Samurai! is a 1957 autobiographical book by Saburo Sakai co-written with Fred Saito and Martin Caidin. It describes the life and career of SaburÅ Sakai, the Japanese combat aviator who fought against American fighter pilots in the pacific theater of World War II, surviving the war with 64 kills as one of Japan's leading flying aces. Caidin wrote the prose of the book, basing its contents on journalist Fred Saito's extensive interviews with Sakai as well as on Sakai's own memoirs.
Questioned assertions
According to an analysis of official Japanese records, Sakai had 28 aerial victories. This number includes shared victories. The same source claims that Martin Caidin intentionally inflated these numbers to generate publicity for this book. It also attests that many stories written in his books are fiction, and that the claims made in Samurai! are very different from the content of Japanese works on the life of Saburo Sakai.