Ōishi Yoshio, commonly known as Ōishi Kuranosuke, was the senior retainer of Asano Naganori, lord of Akō Domain, and became the leader of the group remembered as the Forty-seven Rōnin. Born in 1659, he served as chief chamberlain and managed important affairs of the domain. In 1701 Asano wounded the court official Kira Yoshinaka inside Edo Castle, was ordered to commit seppuku and lost his domain, leaving Ōishi and the other retainers masterless.
For nearly two years Ōishi coordinated a secret plan to avenge Asano while attempting to disguise the group’s intentions. In January 1703 the former retainers attacked Kira’s residence in Edo, killed him and carried his head to Asano’s grave at Sengaku-ji before surrendering. The shogunate ordered forty-six participants, including Ōishi, to die by seppuku, giving them an honourable form of execution while still enforcing public law. Later drama and legend transformed Ōishi into a major Japanese symbol of loyalty and duty.
In John Allyn’s 47 Ronin, in 1701, Lord Asano Naganori is ordered to receive imperial envoys at Edo Castle and must learn the court's elaborate ceremonial from Kira Yoshinaka. Kira's sustained humiliations drive Asano to draw a blade inside the shogun's palace, an offence punished immediately by forced seppuku and confiscation of the Akō domain. His retainers lose their status and become rōnin, while the authorities expect them to accept the shogunate's judgement. Led by Ōishi Yoshio, forty-seven former retainers conceal their intentions for almost two years, dispersing, taking ordinary work and allowing Kira's household to believe the danger has passed. In Laura Joh Rowland’s The Ronin’s Mistress, Sano is given only days to determine what happened between Asano’s forced death and the attack on Kira’s residence. His inquiry follows Ōishi Yoshio, the ronin and the woman whose position gives the novel its title, uncovering political interests behind the celebrated account. In Lucia St. Clair Robson’s The Tokaido Road, after Asano Naganori is forced to commit seppuku for attacking the court official Kira Yoshinaka, his fictional daughter Kinume—known as Cat—loses the protection of her household. Believing that Kira intends to eliminate the remaining Asano family, she disguises herself as a travelling priest and sets out from Edo along the Tōkaidō road to find Ōishi Yoshio, leader of her father’s former retainers. Cat’s journey through post stations, temples, pleasure districts and villages becomes both an escape and an education in Tokugawa society. Pursued by a rōnin hired to capture her, she relies on poetry, disguise and the naginata while the former Asano retainers prepare their celebrated revenge.
