Oguri Kōzukenosuke appears not only in histories and biographies but again and again in novels and in works for the stage. How writers such as Shimazaki Tōson and Nakazato Kaizan drew him; what traditions the school of swordsmanship handed down in the Oguri house has left; how varied a set his schoolfellows as a boy turned out to be. This chapter sets out the Oguri Kōzukenosuke who lives in literature and in what has been handed down.
None of it is history itself; it is later invention and tradition, passed on by telling. Five subjects, with a note on how each stands to the historical record.
Articles in this chapter
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Oguri Kōzukenosuke in Shimazaki Tōson's Yoake Mae
Scenes from the end of the shogunate in a long novel set on the Kiso road, and how far the invention stands from the record.
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The “one come again” in Nakazato Kaizan's Daibosatsu Tōge
A character in the unfinished novel is said to call Oguri to mind. There is a curious link, too, between the author and the movement to commemorate him.
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The Oguri school of the sword, and an unexpected link with Sakamoto Ryōma
The Oguri school of swordsmanship and jūjutsu, handed down in the family. The tradition that it was the school Sakamoto Ryōma learned in Tosa.
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Fellow students at Asaka Gonsai's school
The register of the private school he attended as a boy holds more than two thousand names. Men of the shogunate and men who would bring it down sat at the same desks.
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The Satsuma biwa song “Lord Oguri of Jōshū”
A piece for the Satsuma biwa made in 1955 for the memorial in the eighty-eighth year after his death. A work of letters that came out of the movement to commemorate him.