Yodo-dono

At midday on 4 June 1615, in a storehouse in the corner of a burning Osaka Castle, a woman and her son waited for an answer. It came as gunfire.

She was born Chacha, niece of Oda Nobunaga. Before she was fifteen she had lost her father, her uncle and her mother, and each loss carried her into another household, until she became the mother of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's only heir. For seventeen years she held no office and commanded no army, and every powerful man in Japan still had to reckon with her.

Her life was framed by three sieges. She was a small child when Odani fell, fourteen when Kitanoshō burned, and in her mid-forties when Osaka Castle was taken, where she and her son died.

History has rarely been kind to her. The earliest accounts, written under the government that destroyed her house, said only that she would not listen to advice. Over the next two centuries that judgment hardened into the proud, faithless and finally monstrous figure of the plays and popular histories.

Mio Nakagawa sets that tradition aside and returns to the record: the court diaries of Chacha's own lifetime, the chronicles closest to events, and the work of the Japanese historians who have reassessed her. What emerges is not a heroine, but a capable woman making hard decisions from a position that grew weaker every year.

Written in clear, unhurried prose, Yodo-dono follows her in fourteen short chapters, with source notes, a map, portraits and brief biographies of the principal figures.

The men who destroyed her wrote her story. This is the woman they left out.