Sato Tadanobu's bravery in defense of his lord Yoshitsune, the most celebrated of all the tragic warrior-heroes in Japanese history, is recounted in many tales and ballads of the medieval period. Some of these stories were staged for the first time in the 17th and early 18th centuries, and one scene especially made such an impression on the public mind that it became the centerpiece of subsequent dramatizations down to the end of the 20th century and, by a kind of mythic back-formation, gave Tadanobu the nickname -- Go-Board Tadanobu -- by which he was best known to everyone. This scene depicts Tadanobu, trapped in the house of his mistress, fighting off his enemies with a heavy go board. In its many versions by different artists this fight has become the most common among all woodblock-print motifs related to go.
Our main source of information concerning the life and career of Yoshitsune is Gikeiki (The Chronicle of Yoshitsune), compiled in the 15th century from the mass of factual and legendary materials having to do with the titanic struggle between the Minamoto and Taira clans three centuries earlier. What this chronicle has to say about Go-Board Tadanobu can be summarized as follows:
Sato Shirobyoe-no-jo Tadanobu was born in 1161 into a high-ranking samurai family. He became one of the most trusted retainers of Yoshitsune, the younger half-brother of the warlord Minamoto no Yoritomo, the leader of his great clan. Tadanobu's fate was to be inexorably bound up with the rise, decline, and ultimate extinction of his master's fortunes.
Yoshitsune's brilliant military successes against their clan's arch-rivals, the fierce captains and generals of the Taira clan, had helped Yoritomo gain total control of the country. These victories had also brought Yoshitsune into high favor at the Imperial Court in Kyoto, with the unhappy result that Yoritomo became convinced that Yoshitsune was working up some sort of plot against him.
Early in the winter of 1185, accordingly, Yoritomo secretly dispatched a small troop of warrior-monks from his headquarters in Kamakura (near modern Tokyo) to Kyoto, where Yoshitsune had established himself with his mistress in the Horikawa mansion, the clan's headquarters in the imperial city, on Rokujo Avenue. Under orders to take Yoshitsune dead or alive, the troop attacked on the night of the 17th of the 10th month. According to the legends, the young hero's mistress, a lovely dancer named Shizuka, gave the alarm and roused the household. Benkei, the swashbuckling monk who was Yoshitsune's lifelong companion (and hero, in his own right, of a separate cycle of legends), almost single-handedly held off the foe until other retainers quartered elsewhere in the city could be alerted.
The attack was a failure, but it frightened the timid court into withdrawing its favor from Yoshitsune, and revealed to him the deadly peril in which he stood from his brother. He left the city about two weeks later with Shizuka, his faithful lieutenants, and a large number of retainers and dependents, intending to find a haven in the western island of Shikoku or Kyushu. They sailed from Daimotsunoura, a port near Osaka, but were driven back by a violent storm that severely damaged their ship and took many lives.
Yoshitsune now abandoned his first plan and determined to look for help in the distant northeast of Honshu, where he had spent much of his boyhood. By this time he and his dwindling band, Tadanobu among them, had been declared outlaws and were becoming the objects of the most extensive manhunt in Japan's history. In order to bypass Kyoto, now swarming with Yoritomo's troops, they were forced to make a difficult detour through the snow-bound mountains of Yoshino. It was necessary to move quickly, so at the urging of his lieutenants Yoshitsune reluctantly parted from Shizuka and sent her home in tears. (This episode is the subject of the perennially popular drama Yoshitsune Sembon-zakura (Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees).)
On the following day they were discovered and attacked by a band of bloodthirsty monks from Zao Gongen, one of the great temples of Yoshino. Tadanobu heroically rose to the occasion. To deceive the enemy, he donned Yoshitsune's armor and accepted the gift of Yoshitsune's favorite sword. Then, with a handful of loyal comrades, he fought a delaying action until the others were safely away through the snow. With his companions falling one by one, he expected to be cut down as well, but after a number of hair-raising encounters with the foe he managed to escape.
Weary and dispirited, Tadanobu arrived back at the outskirts of Kyoto on the 23rd day of the 12th month and sought refuge in the house of his mistress. This woman's name is given as Kaya in the Chronicle but as Oguruma in some woodblock prints. (Kaya, it should be noted, is the name of the wood from which the best go boards are made.) His intention was to lie low while casting about for news of his lord's fate. Her father, with whom she lived, received Tadanobu kindly, but in Tadanobu's absence Kaya had transferred her affections to another warrior, Kajiwara no Kagehisa, who had much brighter prospects. On the 5th day of the 1st month of the following year (1186) she invited Kajiwara to her house and tried to persuade him to have Tadanobu arrested. Kajiwara was a loyal vassal of Yoritomo, but the woman's treachery horrified him. He turned down her request and went away, leaving her seething with resentment. In the words of the Chronicle:
That same evening Kaya plied the unsuspecting Tadanobu with wine, and when he fell asleep she slipped out of the house and reported his presence to the authorities. Soon an armed contingent arrived and surrounded the house. The Chronicle relates how Tadanobu, waking in the nick of time, fought his way out of the trap, and, over the rooftops, made his way back to the Horikawa mansion, now a desolate ruin. Yoritomo's men found him early the next morning. After a long, violent and bloody struggle, and badly wounded, Tadanobu cut his belly open and fell forward from an upper balcony with the point of his sword in his mouth.1
Together with his master Yoshitsune, Sato Tadanobu is thus the very type of tragic hero whom the Japanese have always held in the highest esteem: bold, single-minded, utterly loyal, betrayed by implacable circumstance, and in the end expiring without complaint in the face of hopeless odds. As for Kaya, she is said to have gone to Yoritomo's headquarters in Kamakura to seek a reward, but was instead put to death for her trouble.
Curiously enough, there is no mention of go or go boards anywhere in the Chronicle. Whether go is mentioned in another recension of the Minamoto-Taira legends remains in doubt. Chikamatsu's own play on the theme, Yoshino Tadanobu (1707), has no such scene in it. But not many years later he refers to Go-Board Tadanobu in his play Kokusenya Kassen (The Battles of Coxinga), first staged in 1715. Some of the stage business he calls for here demonstrates that the go board scene must have been already popular with the audience. It occurs a little later in the scene previously referred to in the discussion of Print 1-4 Chapter 1. Here Bairoku, the villain, with murder in his heart, is climbing up the peak where Go Sankei had encountered the two mysterious old men. They have vanished, leaving only their board behind. . .
Perhaps the go episode was added when the story was dramatized for the first time, in 1680, as a play for the puppet theater, under the title Goban Tadanobu. It must have been a hit, because a number of later plays incorporate the title as they ring changes on the theme: Yoshino Shizuka Goban Tadanobu (Shizuka at Yoshino and Go-Board Tadanobu, 1698), an adaptation of the puppet play for the kabuki stage written and acted by Ichikawa Danjuro I; Goban Tadanobu (Go-Board Tadanobu, 1723), a one-act play starring Danjuro II; Hoshikabuto Goban Tadanobu (The Helmet of Go-Board Tadanobu, 1728), also starring Danjuro II; Senzai Soga Genji no Ishizue (The Everlasting Soga Brothers, Foundation of the House of Minamoto, 1885), informally known as Goban Tadanobu, written by Kawatake Mokuami and starring Ichikawa Sadanji I as the hero; and the last one on the subject, Goban Tadanobu (1911), a production in the style of the 1680s, with Matsumoto Koshiro VII in the title role.
In another version of the story Tadanobu is taking a bath when Kaya slips away to alert the enemy troops. Hearing the commotion they make he snatches up a kimono, tying it with a sash, and rushes out to find that she has taken the precaution of hiding his sword. He picks up the first weapon that comes to hand -- it happens to be a go board -- and brandishing it, scatters his opponents. According to the Chronicle, Tadanobu also bathed in the Zao Gongen Temple while hiding from the warrior monks. A go board would not have been at all out of place in such surroundings. Thus it is not always possible in early prints to be certain where the artist is intending to locate the episode he depicts. The notion of a treacherous mistress and a bottle of sake or a hot bath in Kyoto does strike the note of being an embellishment on an older theme.
An actors' critique3 published in 1729 reveals a little of the stagecraft of Danjuro II in his Tadanobu play Hoshikabuto Goban Tadanobu (The Helmet of Go-Board Tadanobu) of the preceding year:
The critique concludes: `There's no hero today who can equal this man!'
For the 1911 performance a change was made in the character of Oguruma, as Kaya is now called, and in the action leading up to the climax. Her father becomes the treacherous one while she remains loyal (the Japanese at this time were adopting a rather self-conscious Victorian sensibility in regard to women). Tadanobu has brought Yoshitsune's sword with him from Yoshino. One evening, as is his new custom, he makes his devotions to it, as to the spirit of his lord, and falls asleep with his head pillowed on a go board. Oguruma's father creeps near and is about to kill him when Oguruma's spirit appears and wakens him. Tadanobu springs up just in time to defend himself with the board.
Prints of Tadanobu are of two main types. Of these the earlier display him in chain mail with one or more swords inserted in his sash. These seem to be illustrations derived from his fight around the Zao Gongen Temple in Yoshino. Evidence for this is a small black-and-white woodcut in a kabuki chronicle published about 1811-15.4 It depicts a scene from the play Yoshino Shizuka Goban Tadanobu and shows Tadanobu crushing Kakuhan, the leader of the warrior monks. From the same chronicle, another woodcut of a scene from Goban Tadanobu shows the hero similarly accoutered and striking an extremely effective pose with a board.
The second type of print, common in the 19th century, is laid in the house of Tadanobu's mistress on the outskirts of Kyoto. In these prints Tadanobu is unarmed, barefooted, and dressed carelessly as if just emerged from a bath.
Some prints seem to illustrate a special kind of kabuki stage action called dammari, a dance-like pantomime in which a hero and his enemies move slowly about the stage as if hunting for each other in pitch darkness and striking formal dramatic poses as they do so. The dammari of the sort performed in Tadanobu plays was a specialty of the Ichikawa family of actors. Such gestures and poses (kata), as well as costumes and makeup, had in many cases been fixed by the early 18th century and were passed down with little change from generation to generation. Theatregoers -- the public for whom actor prints were produced -- took a keen pleasure in comparing the kata of different actors, and loved to memorize the famous soliloquies and imitate the gestures that accompanied them. The artists therefore had to be careful not to offend their fans' sensibilities by introducing novelty where only the familiar was wanted. This accounts for the strong family resemblance between illustrations of such scenes by artists of different periods.