Ronin

Ronin are landless or masterless peasant-soldiers and samurai who, through dishonor or the loss of their lord, are forced to wander until another lord accepts their service. The old man’s recollections to Yabu give this condition a concrete history: after his master died during a great famine, he searched for food and employment in a country where strangers were mistrusted and fighting was common.

Status and Circumstances

The old man explains that becoming ronin followed his master’s death. Finding another position was difficult: food was scarce, almost every man was a soldier, and strangers were rarely trusted. He fought for whoever would hire him, moving from one battle or skirmish to another, with food as his pay. His account makes the status precarious rather than freely chosen; losing a master could mean losing both security and a dependable means of survival.

The story also associates ronin with the disorder of the period. The old man recalls that robber bands and corsairs were plentiful, and that many who joined them were ronin. He describes the bandits near Osaka as numerous before The Taikō obliterated most of them. The account connects masterlessness not only with individual wandering but with a wider landscape of insecurity, where displaced fighters could become part of the violence threatening roads, coasts, and settlements.

The Old Man’s Experience

After fighting for food, the old man heard that Kyushu had plentiful supplies and started west. That winter, he found shelter and employment as a guard at a Buddhist monastery near Osaka. For half a year he defended the monastery and its rice fields from bandits. The position offered a temporary place within a community, but not lasting safety: an ambush left him for dead, and the monks who found and healed him could not restore his sight.

Blindness ended his life as a wandering fighter but not his capacity to work. A blind monk taught him massage and how to perceive through his fingers; he later told Yabu that his hands conveyed more than his eyes once had. His passage from masterless soldier to monastery guard, and then to a blind practitioner of massage, shows survival as a succession of altered roles rather than a return to the life he had lost.

Narrative Significance

The old man’s history gives the term Ronin social and bodily consequences. Masterlessness begins with a political and personal rupture, but its effects unfold through hunger, precarious employment, exposure to violence, and the search for shelter. Even when the old man secures work protecting the monastery’s rice fields, the ambush overturns that fragile refuge. His account therefore presents wandering not as an adventure in itself, but as a condition shaped by famine, distrust, and the uncertain availability of a new patron.