森蘭丸

Mori Ranmaru (1565–1582) was Oda Nobunaga's closest page — a young man of exceptional beauty, intelligence, and martial skill who served at the very center of Nobunaga's court and who died with him in the flames of Honnōji at seventeen years old. His father Mori Yoshinari had been one of Nobunaga's most valued generals, killed in battle in 1570; his elder brother Nagayoshi was the ferocious warrior known as 'Demon Musashi.' Ranmaru himself combined the physical beauty that contemporaries universally noted with real martial ability: as a page responsible for the personal protection of the most powerful man in Japan, he needed to be a genuine swordsman. When Akechi Mitsuhide's forces surrounded Honnōji in the early hours of June 2, 1582, Ranmaru fought beside his lord to the end. He was seventeen. The image that posterity has preserved of him — the beautiful, perfectly skilled young warrior burning with his master — has become one of the most powerful symbols in Japanese culture of the fusion of beauty and martial virtue, the aesthetic and the martial sides of the warrior ideal perfectly united in a single person. The swords Nobunaga gave him were expressions of the profound bond between them: not merely weapons but gifts charged with trust, affection, and the recognition of excellence.