EPILOGUE.

Sennoske and his fair wife enjoyed a lifetime of good fortune. Nothing untoward befell them but such small ills as humanity can never be entirely free from; and these were scarcely felt in their happy lot and in the love which they bore to each other and to the children that time brought them. The young soldier gained additional fame in his command at Idzu; and fulfilling within a year the task that had been intrusted to him, he returned to Ise and succeeded his father in the responsible office ofkaro. Numa, who had again assumed his old name, retired intoinkio,—a private life of quiet and of literary pursuits, which he continued up to his death, which took place fourteen or fifteen years later. Muramasa, with whom he had continued on terms of close friendship and intimacy, died in the same year. The smith’s son continued in his profession; but the blades he forged, although of higher quality than those of other smiths, were not prized as those of his father. They were like them in appearance, in form, and in sharpness, and merely looking at the one by the side of the other, it was often impossible to tell them apart. Even in a few public trials that had been made they proved of equal excellence in all feats that required mere strength; but in fine fancy-work (such as cutting a piece of floating paper,which is one of the crowning tests of the original Muramasa blade) they were a shade inferior,—lacking in a nameless something, which could not be described in words, but which an expert could tell at once when handling them. In short, they were not true Muramasas. A few only of these competitive trials were made, however, and in Kuwana at least they were soon prohibited; for they always ended in heated discussions and bloodshed between the contending parties. As a singular testimony to the value of the older weapon, it was noticed that its possessor nearly always came off victorious.

GATHERING TEA-LEAVES.

The victory of Nitta, although re-establishing the Mikado’s divine rights and prerogatives, unfortunately did not secure peace to the Empire. The claims—only too well founded—of those who had taken upon themselves the risk and labor ofoverthrowing the Hōjō usurpers were disregarded, and the great offices of state given to favorites who had held aloof while there was danger in acting, but who stepped in at the last moment to claim and almost monopolize the rewards. Rival jealousies and hatreds, dissensions, public and private feuds, again reigned supreme, and precipitated civil wars, which deluged the country. Only the divine rights of the emperors were respected and held sacred, while layman and priest, noble and peasant, suffered alike; and this state of things continued up to the reign of Iyeyas, two hundred and fifty years ago, which inaugurated the long peace that has since ruled in the Empire.

YAMATO-DAKE NO MIHOTA, SEMI-DIVINITY OF WAR.

During all this time the position ofkaroremained in possessionof Sennoske’s descendants, and the family flourished and succeeded, knowing hardly any reverses of fortune. But, strange as it may appear, with the beginning of this peace the fortunes of the house of Numa declined. Some inexplicable bond seemed to connect their welfare with the fate of Muramasa’s swords. These swords, as long as strife and bloodshed were rife, were more esteemed than those of any other maker, in spite, or perhaps partly on account, of the constantly growing feelings of superstition with which they were regarded. Their possessors somehow or other never seemed content unless they had an opportunity for using them; and so generally did they succeed in gaining the victory over their opponents that at last even the bravest shrank with dread from fighting a duel with a man armed with a Muramasa.

Moreover, they were a fruitful cause of accidents. Often, when an interval of peace which had lasted for fifteen or twenty years had caused such a sword to remain unused for that time, upon first being drawn it brought about some dire calamity. It was a common thing, in spite of every care being taken, for the blade to fall out in some unaccountable way and strike the wearer, inflicting a fatal wound. Among those who suffered in this way were some of Numa’s descendants. These, however, were almost the only misfortunes which overtook them. With the return of peace these casualties increased to such an alarming extent that at last the Shôgun’s government issued a peremptory order, forbidding the use of these swords throughout the entire country. Nevertheless, they were still prized in private; but the power of the Tokugawa’s rule was too strong and the edict too imperative to allow of its being in any way openlydisregarded. Muramasa blades after this were found mostly with a few of the most notedroninsand robbers, whom tradition speaks of as having been wonderfully successful.

An unfortunate affair of honor which happened just thirteen years after the beginning of the long peace, and in which the thenkaroof the Duke of Kuwana, a descendant of Sennoske, slew his master’s son by mistake, forced him to commitseppuku. In consideration of their illustrious and faithful services, the reigning Duke caused the family of the unfortunate man to suffer no further punishment than banishment from his province. They found an asylum with the neighboring Duke of Todo, who also gave to the oldest son, who was approaching man’s estate, a position at his court which, although far inferior to that which his father had held at Kuwana, was yet a high and an honorable one. This office was made hereditary with his descendants, who, in spite of faithful services, failed to improve it. The genius of the family evidently lay in a military direction; and although now and then some one of its members would perform a great deed of arms, opportunities for such deeds were rare, and the family barely succeeded in retaining their new position: this, however, they did as long as old Japan existed.

But the end of the power of the sword was rapidly approaching. In the first year of the period of Ansei (1855) came the establishment of treaties with foreign nations, and this sounded the death-knell of feudalism in Japan. For a time the descendants of Sennoske still subsisted upon a scanty allowance as dependants of the Duke of Todo. The complete abolition of feudalism by imperial decree in the third year of Meiji (1870) completed their ruin.

On the first day of the tenth month of that year there was breathless excitement in the town. All thesamuraiof any standing were convened by the Duke in the large hall of the palace; and there an imperial envoy, who had arrived the day before, read the decree, that from that day feudalism ceased to exist. “Everything is at an end,” some of thesamurai, stupefied by the news, said as they passed out of the hall; and so to a great extent it was. At an end all their inherited and fancied superiority. The traditions of the past, the records of twenty-five hundred years of ancestors’ struggles and heroic deeds, the qualities which allsamurairevered and held noble and strove to imitate, the bodily and mental gifts with which birth and education had endowed them,—all this in one day had become like a threadbare garment, fit only to be thrown away; while scarcely one of the losers had the means or possessed the faculty of procuring another that would suit the times.

Without education or qualifications adapting him to the new order of things, the last of the line of Sennoske found himself in a sad condition. The miserable pension allowed him by government was inadequate to his barest needs; but even this was soon lost to him, and the accomplishments of peace having never been his, he was unable to care for himself. Fortune befriended him no more; those in places of official power and affluence no longer reverenced the rank ofsamurai, but turned him from their doors, and he sank lower and lower in the social scale, until only the most degrading position of all, that of the poor, despisedjinrikishaman, was left to him. So to-day he lives, a connecting link between old and new Japan, betweenthe feudalism of the past and the encroachments of the foreign civilization of the present,—a monument to the ruin of chivalry, knightly pursuits, and glorious deeds of arms; a poor, ragged, despisedjinrikishaman, but with a glorious heritage in the superb Muramasa blade which hangs on the walls of his hut.

MARSHAL’S BATON, WAR-FAN, AND HEAD-DRESS.

Back to Index Next