奥羽の二人

Short stories about minor historical figures of the Warring States period

This is a set of short stories about various Warring States samurai. The linking theme is that it's generally people who didn't achieve their ambitions or didn't quite live up to expectations, so it's largely more minor figures.

Language-wise, I found this a very difficult read, and it sat half finished in my in-progress pile for a very long time. The major aspects increasing the difficulty are:

• Because this is episodes from the lives of real historical figures, you can easily get lost if you don’t have enough background knowledge
• Lots of historical place names and personal names which very rarely get furigana
• The author’s style tends to using obscure words
• He throws in the occasional line quoted from e.g. somebody's letter of the time, which is of course in classical Japanese

The upshot is sentences full of unknown words where it can be tricky to tell even whether the unknown word is a normal word, a proper noun or a title sometimes.

Plus because it’s short stories, every thirty or so pages you get a completely different set of names to deal with.

The first sentence is not unrepresentative:

安芸国安佐郡金山の城は、代々、甲斐の武田氏の一族が城主であったが、大内義隆の勃興とともに滅亡してしまった。

(You get furigana for 安佐 = あさ and 金山 = かなやま but nothing else.)

I didn't find the stories being told to really be interesting enough to feel like a good payoff for the effort I had to put in to read them.