Bleed In The Dark

In the middle of the afternoon, on a Kyoto street, a man lies collapsed and drunk while people step around him.

Some of them know who he used to be. A few of them have been sent to watch him. And every one of them walks away with the same report: the great retainer is finished, drowned in sake, no danger to anyone now.

They are looking at the most dangerous man in Japan.

His name is Ōishi Kuranosuke, and not long before this he ran the household of a powerful lord. Then his lord was forced to kill himself over an insult engineered by a rival, the estate was dissolved, and its samurai were scattered masterless into the world. Ōishi swore, silently, to kill the man responsible. And he saw at once the thing that made revenge nearly impossible: everyone expected it. The rival kept spies. The authorities kept spies. Any of the dead lord’s men who so much as reached for a sword in anger would be watched, reported, and cut down before he got close.

So Ōishi reached for the bottle instead.

He set about ruining himself in public, thoroughly, without any visible shame. He drank. He spent his days and his money in brothels and his nights collapsed where anyone could see. To every informant who came to look, he became exactly what the rival most wanted to see: a broken man, a disgrace, a once-formidable samurai who had answered his lord’s death not with vengeance but with self-pity and sake. The performance was so complete, and so unbroken, that his own wife could not bear it and left him.

It ran for the better part of two years. And the whole time, underneath the drunk in the gutter, the plan was quietly assembling itself. Other men took cover as monks, as merchants, as laborers. Some found work near the rival’s household and learned its halls, its guards, the rhythm of its watch. And the rival, observing his enemy’s slow collapse from a safe distance, let himself believe what he was being shown. He relaxed. He drew down his guard.

That was the only thing Ōishi had ever wanted, and he had bought it one humiliating day at a time.