Tokya: Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's third novel called Devil's Dance has been released in Japan with the name Akuma No Dance for the first time after it was banned in Jordan last year.
The novel was supposedly finished by Saddam the day before the US invasion in Iraq and talks about telling the story of a Euphrates River tribe that ousts an invading force 1,500 years ago.
The original manuscript was smuggled out of the country by Saddam's eldest daughter Raghad, when she fled to Jordan just before the US-led invasion.
A copy was given to Japanese journalist who took the novel back home to be published.
Incidentally Raghad has also written a dedication to her jailed father in the novel.
Pirated copies of its Arabic version are already selling like hotcakes in many parts of the Middle East.
Saddam also has been credited with writing The Fortified Citadel and Men and a City.
Itsuko Hirata, , who has written several books on Middle Eastern leaders, translated the book, and was quoted by Japan's Kyodo News agency as saying she believed Saddam expected to lose the looming war and wrote the novel "as a message aimed at raising morale among Iraqi people".
Hirata also said that Saddam was an important witness to world history who should not be sentenced to death.
"I'd like to see him live to tell his tale," she said on Tuesday.
The former Iraqi leader is on trial in Baghdad for the death of 148 Shiites and the imprisonment of hundreds of others in a crackdown following a 1982 assassination attempt against him.
He could face execution by hanging if convicted.
(With inputs from AP)
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