Patriotism is a story about a young army lieutenant named Shinji Takeyama who decides to perform a ritual suicide to escape the decision of remaining loyal to his unit or to his emperor. Personally, I did not enjoy this book. I’m not going to lie, I chose this book by the cover and thought it was going to be a story about a samurai going around, slicing and dicing his foes. Instead I found a book about a man and his wife who spends and entire book preparing for their ritual suicide. This book is extremely gruff and dour. The book was very well written, I understood everything, but it was not my type of book. This book made me have this queasy feeling that I have never had reading a book. I found this book quite boring, weird, and actually pretty creepy. I would definitely not recommend this book to my friends.