“It was only because of Ryo that I survived.”
After Sakamoto Ryōma had overseen the conclusion of the military-political alliance between Satsuma and Chōshū in Kyoto in early 1866, thus hastening the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (Bakufu) less than two years later, his life was in danger. Though the Satusma-Chōshū Alliance was still secret, and so unknown to the Bakufu, the Tokugawa authorities in Kyoto had been after him for “going back and forth between Bakufu enemies Satsuma and Chōshū,” Ryōma wrote to his family later that year.
On the day after the alliance was concluded, Ryōma was attacked by Tokugawa police, at an inn called the Teradaya, in Fushimi just outside of Kyoto. He had arrived at the inn late at night. As he was about to sleep in an upstairs room, a young maid, Narasaki Ryō (better known simply as Oryō), whom Ryōma had met and married about a year and a half earlier, was downstairs soaking in a hot bath. Following is an excerpt from my Samurai Revolution:
Oryo as a young woman, according to a descendent of her second husband, whom she married after Ryoma’s death. (Miyaji Saichirō. Sakamoto Ryōma Shashinshū. Tōkyō: Shinjinbutsu Ōraisha, 1986).
The bathroom was located at the rear of the house, near a narrow corridor leading to the rear staircase. Oryō heard the assailants break in, and, as she recalled over thirty years later:
There was a thumping sound, and before I had much time to think about it, someone thrust a spear through the bathroom window, right by my shoulder. I grabbed the spear with one hand, and in an intentionally loud voice, so that I could be heard upstairs, yelled, “Don’t you know there’s a woman in the bath? You with the spear, who are you?” “Be quiet,” [a voice demanded], “or I’ll kill you.” “You can’t kill me,” I hollered back, jumped out of the bathtub into the garden [outside], and still wet and throwing on just a robe, with no time to even put on my sash, ran barefoot [to warn the two men upstairs]. [end excerpt]
Ryōma, with Miyoshi Shinzō, a samurai of Chōfu (branch house of Chōshū), assigned by the Chōshū men as Ryōma’s bodyguard, fought their way out of the inn and managed to escape, though Ryōma was wounded. The enemy, he reported in a separate letter to his sister, Otome, “cut the base of my right thumb, split open the knuckle of my left thumb, and hacked my left index finger to the knuckle bone.” “It was only because of Oryō that I survived.”