"My lord, I have a request, and I'd like to ask it in front of my brother's grave."

"Yes?"

"Perhaps you understand… in your heart."

"I do understand."

"I would like you to let me go. If you'll grant me that, I know my brother will be relieved, even under the earth."

"Hanbei died saying that his spirit would serve me even from the grave. How can turn my back on something that he worried about when he was alive? You should do what your heart tells you."

"Thank you. With your permission, I will do my best to honor his dying wish."

"Where will you go?"

"To a temple in some remote village." Once again she shed tears.

*    *    *

Granted a dismissal by Hideyoshi, Oyu received a lock of her brother's hair and his clothes. It was inappropriate for a woman to be in a military camp for a long time, and the next day Oyu went immediately to Hideyoshi and told him she had made her travel preparations.

“I'm here to say good-bye. Please, please take care of yourself," she told him.

“Won't you stay two or three more days in camp?" Hideyoshi asked. For the next few days Oyu stayed alone in an isolated hut, praying for her brother’s soul. The days passed without any word from Hideyoshi. Frost had descended on the mountains. Each time the early-winter rains came down, the leaves fell from the trees. Then, on the first night that the moon appeared clearly, a page came to Oyu and said, “His Lordship would like to see you. He has asked that you make preparations to leave this evening and that you go up now to Lord Hanbei's grave on the mountain."

Oyu had few preparations to make for the trip. She set off for her brother's grave with Kumataro and two other attendants. The trees had lost their leaves and the grass had withered, and the mountain had a desolate appearance. The ground looked white in the moonlight, as if there had been a frost.

One of the half-dozen retainers in attendance on Hideyoshi announced Oyu's arrival.

"Thank you for coming, Oyu," Hideyoshi began gently. "I've been so busy with military matters since we last met that I haven't been able to visit you. It's become so cold lately, you must be lonely."

"I have resigned myself to spending the rest of my life in an isolated village, so I won't be lonely."

"I hope that you'll pray for Hanbei's soul. Wherever you choose to live, I suspect we'll meet again." He turned to Hanbei's grave under the pine tree. "Oyu, I have something prepared for you over there. I doubt that I'll ever be able to hear the lovely sound of your koto again, after tonight. A long time ago, you were with Hanbei at the siege of the castle at Choteiken in Mino. You played the koto and softened the hearts of soldiers who had become like demons, and they finally surrendered. If you would play now, it would be an offering to Hanbei's soul, I think, as well as becoming a remembrance for me. Also, if the notes were carried by the wind to the castle, they might shock the enemy soldiers into thinking of their own humanity and make them aware that their deaths now would be meaningless. That would be a great achievement, and even Hanbei would rejoice."

He led her over to the pine tree, where a koto had been placed on top of a reed mat.

Having resisted a siege of three years with all their courage and integrity, the warriors the western provinces, who looked down on other men as being frivolous and vain, were now reduced to shadows of their former selves.

"I don't care if I die fighting today or tomorrow, I just don't want to die of starvation," one of the defenders said.

They had fallen into such an extremity that dying in battle was their last remaining hope. The defenders still looked like men, but they were now reduced to sucking the bones of their own dead horses and eating field mice, tree bark, and roots, and they anticipated having to boil the tatami mats and eating the clay on the walls in the coming winter. As they consoled each other, sunken eye to sunken eye, they still had enough spirit to be able to plan on getting through the winter as best as they could. Indeed, even in small skirmishes, when the enemy drew near, they could suddenly forget their hunger and fatigue and go out to fight.

For more than half a month, however, the attacking troops had not approached the castle, and this neglect was more bitter to the defending troops than any desperate death. When the sun went down, the entire castle was sunk into a darkness so deep it might just as well have fallen to the bottom of a swamp. Not one lamp was lit. All of the fish oil and rapeseed oil had been consumed as food. Many of the small shrikes and sparrows that had flocked morning and night to the trees in the grounds had been caught and eaten, and recently the ones that remained had stopped coming to the castle, knowing, perhaps, what would be in store for them. The men had eaten so many crows that now they were rarely even able to catch one. In the midst of the darkness, the eyes of the sentries would quicken at the sound of something like a weasel scampering by. Instinctively, their gastric juices would begin to flow, and they would look at each other and grimace. "My stomach feels like it's being wrung out like a damp cloth."

The moon that evening was beautiful, but the soldiers only wished it could be eaten. The dead leaves fell in profusion on the roofs of the fortress and around the castle gate. A soldier munched greedily on them.

"Taste good? someone asked.

"Better than straw," he answered, and picked up another one. Suddenly looking queasy, he coughed several times and vomited the leaves he had just eaten.

"General Goto!" someone suddenly announced, and everyone stood to attention. Goto Motokuni, chief retainer of the Bessho clan, walked toward the soldiers from the darkened keep.

"Anything to report?" Goto asked.

"Nothing, sir."

"Really?" Goto showed them an arrow. "Sometime this evening, this arrow was shot into the castle by the enemy. A letter was tied to it, asking me to meet with one of Lord Hideyoshi's generals, Kuroda Kanbei, here tonight."

"Kanbei is coming here tonight! A man who betrayed his lord for the Oda. He's not fit to be a samurai. When he shows up, we'll torture him to death."

"He's Lord Hideyoshi's envoy, and it would not be right to kill someone whose arrival has been announced beforehand. It's an agreement among warriors that one does not kill messengers."

"That would be all right even for an enemy general if it were someone else. But with Kanbei, I feel like I wouldn't be content even eating the meat off his bones."

"Don't let the enemy see what's in your heart. Laugh when you greet him."

Just as Goto gazed out into the darkness, he and the men seemed to hear the intermittent sounds of a distant koto. At that moment Miki Castle became enveloped in a strange hush. In a night the color of India ink, it seemed as though no one could even breathe while the falling leaves swirled and danced formlessly in an uncanny sky.

"A koto?” one of the soldiers said, looking up into the void.

They listened almost in ecstasy to the nostalgic sound. The men in the watchtower, in the guardroom, and in every section of the fortress were caught by the same thoughts. Through storms of arrows, gunfire, and war cries—from dawn until dusk, and from dusk again until dawn—the men who had been in this castle for three years cut off from the outside world had steadfastly dug themselves in, without yielding or withdrawing. Now the sound of the koto suddenly called up various thoughts in their minds.

My ancestral home,

Will you wait

For a man who knows not

If tonight will be

His last?

This was the death poem that Kikuchi Taketoki, Emperor Godaigo's loyal general, had sent to his wife when he was surrounded by a rebel army.