Onna-Musha

A poetic prose

This collaboration begins with a poetic excerpt from Dorie, giving historic context to the exploits of Tomoe Gozen, followed by an imagined account of the battle of Awazu from the perspective of a vagabond samurai.

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The Tale of the Heike exists in multiple recensions. Tomoe appears only in the longer variants (the Kakuichi-bon, 1371). No contemporary document from the Genpei War (1180–1185) mentions her. This places her in the same evidentiary category as Hua Mulan, absent from official histories, present only in literary and oral traditions, but no less culturally real for it.

Tomoe Gozen at the Battle of Awazu

After The Tale of the Heike, Book IX

She wore the red-laced ō-yoroi,¹
Her helmet’s crest a crescent blade;
No chronicle of court or temple
Set down the charge that morning made.

The snow had hushed the pines near Awazu,²
The frozen reeds like broken spears.
Lord Yoshinaka, last of the Kiso,³
Saw his retainers disappear.

“Tomoe,” he said (and she remembered
The waka contest in spring rain,
Her brush-stroke lightning on the paper,
His laugh that never came again,
“You are a storm of silk and quiver,

A rider no man yet could tame.
But flight is not dishonor. Take one
Good head! Then flee! Preserve my name.”⁴
She bowed. Her horse breathed in frost.

Enemies came down the slope in waves of blue.
She counted banners: Hōjō, Nitta,
And the Ashikaga—all new.⁵
The first man swung his nagamaki,⁶

She cut his stirrup from his thigh.
The second, by his helmet’s throat-cord,
She dragged through snow until the sky
Went red behind him.

Three, four, five men
How many ghosts compile a legend?
She severed the wrist of a general
Whose name the Heike would not mention.⁷

Then she saw him: Honda no Moroshige,⁸
The strong man of the eastern host.
He roared her challenge. She unhorsed him
And held his head up, dripping blood, eyes wide shut.

But Yoshinaka’s banner wavered,
The arrow-fall became a sleet.
She found him in a circle of bodies,
A tantō broken at his feet.⁹

“My lord! Go! Let no woman witness
What I become.” She turned her rein.
Some say she rode to the northern mountains,
Became a nun, lived past all pain.¹⁰

Some say she died in that same skirmish,
A name erased, a blade stuck fast.
The Heike says: She was beautiful,
Strong as a hundred men and last.¹¹

Footnotes

¹ Ō-yoroi – “Great armor,” the boxy, lacquered armor of the late Heian samurai, laced with colored cords. Red lacing indicated high rank and aggressive spirit. Compare to the lamellar armor of the Tang dynasty, which influenced Japanese design.

² Battle of Awazu (1184) – Yoshinaka’s final stand near Lake Biwa, after his betrayal by his cousin Yoritomo. The Heike describes snow on the morning of the battle—a poetic signature of doomed last stands, much like Xiang Yu’s final battle at Gaixia (202 BCE) with its encircling Chu songs.

³ Minamoto no Yoshinaka (1154–1184) – Cousin to the shogun Yoritomo. He captured Kyoto in 1183 but was later branded a rebel. His story follows the classic tragic arc: a brilliant upstart destroyed by his own clan.

⁴ “Take one good head – then flee” – In the Heike, Yoshinaka tells Tomoe to escape because he would be ashamed to die beside a woman. This mirrors the gendered rhetoric found in Chinese histories: Liang Hongyu (d. 1135) fought alongside her husband Han Shizhong, but even she was praised as an exception, not a precedent.

⁵ Banners: Hōjō, Nitta, Ashikaga – These clans fought for Yoritomo at Awazu. The Ashikaga would later seize the shogunate in 1336. Tomoe’s “all new” signals the end of one political order and the birth of another—the Kamakura shogunate (1185–1333), Japan’s first military government.

⁶ Nagamaki – A polearm with a long, wrapped hilt and a blade of roughly equal length, wielded with two hands. It was often used by mounted warriors to cut down foot soldiers. Functionally similar to the Chinese zhanmadao (“horse-cutting saber”).

⁷ Whose name the Heike would not mention – A deliberate irony. The Heike glorifies Tomoe but often omits the names of the men she kills, leaving them as generic “strong warriors.” This inverts the usual logic of epic, where the hero’s named enemies are his glory. Compare to the anonymous “enemy generals” slain by Zhao Yun in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

⁸ Honda no Moroshige – The Heike names him as the strong man she defeated and beheaded. His historicity is uncertain. Many scholars believe this episode was added to display Tomoe’s skill by having her defeat a “champion” figure—the same narrative device as Guan Yu killing Yan Liang at the Battle of Guandu (200 CE).

⁹ Tantō – A short dagger, often used for seppuku (ritual suicide). Yoshinaka is found with his broken, suggesting he attempted a final stand rather than an orderly death. The broken blade is a common trope in Japanese war tales for a leader too exhausted to die properly.

¹⁰ Became a nun – The Heike records this as one tradition. Becoming a nun (ama) was a common posthumous narrative device for warrior women who survived their lords, allowing them to exit history with dignity. Compare to the legendary fate of Yang Yuhuan (Yang Guifei) in some versions of her story—death by strangulation, but later traditions have her flee to Japan as a nun.

¹¹ “Beautiful, and strong as a hundred men—and last” – The Heike’s original passage (Book IX, section 16) describes her as “beautiful in countenance, and strong as a hundred warriors, able to match even a demon or a god.” The word “last” is my addition. It plays on the Heike’s famous opening theme: the mighty fall, but beauty lingers in the telling. Tomoe is “last” in the sense that she survives the battle in legend, even if she perished in fact.

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My days are spent in contemplation, now, staring at the ripples on the water.

The mouths of koi sip at the air when they see my hand pass close.

Before, there was only the discipline of the Way.

My path was never marked by glory, nor piled with my slain foes. I only remember the sound of whistling steel, making its inevitable way towards my throat. The sound of the rains on the parched, hard dirt roads, and the way they became a morass. I remember the blood-sucking flies, and mosquitoes. And my suitou, my gourd, perpetually half-full of spirits.

The heat became rains, became blossoms for a week, became the long sordid summer. For a penniless samurai, with only an etched sword to his name, and dusty feet, the road was measured in seasons; miserable heat, to miserable cold.

The aftermath of war—is heard before it is seen. And smelled, as well. Crows call out a litany to their brethren, a calculus of death that factors the corpses of every clan.

There is only stillness, beyond the birds calling, low croaking exchanges in their guttural tongues, bargaining for access to the banquet.

After Awazu, there was stillness.

I was there, in the push of pike. Fighting on foot, with the lowly ashigaru. I was in a shameful state, unwashed for days and barely able to stand, let alone fight. And as a further indignity, I watched the onna-musha, Tomoe Gozen, ride into the enemy, and best 5 retainers before striking down the chief retainer of the Hojo daimyo. She rode through the spray of his blood and into the West. The air steamed with horse breath and blood-heat and fury. She rode through us, a lone warrior carrying a lord’s name on her lips in a reckless charge at death—or escape.

It was a feat I will remember until my grave claims me.

Bravery in the face of death, is remarkable. Bravery in the face of a doomed cause, in the eyes of a dying lord, in the bond of a loyal companion, becomes legend. Whether she escaped or took her own life, no one knows. There are tales that speak of her as a nun, as traveling to the mainland, as finding a new lord to serve. No tales tell of cold death, alone in a snow bank. Or of being a fugitive ghost.

Wayward samurai, disappearing into their destiny, do not intrude in this garden. I am not an adherent of the Way. My sword is kept in its sheath.

Cherry blossoms litter the walk, like the fallen at Awazu.