question to address in this book is where’s Kaida? Don’t worry; you’ll see more of her. She had a storyline in this book all the way up to the very last draft, but in the end the manuscript was just too long. It made more sense to give Kaida her own lead role than to whittle her down along with everyone else in order to trim the book down to fighting weight. So now she’s the star of Streaming Dawn; I hope you catch up with her there.
The next set of questions concerns the historical stuff. Toyotomi Hideyoshi is the most important historical figure in the novel, and as you may remember from Year of the Demon, he was the second of the Three Unifiers, the three great lords who united Japan in the late 1500s. His predecessor, Oda Nobunaga, was a ferocious fighter who brought a third of the empire to heel before being assassinated by one of his inner circle. His successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, sat back and waited for Hideyoshi to bring all the Japanese islands under his rule, then ousted his heirs. Ieyasu built a house on Hideyoshi’s foundation, creating a shogunate that would last more than two and a half centuries.
One of Hideyoshi’s most important political advisors was his wife, Nene. Intelligent, genteel, and politically savvy, she was by all accounts an extraordinary woman. She commanded not only Hideyoshi’s respect but also Nobunaga’s, who wrote to her fondly and even took her side when Hideyoshi complained about her. Nene and Hideyoshi exchanged letters throughout his campaigns, and when she criticized his policies, he was known to change them. It is hard to overstate what a stunning accomplishment this was; Hideyoshi was no feminist, and the Azuchi-Momoyama period was not an era of enlightened gender politics.
In some ways theirs was a strained marriage, for she bore him no children and he did take other wives and concubines. When he died, his proclaimed heir was his son by his second wife, and one factor that allowed Tokugawa Ieyasu to cement his power was that Nene backed Ieyasu, not her own husband’s son. Thus while she cannot properly be called the Fourth Unifier, she was influential for all of the other three. No other woman in Japanese history can lay claim to a similar position.
Other events in Hideyoshi’s biography are also as I portrayed them here. He did boast that he would someday conquer China, and he went so far as to invade the Korean peninsula. (The conquest was short-lived.) He was ugly as sin, but quite charming in spite of that fact. To prevent civil uprising he issued a Sword Hunt that disarmed the peasantry, and this would have included the kama-wielding yamabushi that Daigoro faces in the hills near Fuji-no-tenka.
Yamabushi were a fixture of Japanese life in the sixteenth century. They came in two varieties, because the word is a homonym. In one sense, the yamabushi are “ones who lie in the mountains,” a monastic tradition of ascetic hermits. In Japan the tradition of seeking enlightenment in the mountains dates back to the eighth or ninth century and still lives on today. In the other sense (written with a different kanji for bushi) the yamabushi were “mountain warriors,” packs of soldiers, ronin, and martially trained monks who had turned to banditry. They plagued the countryside, and even the great daimyo were hard-pressed to manage them.
Fuji-no-tenka is fictional, but Atsuta Shrine is not. You can still visit the Shrine today; it is one of Japan’s most venerated sites. It is said to have been founded in the second century to house the remains of Prince Yamato and his fabled Kusanagi no Tsurugi, the Grass-Cutting Sword. Prince Yamato is a legendary hero whose story is told in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the earliest chronicles of Japanese myth and history. His most famous episode is his defeat of the bandit kings Kumaso and Takeru, whom he ambushed in their tents by disguising himself as a serving maid. In another famous adventure, he was caught in a brush fire and survived by cutting down all the grass around him so the fire could not approach. Then he used his sword to redirect the wind, sending the flames back toward his enemies. (If it were me, I’d have called my sword Weather Dominator, not Grass Cutter, but different strokes for different folks, I guess.)
I make brief mention in the book of two other historical figures: Akechi Mitsuhide, who betrayed Oda Nobunaga,