Another urgent message arrived. "Shingen's kinsman, the blind priest Ryuho, was captured and butchered by the enemy."
This time Katsuyori raised his eyes and spoke abusively of the enemy.
"The Oda forces have no compassion. What fault could they find in a blind priest? How could he even have had the power to resist?" But now he was able to think more deeply about his own death. He bit steadily on his lip and repressed the waves roiling at the bottom of his heart. If I give vent to my anger like this, he thought, they may think I've become distracted, and even the retainers around me will feel disgraced. There were many people who saw nothing more than Katsuyori's manly exterior and who considered him bold and even coarse. But the truth was that he was very deliberate in his actions toward his retainers. In addition, he was extremely strict in adhering to his own principles—to his honor as a lord and to self-reflection. He had continued in his father's tradition and had been taught the principles of Zen by Kaisen. But although he had had the same teacher and had studied Zen, he was unable to bring it to life as Shingen had done.
How could Takato Castle have fallen? I was sure it could hold out for another two weeks to a month, Katsuyori thought, which showed that the situation had resulted less from a miscalculation of defensive strategy than from a lack of human maturity. Now, however, regardless of what his natural temperament might be, he had to meet this new tide of fortune.
The sliding partitions had been taken from the wide conference room and even from the outlying rooms of the main citadel; and now the entire clan lived together as though they were refugees from a great cataclysm that continued day and night. Naturally, curtains were set up even in the garden, shields were set up side by side, and soldiers went without sleep, holding large paper lanterns and policing the area at night. Messengers with reports of the situation were taken hourly directly from the entrance through the central gate to the garden, so that Katsuyori listened to the dispatches in person. Everything that had just been part of the construction the year before—the scent of new wood, the gold and silver inlay, the beauty of the furniture and utensils—now seemed only to be in the way.
Accompanied by a maid and binding up the train of her kimono, a lady-in-waiting with a message from Katsuyori's wife stepped out of the confusion of the garden and into the dark hall, and bravely looked through the crowd of men. At that time, the room was full of generals, both young and old, all noisily expressing their opinions about what to do next.
The woman finally came before Katsuyori and appealed to him with the message from his wife. "The women are all standing around crying in confusion, and won't stop no matter how we console them. Your wife has said that our last moment comes only once, and she thinks that perhaps the women would be a little more easily resolved if they could be here with the samurai. If she has your permission, she will move here immediately. What are my lord's wishes?"
"That's fine," Katsuyori answered quickly. "Bring my wife here and the young ones too."
At that moment his fifteen-year-old heir, Taro Nobukatsu, came forward and tried to dissuade him. "Father, that wouldn't be very good, would it?"
Katsuyori turned to his son, less with displeasure than with a nervous preoccupation. “Why?"
"Well, if the women come here, they'll just get in the way. And if the men see them crying, even the bravest samurai may become disheartened." Taro was still a boy, but he inisted on giving his opinion. He continued to argue that Kai had been their ancestral land since the time of Shinra Saburo, and it should be their land to the very end, even if they have to fight and die. To abandon Nirasaki and flee, as one general had just recommnded, would bring the greatest shame to the Takeda clan.
A general argued the opposite position: "Nevertheless, the enemy is on all four sides, and Kofu is situated in a basin. Once the enemy invades, it will be like water rushing into a lake. Wouldn't it be better to escape to Agatsuma in Joshu? If you got to the Mikuni mountain range, there would be any number of provinces where you might find asylum.
Once you called together your allies, you could certainly reestablish yourself."
Nagasaka Chokan agreed, and Katsuyori's mind was inclined in that direction. He set his eyes on Taro and was silent for a moment. He then turned toward the lady-in-waiting and said, "We will go."
Taro's advice was thus refused by his father. Taro turned away silently and hung his head. The remaining question was whether to flee to Agatsuma or to entrench themselves in the area of Mount Iwadono. But whichever route they chose, abandoning their new capital and fleeing was the unavoidable fate to which both Katsuyori and his generals were resigned.
It was the third day of the Third Month. If it had been any other year, Katsuyori and his retinue would have been enjoying the Doll Festival in the inner citadel. But on this bright day, the entire clan was driven from behind by black smoke as they abandoned Nirasaki. Katsuyori, of course, also left the castle, as did every samurai that served him. But as he turned and looked at his entire force, his expression was one of amazement.
"Is this all?" he asked. At some point, senior retainers and even kinsmen had disappeared. He was told that they had taken advantage of the confusion during the darknes of dawn, and had fled each to his own castle with his retainers.
"Taro?"
"I'm here, Father." Taro drew his horse up to the solitary figure of his father. With all the retainers, the common samurai, and the foot soldiers combined—there were less than a thousand men. There were large numbers, however, of lacquered palanquins and litters for his wife and her court ladies, and the pathetic figures of veiled women, both walkin and on horseback, filled the road.
"Oh! It's burning!"
"The flames are so high!"
The crowd of women could hardly stand to leave, and when they had traveled only about a league from Nirasaki, they turned to look even as they walked. Flames and black smoke rose high in the morning sky as the castle at the new capital burned. They had set the fires at dawn.
"I don't want to live a long life," said one of the women. "What kind of future would I see? Is this the end of Lord Shingen's clan?" The nun who was Katsuyori's aunt, the charming young girl who was Shingen's granddaughter, the wives of the clan members and their servant ladies—all of them were drowning in their tears, holding each other as they cried, or calling out the names of children. Golden hairpins and other ornaments were left on the road, and no one even bothered to pick them up. Cosmetics and jewelry were smeared with mud, but no one gazed at them with regret.
"Hurry up! Why are you crying? This is what it is to be born a human being. You're going to shame yourselves in front of the farmers!" Katsuyori rode in among the slow-moving palanquins and litters, urging them on, to escape farther and farther to the east.
Hoping to reach Oyamada Nobushige's castle, they looked at the old castle in Kofu as they passed by but could only walk on toward the mountains. As they walked on, the carriers who shouldered the palanquins gradually disappeared, the menials who carried the baggage and litters ran off one after another, and their number was reduced by half and then by half again. By the time they had entered the mountains near Katsunuma, their entire force numbered only two hundred men, and less than twenty of those were mounted, counting Katsuyori and his son. When Katsuyori and his followers had struggled along as far as the mountain village of Komagai, they found that the one man they had been relying upon had suddenly had a change of heart.
"Take refuge somewhere else!" Obstructing the summit path to Sasago, Oyamada Nobushige prevented Katsuyori's party from passing through. Katsuyori, his son, and the entire group were at a complete loss. There was nothing they could do but change their direction, and they now fled toward Tago, a village at the foot of Mount Temmoku. Spring was in full bloom, but the mountains and fields, as far as the eye could see, held neither comfort nor hope. So now the small group that remained put all their trust in Katsuyori, as they might in a staff or a pillar. Katsuyori himself was at his wits' end. Huddling together in Tago, his followers waited in a daze, swept over by the mountain wind.
The combined forces of the Oda and the Tokugawa entered Kai like raging waves. Led by Anayama, Ieyasu's army marched from Minobu to Ichikawaguchi. Oda Nobutada attacked upper Suwa and burned the Suwa Myojin Shrine and a number of Buddhist temples. The common people's homes along the road he burned to ashes as he hunted for surviving enemy soldiers and pushed on—day and night—toward Nirasaki and Kofu. Finally, the end came. It was the morning of the eleventh day of the Third Month.
One of Katsuyori's personal attendants had gone to the village the night before and returned after reconnoitering the enemy positions. That morning he gave the report to his lord as he gasped for breath.
"The vanguard of the Oda forces has entered the nearby villages and seems to have learned from the villagers that you and your family are here, my lord. It appears that the Oda have surrounded the area and cut off all the roads, finally starting their last push in this direction."
Their group now numbered only ninety-one—the forty-one remaining samurai with Katsuyori and his son, and Katsuyori's wife and her ladies-in-waiting. In the preceding days they had ensconced themselves in a place called Hirayashiki and had even erected a sort of palisade. But when they heard the report, every one of them knew that the time had come, and they hurried to prepare themselves for death. Among them, Katsuyori's wife sat as though she were still in the mansion of the inner citadel. Her face was like a white flower as she looked off in a daze. The women who surrounded her had broken into tears.
"If it was going to come to this, it would have been better to stay in the new castle at Nirasaki. How pitiful. Is this how the wife of the lord of the Takeda should look?"
Left to themselves, the women cried miserably and lamented to each other without end.
Katsuyori went to his wife and pressed her to leave. "I've just ordered my attendant to bring you a horse. Even if we could stay here for a long time, our regrets would never end, and now the enemy is closing in on the foothills. I've heard that we're close to Sagami, so you should go there as quickly as possible. Cross the mountains and go back to the Hojo clan." His wife's eyes were filled with tears, but she made no move to leave. Rather, she looked as though she resented her husband's words.
"Tsuchiya! Tsuchiya Uemon!" Katsuyori called, summoning a retainer. "Get my wife on the back of a horse."
The attendant strode up to Katsuyori's wife, but she suddenly turned to her husband and said, "It is said that a true samurai will not have two masters. In the same way, once a woman has taken a husband, she should not go back to live with her family again. Though it may seem to be compassionate of you to send me back to Odawara by myself, just those words feel so unsympathetic…I'm not moving from this place. I'll be at your side until the very end. Then, perhaps, you will let me go with you to the hereafter." Just at that moment, two retainers rushed up with the information that the enemy was closing in.
"They've reached the temple in the foothills."
Katsuyori's wife strictly scolded her attendants for their sudden wailing. "There is no time to do anything but grieve. Come here and help with the preparations."
This woman was not yet twenty years old, yet she did not lose her sense of propriety even as death pressed in. She was as serene as a pool of water, and Katsuyori himself felt reproved by her composure.
Her attendants went off but returned shortly with an unglazed cup and a sake flask, and set them down in front of Katsuyori and his son. It appeared that his wife had thought far enough ahead to prepare even for this moment. Silendy she offered her husband the cup. Katsuyori held it in his hand, took a sip, and passed it to his son. He then shared it with his wife.
"My lord, a cup for the Tsuchiya brothers," his wife said. "Tsuchiya, you must say farewell while we are all still in this world."
Tsuchiya Sozo, Katsuyori's personal attendant, and his two younger brothers had truly been devoted to their lord. Sozo was twenty-six years old, the next oldest was twenty-one, and the youngest brother was only eighteen. Together they had protected their ill-fated lord with fidelity all along the way, from the fall of the new capital to their last stand on Mount Temmoku.
"With this, I can leave without regrets." Emptying the cup he had received, Sozo turned and smiled at his younger brothers. Then he turned to Katsuyori and his wife. "Your misfortune this time is due entirely to the defection of your kinsmen. It must be fearful and unsettling for both you, my lord, and your wife to go through this without knowing what was in people's hearts. But the world is not filled only with people like those who betrayed you. Here at your final moment, at least, everyone with you is of one heart and one body. You can now believe in both man and the world, and walk through the portals of death with grace and an easy mind." Sozo stood straight up and walked over to his wife, who was with her ladies.
Suddenly there was the heartrending shriek of a child, and Katsuyori yelled out frantically, "Sozo! What have you done?"
Sozo had stabbed his own four-year-old son to death right before his wife's eyes, and now she was sobbing. Without even putting away his bloody sword, Sozo prostrated himself toward Katsuyori from a distance.
"As proof of what I have just declared to you, I have sent my own son ahead on the road of death. Certainly he would have been an encumbrance otherwise. My lord, I am going to accompany you; and whether I be first or last, it will take only an instant."
How sad to see the flowers
I knew would fall
Departing before me,
Not one to remain