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with not the slightest gratification. Even Yojirō’s armed attack upon him, viewed in the light of this subsequent suicide, seemed to Lord Tadanao to have been a strangely incredible act. He wondered whether it had been no more than a calculated attempt to achieve a noble death at the hands of the master. If this were so, then Lord Tadanao’s amazing feat in seizing Yojirō’s arm before he could strike, and forcing him to yield, was not so very different from those amazing victories over the enemy commanders in the battles of the Reds and the Whites. After a little more of such reflections Lord Tadanao had lapsed once more into a state of black despair.

The steady worsening of Lord Tadanao’s disorder from this point is as recorded in the histories. In time not only was he casually murdering his own retainers but he reached the point of imprisoning and putting to the sword numbers of completely innocent countryfolk. The tale of ‘The Stone Chopping-block’ in particular, a story which has come down to us over the centuries in oral tradition, still produces in the listener a shudder of aversion. But, if Lord Tadanao perpetrated such cruelties, it may well have been because his retainers failed to treat Lord Tadanao as a human being, and Lord Tadanao, on his side, ended by treating his retainers in the same way.

But this outrageous behaviour was not to continue without end. Whilst Lord Tadanao, in Echizen, proceeded freely from excess to excess, in Edo the Shōgun’s ministers, Lords Doi Toshikatsu and Honda Masazumi, were privately evolving plans for his overthrow. Frontal measures against so hot-headed a daimyō, and one, moreover, who was closely related to the Tokugawa family, might have given rise to a serious disturbance, and accordingly the ministers decided to send Lord Tadanao’s mother, who had taken Buddhist vows and was now known as The Nun Seiryo, on a mission to Echizen to convey indirectly the resolve of the Shōgun’s household.

Lord Tadanao received his mother, whom he had not seen