yoshi meets a strange samurai named Manjiro who, surprisingly, employs him as his "apprentice bodyguard." But something even more unexpected happens when Yoshi and an American boy from one of the ships become entangled in a web of intrigue involving spies and assassins, and the two boys must rely on each other to survive.