From my forthcoming Samurai Swordsmen:

At around four o’clock in the afternoon, “at dusk on that early spring day, someone came to my house to tell us that ‘Sannan is going to commit seppuku,’” Yagi recalled. The boy and his father “rushed” to the Maekawa house just across the narrow street—and the scene they witnessed was “pathetic.” “Just as I passed through the front gate of my house, there was a girl rushing by,” whom Yagi recognized as a woman from the Shimabara pleasure quarter who “had become intimate with Sannan.” Taken by surprise, the boy, “without saying a word, stood in front of the gate and watched as the girl ran over to the latticed bow window on the west side of the Maekawa house, and while knocking [on the window] screamed” Sannan’s name “over and over.” Soon Yagi approached the house and “silently stood there watching.”

Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1863–1869) (Helion, 2026) is now in production.