Volume 1 – Chapter 4 Part 1

Iwamuro Nagato-no-kami and Iwamuro Sojun

One day, some time after my father Nobuhide’s funeral, Iwamuro Sojun came to visit me.

At first, he spoke of old times, reminiscing fondly about my father.

Apparently, the Iwamuro family traced its lineage back to Yamanaka Juro—one of the Three Kashiwagi Houses among the Twenty-One Clans of Kōka—and adopted the surname Iwamuro after being granted the village of Iwamuro in Ōmi Province. However, the fact that during the time my father was rapidly expanding his power in Owari, he recruited Iwamuro Sojun and Takigawa Sukekiyo (Kazukatsu)—both originally from Kōka—to join his ranks in Owari was not widely known.

I hadn’t known it either.

As he recalls my father, Sojun speaks to me with a distant look in his eyes.

「The Great Lord was a very progressive man, and when he heard that Kubo-sama (the Shogun, Ashikaga Yoshiharu) had employed the services of ninja, he wrote a letter