The man who prayed for suffering. Yamanaka Yukimori — better known as Shikanosuke — served the Amago clan of Izumo, and when the rival Mōri crushed them and scattered the house, most retainers would have found a new lord and got on with living. Yukimori did the opposite. He devoted the rest of his life to raising the Amago from the dead, again and again, losing every time and refusing every time to stay beaten.

The image that made him legend is a prayer. Kneeling under the thin crescent moon, he is said to have asked heaven not for victory, not for safety, but to heap on him the seven misfortunes and eight hardships — every trial a man can bear — if only it would restore his fallen clan. He wore that crescent on the front of his helmet, born as he was under a harvest moon. It became his emblem and his epitaph: a man who volunteered for the whole weight of the world's cruelty in service of a cause already lost. He was finally cut down in 1578, the Amago restoration dead with him — loyalty pushed past all reason, which is precisely why the Japanese have never stopped telling it.

That crescent is why Yoshitoshi places him in One Hundred Aspects of the Moon. For most figures in that series the moon is a backdrop; for Shikanosuke it's the whole story — the very object of his most famous vow. If the forty-seven rōnin waited two years, Shikanosuke gave the fight his entire life and asked for more pain on the way. Devotion doesn't come more stubborn than this.

Yamanaka Yukimori (山中幸盛), from the series Tsuki hyakushi (月百姿, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon) 1885.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳, 1798-1861)