" Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show is world-class historical fiction. It takes us to a place, mid-nineteenth-century Japan, that's long ago and far away, and makes it contemporary and intimately familiar. It's a wryly told tale, full of wonders and surprises, written with grace and authority. Richard Wiley is one of the few American novelists with the will and the ability to penetrate a culture not his own with the requisite alacrity and intelligent respect. If there is such a thing as global fiction, Richard Wiley is writing it." --Russell Banks In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo Bay and "opened" Japan to trade with America. As entertainment for the treaty-signing ceremony, Perry brought a white-men-in-black-face minstrel show--and thereby confirmed the widely whispered Japanese belief that trade with the American "barbarians" could only lead to cultural ruin. Yet the pawns in this clash of cultures--the minstrels, Ace Bledsoe and Ned Clark, and the Japanese interpreter, Manjiro Okubo--are just slightly more curious than cautious.

Within the minstrels Manjiro sensed "the subtleties of spirit that reside in all good men." When Ace and Ned are unwittingly made part of a Japanese plot to undermine the American presence, Manjiro helps them escape into the countryside. Pursued by samurai, torn between treachery and loyalty, Manjiro and the minstrels (along with family, friends, and lovers) make their way across Japan, fleeing a showdown with the samurai that gradually becomes inevitable. Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show is the long-awaited prequel--more than a decade in the making--to Richard Wiley's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel, Soldiers in Hiding . A sword-swinging page-turner infused with a heady mix of Japanese etiquette, American ideals, and Machiavellian philosophy, Wiley's latest novel sparkles as it shapes history into an enlightened drama of the earliest moments of globalization.