The birth of Taikō’s Heir Yaemon is presented as a turning point in Toranaga’s recollection of a political plan: after the Taikō’s first son died, the arrival of a second son seemed to ruin everything Toranaga had arranged. The event matters less as a witnessed birth than as the moment, seen in retrospect, when an anticipated outcome gave way to uncertainty.

Memory and Sequence

Toranaga remembers Lady Ochiba giving birth to a boy a few years after an earlier political episode. He recalls another birth in the same sequence: after the Taikō’s first son had died, Taikō’s Heir Yaemon was born as the second son. The narration supplies no details of the birth itself; it is the compressed chronology in Toranaga’s memory that establishes its importance.

Political Reversal

The death of the first son had made room for a different expectation, but Taikō’s Heir Yaemon’s birth disrupted Toranaga’s plan. Toranaga’s response is to regard the plan as ruined and the turn of events as karma. The recollection makes the birth a reversal rather than a simple family milestone: a change in the succession that Toranaga understands as overturning what he had intended.