Shogun

absence would be misinterpreted. Your enemies would poison his mind against you.”

“Yes,” his consort added. “Please excuse me, but you must listen to the Lady, your wife. She’s right. Lord Toranaga would never believe that you’d disobeyed just to look at a barbarian ship. Please send someone else.”

“But this isn’t an ordinary barbarian ship. It’s not Portuguese. Listen to me. Omi says it’s from a different country. These men talk a different-sounding language among themselves and they have blue eyes and golden hair.”

“Omi-san’s gone mad. Or he’s drunk too much sake,” his wife said.

“This is much too important to joke about, for him and for you.”

His wife had bowed and apologized and said that he was quite right to correct her, but that the remark was not meant in jest. She was a small, thin woman, ten years older than he, who had given him a child a year for eight years until her womb had dried up, and of these, five had been sons. Three had become warriors and died bravely in the war against China. Another had become a Buddhist priest and the last, now nineteen, he despised.

His wife, the Lady Yuriko, was the only woman he had ever been afraid of, the only woman he had ever valued—except his mother, now dead—and she ruled his house with a silken lash.

“Again, please excuse me,” she said. “Does Omi-san detail the cargo?”

“No. He didn’t examine it, Yuriko-san. He says he sealed the ship at once because it was so unusual. There’s never been a non-Portuguese ship before, neh? He says also it’s a fighting ship. With twenty cannon on its decks.”

“Ah! Then someone must go immediately.”

“I’m going myself.”

“Please reconsider. Send Mizuno. Your brother’s clever and wise. I implore you not to go.”

“Mizuno’s weak and not to be trusted.”

“Then order him to commit seppuku and have done with him,” she said harshly. Seppuku, sometimes called hara-kiri, the ritual suicide by disembowelment, was the only way a samurai could expiate a shame, a sin, or a fault with honor, and was the sole prerogative of the samurai caste. All samurai—women as well as men—were prepared from infancy, either for the act itself or to take part in the ceremony as a second. Women committed seppuku only with a knife in the throat.

“Later, not now,” Yabu told his wife.

“Then send Zukimoto. He’s certainly to be trusted.”

“If Toranaga hadn’t ordered all wives and consorts to stay here too, I’d send you. But that would be too risky. I have to go. I have no option. Yuriko-san, you tell me my treasury’s empty. You say I’ve no more credit with the filthy moneylenders. Zukimoto says we’re getting the maximum tax out of my peasants. I have to have more horses, armaments, weapons, and more samurai. Perhaps the ship will supply the means.”

“Lord Toranaga’s orders were quite clear, Sire. If he comes back and finds—”

“Yes. If he comes back, Lady. I still think he’s put himself into a trap. The Lord Ishido has eighty thousand samurai in and around Osaka Castle alone. For Toranaga to go there with a few hundred men was the act of a madman.”

“He’s much too shrewd to risk himself unnecessarily,” she said confidently.

“If I were Ishido and I had him in my grasp I would kill him at once.”

“Yes,” Yuriko said. “But the mother of the Heir is still hostage in Yedo until Toranaga returns. General Lord Ishido dare not touch Toranaga until she’s safely back at Osaka.”

“I’d kill him. If the Lady Ochiba lives or dies, it doesn’t matter. The Heir’s safe in Osaka. With Toranaga dead, the succession is certain. Toranaga’s the only real threat to the Heir, the only one with a chance at using the Council of Regents, usurping the Taiko’s power, and killing the boy.”

“Please excuse me, Sire, but perhaps General Lord Ishido can carry the other three Regents with him and impeach Toranaga, and that’s the end of Toranaga, neh?” his consort said.

“Yes, Lady, if Ishido could he would, but I don’t think he can—yet—nor can Toranaga. The Taiko picked the five Regents too cleverly. They despise each other so much it’s almost impossible for them to agree on anything.” Before taking power, the five great daimyos had publicly sworn eternal allegiance to the dying Taiko and to his son and his line forever. And they had taken public, sacred oaths agreeing to unanimous rule in the Council, and vowed to pass over the realm intact to Yaemon when he came of age on his fifteenth birthday. “Unanimous rule means nothing really can be changed until Yaemon inherits.”

“But some day, Sire, four Regents will join against one—through jealousy, fear or ambition— neh? The four will bend the Taiko’s orders just enough for war, neh?”

“Yes. But it will be a small war, Lady, and the one will always be smashed and his lands divided up by the victors, who will then have to appoint a fifth Regent and, in time, it will be four against one and again the one will be smashed and his lands forfeit—all as the Taiko planned. My only problem is to decide who will be the one this time—Ishido or Toranaga.”

“Toranaga will be the one isolated.”

“Why?”

“The others fear him too much because they all know he secretly wants to be Shogun, however much he protests he doesn’t.”

Shogun was the ultimate rank a mortal could achieve in Japan. Shogun meant Supreme Military Dictator. Only one daimyo at a time could possess the title. And only His Imperial Highness, the reigning Emperor, the Divine Son of Heaven, who lived in seclusion with the Imperial Families at Kyoto, could grant the title.

With the appointment of Shogun went absolute power: the Emperor’s seal and mandate. The Shogun ruled in the Emperor’s name. All power was derived from the Emperor because he was directly descended from the gods. Therefore any daimyo who opposed the Shogun was automatically in rebellion against the throne, and at once outcast and all his lands forfeit.

The reigning Emperor was worshiped as a divinity because he was descended in an unbroken line from the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, one of the children of the gods Izanagi and Izanami, who had formed the islands of Japan from the firmament. By divine right the ruling Emperor owned all the land and ruled and was obeyed without question. But in practice, for more than six centuries real power had rested behind the throne.

Six centuries ago there had been a schism when two of the three great rival, semiregal samurai families, the Minowara, Fujimoto and Takashima, backed rival claimants to the throne and plunged the realm into civil war. After sixty years the Minowara prevailed over the Takashima, and the Fujimoto, the family that had stayed neutral, bided its time.

From then on, jealously guarding their rule, the Minowara Shoguns dominated the realm, decreed their Shogunate hereditary and began to intermarry some of their daughters with the Imperial line. The Emperor and the entire Imperial Court were kept completely isolated in walled palaces and gardens in the small enclave at Kyoto, most times in penury, and their activities perpetually confined to observing the rituals of Shinto, the ancient animistic religion of Japan, and to intellectual pursuits such as calligraphy, painting, philosophy, and poetry.

The Court of the Son of Heaven was easy to dominate because, though it possessed all the land, it had no revenue. Only daimyos, samurai, possessed revenue and the right to tax. And so it was that although all members of the Imperial Court were above all samurai in rank, they still existed on a stipend granted the Court at the whim of the Shogun, the Kwampaku—the civil Chief Adviser—or the ruling military junta of the day. Few were generous. Some Emperors had even had to barter their signatures for food. Many times there was not enough money for a coronation.

At length the Minowara Shoguns lost their power to others, to Takashima or Fujimoto descendants. And as the civil wars continued unabated over the centuries, the Emperor became more and more the creature of the daimyo who was strong enough to obtain physical possession of Kyoto. The moment the new conqueror of Kyoto had slaughtered the ruling Shogun and his line, he would—providing he was Minowara, Takashima, or Fujimoto—with humility, swear allegiance to the throne and humbly invite the powerless Emperor to grant him the now vacant rank of Shogun. Then, like his predecessors, he would try to extend his rule outward from Kyoto until he in his turn was swallowed by another. Emperors married, abdicated, or ascended the throne at the whim of the Shogunate. But always the reigning Emperor’s bloodline was inviolate and unbroken.