The boy who waited eighteen years to kill a man. Soga Tokimune — known through most of the legend by his childhood name, Gorō — was the younger of the two Soga brothers, and half of the oldest of Japan's great revenge stories. He was a small child when his father was murdered by a kinsman, Kudō Suketsune, in a poisonous quarrel over land. Most children grow up and let it go. The Soga boys grew up and sharpened the knife.

For eighteen years, Gorō and his elder brother Jūrō carried the vendetta like a second pulse. In 1193 their moment came: Minamoto no Yoritomo, master of the realm, held an enormous hunt at the foot of Mt Fuji, and under cover of a storming night the brothers slipped into the camp and cut Suketsune down at last. It cost them everything, exactly as they'd always known it would. Jūrō died in the chaos that followed. Tokimune was taken alive and executed soon after — the revenge complete, the bill paid in full. Their tale became one of the three great vendettas of Japan, the natural sibling to the forty-seven rōnin: where the rōnin are grizzled retainers, the Soga brothers are the young-blood version, a childhood grief carried into one doomed strike.

Yoshitoshi sets Tokimune in his One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, and the moon is exactly right — the Soga raid is a thing of night, of patience and darkness and the long wait for the guard to drop. Fitting that the fiery younger brother, all swagger and stamping fury on the kabuki stage, should be caught here in a quieter, moonlit register: the boy behind the bravado, in the last dark before the blood.

Soga Tokimune (曾我時致), from the series Tsuki hyakushi (月百姿, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon) 1885.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年, 1839-1892)