Part One: Notes

I've chosen to make the island nation of Wa the homeland of my Yoshimo for several reasons. Kozakura and Wa are the two different representations of Japan that appear on Toril, the former is a version of Japan during the warring states or, sengoku period the latter is a version of Japan during the middle to late Tokugawa period. The imaginary Wa mimicks the real Tokugawa Japan in many ways, even in the way the bureaucracy set in place two hundred years earlier was beginning to crumble, rotting from the inside and eroding due to various economic pressures.

In many ways the chaotic atmosphere of Kozakura is one where a fellow like Yoshimo would have fit in better, but that's why I didn't choose it. Yoshimo has always seemed to me to be the perennial outsider, never fitting in anywhere, never belonging, especially in the places where he ought to have belonged the most, such as his own homeland or even his own home. As a young man he would have chafed under the pointless restrictions, been bemused by the way so many of the supposedly honorable samurai cheated and lied to get around them, and invariable would have found a way to make the system work to his advantage.

Musui's Story, the autobiography of a poor, unemployed man from the samurai who cheated, lied, stole and and bullied his way to the top of the heap of the barrel-bottom scrapings of his class is my source for the world of Rinkawa Hiruma, Yoshimo's violently sociopathic mentor in the questionable art of bounty hunting.

All details I couldn't glean from game material or this autobiography and various history texts I've read are gleaned directly from my overactive imagination and educated guesswork.

-Blue