Falcons

Falcons are trained hunting birds in the novel, most closely associated with Toranaga’s exacting practice of falconry. They are more than ornaments of a lordly pastime: their training and handling express a personal rule about mastery, while their flight can intersect with the transmission of military intelligence. Across the episodes, the hunt shifts between recreation, operational calculation, and an arena in which abrupt human violence becomes visible.

Toranaga’s Rule of Training

After confinement in Osaka, Toranaga is urged to hunt nearby, with the promise that the hunting is good and that falcons are available. He welcomes the prospect, but recalls that he lost his birds there. When told that Hiro-matsu might bring them to Yedo, Toranaga explains that he ordered the birds released once the party was safely away. By the time they could have reached Yedo, he says, they would have been out of training and tainted.

Toranaga makes the decision part of a larger personal discipline: he flies only falcons he has trained himself and allows them no other master. The reason he gives is pointedly practical and self-limiting: under that rule, the birds make only his mistakes. The birds’ performance therefore depends on a particular relation between trainer and animal, not simply on possession. His refusal to transfer them preserves that relation even at the cost of losing the immediate pleasure of hunting with them. The episode also lets another character propose that Toranaga’s rules might be discussed over food, turning falconry into a subject through which private habits and the prospect of closer acquaintance can be approached.

Birds and Military Information

Falcons enter a second, more tactical context when Omi urges Yabu to send all the falcons and falconers east. The suggestion follows a concern that Nebara Jozen’s carrier pigeon must be stopped before dawn; Yabu has already ordered Igurashi to watch Jozen and see whether he sends a bird. Igurashi warns that a pigeon being brought down or tampered with could make Jozen suspect treachery. Omi nevertheless insists that it must be prevented.

The proposal places falconry beside surveillance and message control. A trained bird might be used to intercept a pigeon, but the scene records the recommendation and its risk, not a completed operation: it does not establish that the falcons are sent east or that a pigeon is captured in response to Omi’s instruction. The distinction matters. The birds’ military significance lies here in the possibility of turning an established hunting practice against a channel of communication, while the danger of discovery makes even that possibility politically charged.

The Pigeon Hunt

A later hunt supplies a direct image of a falcon taking a pigeon. After a meeting with Zataki, Toranaga rides up with Naga serving as his equerry. The falcon folds her wings and drops from the evening sky, striking the fleeing pigeon amid a burst of feathers. She catches it in her talons and carries it downward, then releases the dead prey close to the ground, brakes, and lands on it. Her cry and the flutter of her neck feathers accompany her display of possession; she tears at the pigeon’s head in the excitement of the kill.

Toranaga calls her gently to his fist. She steps onto his glove obediently and receives a morsel of flesh from an earlier kill as a reward. He puts on her hood, tightening its thongs with his teeth, while Naga retrieves the pigeon and places it in the half-full game bag on his father’s saddle. The sequence gives the hunt a precise routine: capture, recall, reward, hooding, and collection. The falcon’s successful strike is her own forceful action, while the trained return to the glove brings that action back within the partnership Toranaga has described.

With the bird settled on his gloved hand and held by thin leather jesses, Toranaga looks up to judge how much daylight remains. He tells Naga that the next day should be cloudless and says he intends to hunt at dawn. The promise of another hunt follows immediately after the politically fraught meeting, making the return to falconry an enacted routine rather than an explanation of Toranaga’s feelings. Naga is perplexed by his father’s composure: after the ceremony of dismissing Zataki, Toranaga has summoned the birds, beaters, and guards and ridden into the hills. The falcon on his glove belongs to this controlled change of activity, set against Naga’s awareness of the danger surrounding the family.

Hunting Interrupted

Blackthorne’s hawking provides a contrasting episode. That morning the hunt has begun successfully: he has chosen a tiny, long-wing falcon, compared in the narration to a merlin, and flown her at a lark. The stoop and soaring chase are carried southward beyond a belt of trees by a freshening wind. Leading the charge as his privilege, Blackthorne rides through the forest along a well-beaten path, scattering peddlers and farmers.

The chase ends at an obstruction rather than with the falcon’s capture of the lark. A weather-beaten oil seller, mounted on an equally threadbare horse, refuses to move. Blackthorne curses him; the peddler answers rudely. Toranaga arrives and tells Blackthorne to give the bodyguard his sword for a moment. Before Blackthorne understands what is happening, the samurai strikes the oil seller with a blow so savage and exact that the man walks on a pace before falling, divided at the waist. The hunt’s forward motion has led into an execution, and the falcon’s successful flight is abruptly displaced by the sword’s violence.

Toranaga briefly shows delight, pounding his pommel, before returning to melancholy as the other samurai cheer. The bodyguard carefully cleans the blade with his silken sash, sheaths it, and returns it; Mariko later explains that he is proud to have tested such a blade and that Toranaga suggests naming it Oil Seller. The falcon does not cause or participate in the killing, but the episode places its swift pursuit beside another, human act of pursuit and force. Together, the scenes establish falconry as a recurring practice with distinct uses: a personally governed art for Toranaga, a proposed instrument against a carrier pigeon, and the opening movement of a hunt that is overtaken by political violence.