Laura Rowland - The Ronin’s Mistress

By the next month, the government had dissolved the house of Asano, officially wiping the clan out of existence. Family members huddled inside Ako Castle while Oishi and the thousands of other retainers massed atop the walls and watched troops marching toward the castle. The men clamored in outrage: “We’ll fight!”

“Don’t be fools!” Oishi shouted. “There are too many of them! We’ll be slaughtered! We must live to avenge Lord Asano!”

Although the men grumbled, they allowed Oishi to herd them from the castle. They stood beside their horses, their possessions in the saddlebags. Oishi led out the Asano family, thankful that Lord Asano’s wife needn’t see this. She was in Edo, where the law forced daimyo wives to reside as hostages to their husbands’ good behavior. So were Oishi’s own wife and children. Oishi helped the Asano family into oxcarts piled with the few belongings they were allowed to keep. The women and children sobbed.

So did many retainers as they watched the army arrive. This was the worst day of their life, every samurai’s worst nightmare. Oishi couldn’t believe it was happening to him. He stared in mute shock as troops filed into the castle and filed out carrying furniture, trunks of money, and priceless heirlooms. No one in the Asano group could bear to watch, but everyone stayed until the next day, when the loot was borne off to Edo to be received by the shogun and the army was gone except for a platoon that occupied the castle. Then they faced the terrible moment they’d been dreading.

They were homeless, destitute. The retainers were ronin, stripped of honor, utterly humiliated. They turned to Oishi, even though he was no longer their superior.

“Where are we going to go?” they cried.

“To Edo,” Oishi said. “We have work to do there.”

But as the procession moved down the highway, it shrank. Some men stayed at teahouses in the villages to find comfort in drink and the arms of prostitutes. Some went off to seek their fortunes alone. Suicides drastically thinned the ranks. The procession left a string of graves in its wake. Oishi arrived in Edo with only a hundred men left. The government seized the Asano estate in Edo. Oishi put Lady Asano in a Buddhist convent and moved his family to lodgings in the Nihonbashi merchant quarter. Then he began a campaign to get the house of Asano reinstated. He wrote letters to government officials. He called in every favor. Nothing worked. His contacts said the shogun couldn’t change his mind because that would make him look weak, and he would never reinstate the house of Asano. They told Oishi to make the best of his new life as a commoner.

Instead, Oishi turned his attention to his next duty. One day he walked to Kira’s estate. He was so consumed by murderous rage that he could feel his heart burning black. Kira had brought about Lord Asano’s destruction. Oishi must make Kira pay.

But Kira evidently expected the Asano ronin to try to kill him. Guards ringed the estate. Oishi saw Kira come out, accompanied by fifty soldiers. Oishi kept surveillance on Kira long enough to know that he never let down his guard. Revenge seemed impossible.

Oishi fell into a state of deep despair. He began drinking because wine eased his pain. He frequented teahouses and stayed out all night. The change in him infuriated his wife.

“You’re disgusting! What’s the matter with you?” Ukihashi demanded. She’d once been a pretty, sedate woman, but losing her home, her social status, and her servants had made her wretched and shrill. “I know you’re upset, but what about us?” She waved her hand at their two little daughters and their fourteen-year-old son. The children sat by a cold hearth, eating millet, the food of poor people. “Have you forgotten that you have a family to support?”

“Shut up!” Oishi couldn’t bear her criticism. “Leave me alone.”

They quarreled every day until Oishi said, “I’ve had enough. I’m leaving.”

“Good riddance,” Ukihashi said bitterly.

Oishi made Chikara go with him. He divorced his wife before he left Edo. It was summer, more than a year after Lord Asano’s death. He and Chikara went to Miyako. They earned their rice by working as bodyguards for a merchant, living behind the shop. Oishi continued drinking. At the Ichiriki teahouse he met a beautiful young prostitute named Okaru. With her he found the first pleasure he’d experienced since Lord Asano’s death.

After too many drunken binges, his employer threw him out. Oishi couldn’t afford to pay Okaru. He couldn’t ask his son for the money, because Chikara hated Okaru, hated that Oishi had broken up their family. Father and son became estranged.

Okaru said, “You needn’t pay me anymore. I love you. I’ll take care of you.”

Oishi loved her, too; she made him feel young and hopeful again. He moved into her lodgings. Okaru continued to entertain her customers. Oishi lived on her. She pampered him, but he couldn’t make peace with his circumstances. One day he got so drunk that he collapsed on the street. Passersby jeered. A man stood over him and said, “Oishi- san ? Is that you?”

His square, pugnacious face was vaguely familiar. Oishi couldn’t recall his name but recognized him as a merchant from Satsuma.

“Why are you lying in the gutter? What happened?” Catching a whiff of liquor, the Satsuma man recoiled in disgust. “The rumors are true, then. You’ve become a bum.”

He announced, “This is Oishi Kuranosuke, former retainer of Lord Asano. He doesn’t have the courage to avenge his master’s death. Faithless beast!” He trampled on Oishi and spat in his face. “You are unworthy of the name of samurai!”

A crowd joined in the taunting, kicking, and spitting. The pain brought Oishi to his senses. Something within him shifted, like fractured ground settling back into place after an earthquake. That day was the last time he ever drank. That day he vowed to fulfill the promise he’d made to Lord Asano. That day he began his journey toward vengeance and redemption.

* * *

“You know the rest,” Oishi said to Sano.

They gazed at each other across Lord Hosokawa’s desk, like two generals across a battlefield. “Not quite,” Sano said. “It’s a long way from a gutter in Miyako to a slaughter in Edo.”

Once more he’d become thoroughly engaged in Oishi’s tale, against his will because it had taken him to places he didn’t want to go. He’d always wondered how he would handle the most extreme situations a samurai could face. What would it be like to assist in the ritual suicide of someone he loved as much as Oishi had apparently loved Lord Asano?

Sano didn’t know whether he could do it.

How would it be to feel such love for his lord that he would give up his family and dedicate his life to revenge?

In his deepest heart Sano admitted that he didn’t love the shogun. He didn’t know whether he could follow the Way of the Warrior that far. He felt caught between admiration for Oishi, who had proved himself truer to Bushido than most samurai ever did, and antagonism toward Oishi for exposing his own fears and self-doubts.

“Fill in the gaps in your story,” Sano ordered.

“In the summer of the year after Lord Asano died, I went looking for his other retainers,” Oishi said. “I gathered forty-six of them together, including my son.”

Could Sano lead his own son down the same dangerous path that Oishi had led Chikara? That hardly bore imagining. But it was a son’s duty to follow his father. Sano and Masahiro came from a long line of fathers and sons who’d marched into battle together. But would Sano bring Masahiro in on an illegal vendetta, a crime? Shouldn’t a father protect his child?

“I told my comrades that it was time to avenge Lord Asano,” Oishi went on. “We formed a conspiracy. It took almost six months to set our plans. Then we walked to Edo, which took us another two months. When we got here, we rested for a few days. Then we went after Kira.”