Akechi Mitsuhide

Before dawn on a June morning in the season of the long rains, thirteen thousand soldiers closed in on a temple in Kyoto. Inside lay the most powerful man in Japan.

At their head rode Akechi Mitsuhide, the general Oda Nobunaga had trusted for thirteen years with his court affairs and his hardest campaigns. By nightfall he held the capital. Within two weeks he was dead on a village road.

Why did he do it?

A loyal servant pushed too far? A man hungry for power? Few people know that the famous tales of insults and revenge were written long after his death, and that the documents of his own age never settle the question.

This history follows Mitsuhide from the ruins of his family's castle to the courts of Kyoto, the mountains of Tanba and a poem composed at a shrine days before the march, a verse that can be read as a prayer for rain or a claim to rule the realm. Then come Honnoji, the eleven days that followed, the battle at Yamazaki and the fate of the daughter he left behind.

What you are about to discover will change how you see a man remembered only as a traitor: a poet, a governor and a father whose story was rewritten by playwrights and print makers.

One night can erase a lifetime, and the reasons behind it can vanish with the man.

What you will gain: a vivid account that separates documented fact from later legend and weighs the main theories fairly, from private grievance to Shikoku policy to plain ambition. When it speaks most clearly: whenever loyalty, ambition and power collide. Who will love it: readers of samurai and Sengoku history, lovers of true stories of betrayal, and anyone curious how a trusted servant became a byword for treason.