Yabu Submits to Toranaga and Pledges Izu

Yabu’s submission to Toranaga turns a political pledge into a personal reckoning: before his assembled men, Yabu offers both the province of Izu and a sword bound to Toranaga’s family history. Toranaga accepts the allegiance, but the ceremony’s sharpest consequence comes when the blade is sent beneath the sea. Yabu receives Izu as a fief; Toranaga keeps the underlying power to take it back.

The Pledge and Its Political Stakes

Toranaga recalls asking Yabu what he had decided about going to Osaka. Yabu answers that he will not go until Toranaga does, and says he has ordered Izu mobilized. The choice is more than a declaration of personal loyalty: Yabu frames the province’s fate as tied to Toranaga’s, warning that if the Kwanto falls, Izu will fall with it. He insists that he made a solemn bargain and that the Kasigi honor their bargains.

Toranaga responds that he is equally honored to have Yabu as an ally, but the recollection makes clear that this apparent welcome conceals calculation. He is pleased because Yabu has once again done what Toranaga planned for him to do. Allegiance is therefore both sincere in its public form and useful within Toranaga’s design: Yabu chooses to commit himself, while Toranaga receives the commitment on terms that preserve his own leverage.

The pledge becomes unmistakable the following day. Yabu assembles a host, asks Toranaga to review it, and, before all his men, kneels formally and offers himself as Toranaga’s vassal. Toranaga asks whether Yabu acknowledges him as his feudal lord. Yabu answers yes, extending the submission to all the men of Izu as well. The public setting gives the words political force: this is not merely a private assurance between two leaders, but a visible declaration before the armed body whose obedience the pledge claims.

The Sword as a Gift and a Family Memory

Still kneeling, Yabu presents his Murasama sword as a token of filial duty and identifies it as the weapon that murdered Toranaga’s grandfather. Toranaga’s immediate disbelief—“That’s not possible!”—registers the revelation as more than a ceremonial flourish. The gift brings an inherited act of violence into the present at the very moment Yabu offers his service.

Yabu explains how the sword passed down to him and says that he learned its true identity only recently. He then summons Suwo, whose testimony supplies an eyewitness’s history. Suwo recalls serving Toranaga’s grandfather, Lord Chikitada, and swears that he was there on the day Chikitada died. He also says that no one saw Obata’s father break the sword or cast it into the sea. The story of the blade thus rests not only on Yabu’s claim: Suwo’s remembered presence confirms the connection between the weapon and the death.

Toranaga accepts the sword, which seems to quiver with malevolence in his hand. Until this moment he had scoffed at the legend that certain swords possess a killing urge of their own, needing to leap from their scabbards to drink blood. Holding this particular blade changes his response. The gift does not simply commemorate Yabu’s new vassalage; it confronts Toranaga with a family history that makes the sword seem actively dangerous.

The Blade’s Threat and Its Destruction

The recollection widens beyond his grandfather’s murder. Toranaga remembers that another Murasama blade nearly severed his arm when he was six: no one had been near him, yet his sword arm was slashed and he nearly bled to death. A third such blade decapitated his first-born son. These memories make the offered weapon part of a repeated pattern of injury and loss, and explain why the sword’s history overwhelms any ordinary reading of it as a valuable gift.

Yabu proposes that so befouled a blade should not be allowed to live. He offers to take it out to sea and drown it, so that it can never threaten Toranaga or his descendants. Toranaga agrees at once and orders him to do it. His relief is not complete until his men have witnessed the sword sink out of sight into deep water; only then does his heart begin to beat normally. The destruction answers the family danger in practical terms, but the scene also shows how strongly the belief in the blade’s menace has taken hold of him.

Fief, Allegiance, and Retained Authority

After the sword is gone, Toranaga thanks Yabu, stabilizes taxes at sixty parts for the peasants and forty for their lords, and grants Yabu Izu as his fief. The political reward follows the act of submission and the destruction of the dangerous gift. Yabu’s province is formally placed in his hands, while the arrangement does not surrender Toranaga’s ultimate authority.

The recollection closes on this careful distinction: everything is as before, except that all power in Izu belongs to Toranaga if he chooses to take it back. Yabu’s kneeling pledge appears to establish a settled feudal bond, but its terms leave the stronger lord able to reclaim control. The event therefore joins personal loyalty, public recognition, inherited violence, and political containment in a single sequence. Toranaga accepts Yabu as vassal and grants him a fief, yet the final balance of power remains with Toranaga.