The first thing to know about Hideyoshi is that Hideyoshi isn’t his real name. He doesn’t have a real name; he changed it many times over, as did many of the great figures of his day. This habit of theirs is enough to drive historians to apoplexy, and so even the most esteemed scholars of Japanese history resort to using just one name, usually the name the figure is best known by.
But a Hideyoshi by any other name would still be a badass. He had so much working against him—he was born of peasant stock, he was so ugly that his nicknames were “the Bald Rat” and “the Monkey King,” and he showed no promise whatsoever as a fighter—yet he made himself the most powerful man in the empire. Through sheer force of personality, he earned his seat as one of the Three Unifiers, the three warlords who created the nation we now know as Japan.
The other two Unifiers are Oda Nobunaga, who raised Hideyoshi from lowly manservant to one of his top generals, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was first a rival, then an ally, then a usurper. All three were brilliant strategists, each in his own way. Nobunaga is best known for his ruthlessness, Hideyoshi for his honeyed tongue, and Ieyasu for his patience. In brief, their stories run as follows: Nobunaga, who was so merciless that he could scarcely retain even the loyalty of his own family, saw great promise in Hideyoshi and elevated him to the rank of general. With him and a coterie of other now-legendary commanders, Nobunaga conquered a third of Japan.
When Nobunaga was assassinated by one of his inner circle, Hideyoshi swept in to kill the traitor. He then pressured the emperor into making him samurai and appointing him as imperial regent and chief minister. Hideyoshi was no swordsman, but he was a cunning strategist and a negotiator nonpareil, and he crushed every warlord he could not recruit as an ally. Enter Ieyasu, whose preferred method was to sit back and allow Nobunaga and Hideyoshi to do all the heavy lifting. Then he ousted Hideyoshi’s heirs, appointed himself shogun, and established the greatest dynasty in Japanese history. Hence the mnemonic, recited in one variant or another in classrooms throughout Japan: Nobunaga mixed the dough, Hideyoshi baked the cake, and Ieyasu got to eat it.
Because Daigoro and Shichio are my two lenses for viewing Hideyoshi, I have chosen to characterize him rather differently than you might see him elsewhere. In Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, for example, Hideyoshi is portrayed as a deadly serious samurai warrior. This is by no means unfair, for Hideyoshi desperately wanted to be thought of as noble and refined. He was fascinated by the tea ceremony, he performed kabuki, and fancied himself an accomplished singer. His palace, the Jurakudai, was real, and if there can be such a thing as an excess of elegance, this was it. But if Hideyoshi was pretending at nobility, he certainly was not pretending at being charismatic. By all accounts he was positively magnetic, but because Shichio is effete and Daigoro is highborn, they see my Hideyoshi’s charms as being quite coarse.
Shichio himself is purely fictional, but homosexual relationships were common among men of Hideyoshi’s station and era. These ritualized relationships, known as shudo, usually coupled adults with young boys; grown men were not supposed to be penetrated (hence the tension in Shichio’s relationship with Hideyoshi). Mio Yasumasa is also fictional, but Hideyoshi certainly had high-ranking samurai advisers like Mio. I’m sorry to say that Mio’s death is based in truth; the method is called lingchi, and it is the origin of the proverbial “death of a thousand cuts.” We don’t know for a fact that Hideyoshi employed it, but we do know that he developed a penchant for cruel and elaborate executions.
On that note, I should mention that including Mio’s torture was a considered choice. My agent and my editor found the scene quite disturbing—so much so that my agent was only willing to read it once, and my editor suggested that perhaps I ought to take it out. Obviously I didn’t.
I chose to keep the scene because of what the story arc demands, not because I think torture is cool. Quite the opposite: I joined the Campaign to Ban Torture years ago, and I remain a member of the Center for the Victims of Torture today. Milan Kundera suggested that the true measure of our morality lies in how we treat those who are at our mercy, and I happen to think he’s right. Regardless of whether or not you agree with me, I hope you will grant that I have not glorified torture here.
Shifting from philosophy back to history, all of the military conquests I attribute to Hideyoshi in this book are true to life. Oda Nobunaga’s Sword Hunt was real, as was Hideyoshi’s, though on that count I must confess that I got extremely lucky. I don’t recall why I picked 1587 as the setting for Daigoro’s story in Daughter of the Sword, but it certainly wasn’t because I anticipated writing a second book, or that I planned to make the Sword Hunt a plot element in Daigoro’s continuing story. This was just one of those cases where you do your research and it gives you better ideas than you could have come up with on your own.
The Wind is a fictional clan, but ninja clans did exist, and they were more active in the Kansai than in any other region. Despite what you may have seen in pop culture, samurai were not “the good guys” and ninja were not “the bad guys.” Shinobi (or shinobi no mono, the period terms for what we now call ninja) were the original secret agents, routinely hired by the great houses as spies, forward observers, assassins, saboteurs, and the like. Their clans trained them in a wide range of skills, by no means limited to martial arts; they also learned a wide range of professional skills, the better to blend in and take on any disguise as necessary.
Incidentally, such disguises did not involve the trademark black bodysuit and face mask that we all know and love today. These would have been about as subtle as James Bond wearing a ghillie suit. The black garb that has become their emblem actually dates back to the theater; stagehands would wear all black, the better to go unnoticed as they moved certain props. (Stagehands do this in modern theater even today.) Somewhere along the line, a clever playwright needed to figure out how a ninja could sneak up on his protagonist, catching even the audience unawares. The answer was—like the ninja themselves—hiding in plain sight: just make one of the stagehands the assassin. The audience was delighted and a new tradition was born.
Featuring as prominently as the shinobi in this book is the ronin, or masterless samurai. According to bushido ideals, the samurai was to commit suicide at the loss of his master. Needless to say, not everyone lived up to the ideal. Many samurai became itinerant swords for hire, wandering the countryside as freely as waves on the sea—hence the name ronin, or “wave-person.” (Katsushima Goemon is one such case.) Other samurai chose to abandon their caste, shave their topknots, and join a monastery. (The abbot of Katto-ji is one such case.) Then there were those who gave the ronin their bad name: they became highwaymen and bandits, either falling in with criminal elements or forming gangs of their own.
The third profession to feature prominently in this book is the ama, usually translated as “pearl diver.” Literally, ama just means “sea-woman” (and with a swapped character, “sea-man”). The ama occupies a strange cultural space in that it is, to the best of my knowledge, the only profession in Japan that is defined by strenuous physical labor and is yet a profession that belongs to women, not men. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, though the U.S. Navy did yeoman’s work in trying to discover the answer. This was one of the gems you are only likely to find while writing a book and wanting to get the details right: a 380-page study on breath-hold diving, with detailed descriptions (and even diagrams!) of ama diving techniques, published in 1965 by none other than the Office of Naval Research. The SEALs were brand-spanking-new then, and it seems the navy was interested in training them to dive deeper and longer—an interest it has since suspended, officially designating breath-hold diving as “an extremely dangerous practice.” To my mind this tidbit only makes Kaida cooler. If at age thirteen she can outswim a SEAL, then the Wind will make a fine shinobi of her.