petronia

I bought myself a packet of ten little Italian chocolate-covered Limoncello cakes, and I'm so hungry I'm eating them all. I sense a sugar rush in my near future. As for dinner - Chinese noodle bowl? Korean noodle bowl? Please vote on my gastronomic near future!

***

So basically the thing about Gunjou is, it's the episode where you find out the circumstances surrounding Saburou's rape - who did it, why, and what happened after. It turns out I was right about Ujimasa. Okay, a few hundred years late, but whatever.

The story takes place three years before Ujiteru picks Takaya up in Shinjuku, or two and a half years before the beginning of the first Mirage of Blaze novel. The few chapters mostly follow Ujiteru as he reminisces and angsts about how he wasn't able to take care of Saburou. He's seriously obsessive about this, actually, to the point where I'd say it was one of the reasons he came back in the first place. This book is where all the flashback scenes with their flute-playing conversations that were in the anime but not in books 6-8 come from. Then again he's just as dorky about Ujimasa and his other brothers (Ujiteru is way dorkier in Gunjou than he is in the series proper, is where that Jfandom baka-niisan characterization comes from methinks), just that Saburou was the youngest and the one he most conspicuously failed to save.

Ujiteru hikes up to Hachiouji-jou (1 | 2) to apologize to the ghosts of the soldiers there for not helping them defend the castle he built, being besieged in Odawara. (It was one of those ruthless battles; many of the defenders killed were elderly, women and boys. Supposedly so many women committed suicide in the river when the castle was taken that the rice fields downstream ran red.) The ghosts, of course, apologized back for letting Uesugi Kagekatsu and Maeda Toshiie take the thing. Everyone cried. The old dude who guided Ujiteru up the trail was roundly traumatized.

Kotarou picks Ujiteru up at the foot of the mountain, and they have another one of their "Please desist from your illogical course of action." "Talking to you is like talking to a household appliance! >:E" conversations. When they get back to the house it transpires that 1) Ujimasa had been attacked by Satomi assassins and got his shoulder sliced up, and 2) Ujikuni had had a scuffle with the Yashashuu and got his arm broken. The rest of the story deals with the problem of the assassins, who prove stubborn in their mission and difficult to capture, and the problem of Saburou Kagetora and his position as leader of the Meikai Uesugi, which Ujiteru, Ujimasa and their uncle Tsunashige discuss exhaustively. Ujiteru's position is of course that they have to find Saburou and bring him back to the Hojo post-haste, because all those Uesugi did was abuse and mistreat the poor thing, and even after they drove him to his death they didn't let him rest and stuck him with exorcising "until castles turn to ruins and are buried underground", not to mention heartlessly staffing his team with poor specimens of Kagekatsu-supporting humanity such as Naoe Nobutsuna, with whom it must be humiliating for him to even stay in the same room (^^;). Et cetera. Ujimasa mostly sort of nods and smiles before Ujiteru's rants. To Tsunashige in private he expresses that insofar as he was concerned Kagetora's power was a clear and present danger to the Hojo: if he could be persuaded to join their side (and it's worthwhile to note that they all assume he would as a matter of course) that was of course the best-case scenario, but if he couldn't he had to be taken out. Tsunashige is frankly rather shocked by this, but Ujimasa's always been the "cold" one, probably because he was the heir and stuck with the tough decisions. In any case all his younger brothers are actually somewhat intimidated by him, except for Ujiteru who persists in believing that Ujimasa just has trouble expressing his emotions.

In a way, the true centre of this novella is the psychological portrayal of Ujimasa, through his own thoughts and the family members observing him. Basically - he is cold and calculating, and it is basically just that he has trouble expressing his emotions, even to himself. You get the impression he had difficulty recognizing his own feelings. The only person said to really have understood him was his wife Oubai-in (yes, Shingen's daughter, and after the Hojo broke their treaty with the Takeda they sent her back, after ten years of marriage and six(!) children. She died not long afterward. It's just as well the women of Sengoku Jidai generally have more sense than to come back as onryou just so they can bitchslap their husbands/fathers for ruining their lives). In this and other ways - stubborn pride, magic ability to cause psychosis in his retainers (but more on that later) - he actually reminds me of Kagetora himself, ironically enough. It's amusing to see the family resemblances; Ujiteru and Kagetora, for instance, share a tendency to favor attack over defense in their tactical planning.

Anyway, you know Ujimasa has difficulty recognizing his feelings because he thinks he doesn't care about Saburou at all - he was sent off to the Takeda for so long Ujimasa never managed to emotionally accept him as a sibling, even though the rest of the family had no such problems - but sits around and angsts about him anyway. He remembers the last time he ever touched the boy: Saburou had wandered into his garden chasing a butterfly. Ujimasa caught it and tried to give it to him, but Saburou was so intimidated that he fumbled and the butterfly flew away.

What he retains from the incident is that their hands were very alike.

As for the assassins, they're kanshousha so the kekkai the Hojo put up around Hakone and environs can't keep them out, and they can split their ki to attack different locations simultaneously, long-distance. They also have no compunction about injuring or killing present-day human bystanders, which pisses the Hojo off not only out of moral principle but because it invites the Yashashuu to take an interest in the proceedings. After a few such incidents they send Ujimasa a dead mouse and a skimmia branch in a box, which ~~psycho stalker behaviour~~ clues Ujimasa in as to who he's dealing with, and why they have a personal hate-on for him.

What's more, they know about Saburou's rape.

You see where this is going, right?

Eventually the assassins piss Ujimasa off so much that he implements an elaborate plan to draw them out, involving switching yorimashi with Tsunashige and driving around Hakone in that infamous illusion-inducing magic Fuuma fog. .........And jeebus, I'm going to have to go or I'll miss my movie. Will finish later. I can't believe I wrote all this. XD;