Between Worlds: The Impossible Life of Yasuke

He was a man history tried to erase. A warrior they worked to forget.
In the late 16th century, a towering African man arrives in the vibrant, violent world of feudal Japan. Torn from his homeland and bound to the service of Jesuit missionaries, he is a living impossibility in a land of rigid tradition and lethal court politics. His presence, a spectacle of both divine and demonic projection, captures the attention of the most powerful and ambitious warlord in the nation: Oda Nobunaga.
The "Demon King," a master of war and a collector of the unusual, sees in this foreigner not just a curiosity, but a weapon, a symbol, and a mind of unexpected brilliance. Against all precedent, the man they call Yasuke is elevated to the rank of samurai, granted a title, a residence, and a place in Nobunaga's inner circle. But with this impossible honor comes a terrible gift: the Muramasa, a legendary cursed blade that pulses with a will of its own and whispers of a bloodlust that centuries have not slaked.
Plunged into a world of shifting alliances, tea ceremonies that are deadlier than battlefields, and bitter rivalries that threaten to tear the nation apart, Yasuke must navigate a treacherous path. He must prove his loyalty to a lord who values merit over birthright, even as the most powerful men in Japan plot to remove the foreign contamination that threatens their vision of the world.
But Yasuke's story does not end in the fires of betrayal at Honno-ji temple. Four centuries later, his ghost echoes through our own time. A historian in Tokyo uncovers his censored history. A mixed-race teenager in a museum finds a mirror of his own identity in a 400-year-old artifact. An art class in Nairobi and a global livestream in Los Angeles reclaim his image, transforming him from footnote to icon. His legacy becomes a new battlefield, fought over by scholars, artists, and corporations who all want to own a piece of the impossible man.
Spanning centuries and continents, Between Worlds is a relentless, masterfully crafted epic of a man who defied every category. It is a story about survival, the cost of belonging, and the battle for history itself—a battle that proves some lives are too extraordinary to be forgotten.