Ama Gozen

Tomoe Gozen rode in the Genpei War of 1180 to 1185, the struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans that broke the power of the old court and opened the age of the samurai. She rode with Minamoto no Yoshinaka, called Kiso no Yoshinaka after the mountain valley in Shinano where he was raised.

Almost everything we know of her comes from one book. The Tale of the Heike, the great war epic shaped over the following centuries by blind storytellers who chanted it to the lute, gives her a single famous passage. It says she was beautiful, fair-skinned and long-haired, a strong archer, and a swordswoman worth a thousand men, ready to face a demon or a god on horseback or on foot. It says she could master unbroken horses and ride them down slopes no one else would try. When battle came, Yoshinaka sent her out first, as his leading captain. Of the two women he had brought from Shinano, the Heike says, the other, Yamabuki, had fallen ill and stayed behind in the capital.

The Heike brings Tomoe onstage only at the end. In the first month of 1184, beaten by the armies his cousin Yoritomo sent against him, Yoshinaka was worn down to a handful of riders on the shore of Lake Biwa near Awazu. He ordered Tomoe to go. He meant to die there, and it would not do for people to say that Lord Kiso had a woman with him in his last fight. She obeyed, but first she rode at an enemy warrior, Onda no Hachirō, dragged him against her saddle and took his head. Then she threw off her armor and rode away toward the east. Yoshinaka was killed before the day was out, and the Heike never mentions her again.

Later writers could not leave her there. The Genpei Seisuiki, a longer retelling of the war, makes her the daughter of Yoshinaka's foster father, Nakahara Kanetō, and the sister of his most loyal captains, Imai Kanehira and Higuchi Kanemitsu. It says she was brought to Kamakura, married the warrior Wada Yoshimori and bore him a son, and that after the Wada fell in 1213 she became a nun and lived to ninety-one. A Noh play has her ghost appear to a traveling monk at Awazu. At Gichū-ji, the small temple in Ōtsu that keeps Yoshinaka's grave, tradition says a nameless nun once lived in a grass hut beside it and prayed for him, and that the nun was Tomoe. The poet Bashō asked to be buried at that temple, beside Yoshinaka, and he was.

No document from her own lifetime names her. She may have been a real woman, or a story soldiers told around fires. That gap is where this series lives.

Ama Gozen begins in 1213, the year the Wada fell. An old nun keeps a grave on the shore at Awazu. A girl comes off the east road, hunted, asking for the lady Tomoe. The nun tells her no one by that name lives there. Then, night after night, she tells the girl about a girl in Kiso.