The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-38 has long been a shadowy footnote in Japanese history: an uprising of poor farmers and hidden Christians, crushed with such ferocity that 37,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered at Hara Castle. In most textbooks it garners a brief mention, a prelude to the closing of Japan, when the Tokugawa shogunate expelled the Portuguese and turned suspicion of foreign influence into full-blown xenophobia.
But in Spring Castle, Michiko Ishimure—a towering figure in Japanese literature—makes that shadow flare with colour, detail, and humanity. Ishimure-san’s drive to tell this story came from a place very deep within her. As she explains in the introduction:
There were parents, brothers, sisters and grandparents. But the names of those people—not even one of them remains. And their dead bodies were thrown away like the tossing out of tattered rags. I think of myself as a descendant of those who survived, so I thought I needed to give them names.
She not only gave them names, she created their lives and histories entirely from her imagination. It is a novel fifty years in the making, ambitious as it is unflinching. The drama unfolds like an intricate piece of origami: layers folding and refolding, characters emerging from the creases of memory, and at its centre, the figure of Amakusa Shirō, the teenage leader whose martyrdom became legend. Yet Ishimure’s focus is not on the famous, but on the nameless. She restores peasants, wives, children, and outcasts, to their rightful place at the heart of the story—as people, not statistics.
In Okayo, the young bride introduced in the opening chapter, the reader sees the rhythms of domestic life disrupted by famine, taxation, and persecution. In Oume, the Buddhist servant and midwife who works for a Christian household, we see a bridge across religions, an embodiment of the so-called ‘Golden Rule’:
‘Care for your neighbours as you would for yourself’— that’s what I aim for in my life. In that sense we’re all in this together. That is the basic way of all people.
The novel marches inexorably toward the massacre, but never loses sight of the nature-attuned underpinnings of Japanese culture: seasons, tides, and plants are star witnesses, given equal standing to humans. Time is measured not only by cannon fire, but by flower clocks and cherry blossoms. Even at the climax of the massacre, the farmer and family man Daisuke notices nature continuing its cycle even as human lives are cut down:
Daisuke ran, feeling his legs had been injured. At that moment he caught sight of the first of the cherry blossoms opening above Okayo’s head. He also saw the bodies of his parents.
At nearly 500 pages, this novel demands patience, but the reward is intimacy with the silenced: interior monologues do a lot of the heavy lifting. Ishimure interlaces oral tradition, dialect, and folk song, weaving a semiotic web as delicate as it is deliberate.
The translator, retired history professor Bruce Allen, deserves credit for tackling this epic story, because—by his own admission—his biggest challenge was “conveying her use of dialects and the ‘sound spaces’ she creates.” With the author recreating 400-year old dialects of both peasants and samurai, not to mention Spanish and Portuguese missionaries, the degree of technical difficulty is unimaginable. On occasion it might feel that such dedicated adherence to Ishimure’s authenticity might have cost a little in the smooth flow of the English.
The siege itself, when it comes, is relentless. The shogunate amassed 120,000 troops to besiege the castle, and gave orders to leave no one alive. Ishimure spares nothing, yet even in the horror there are passages of aching beauty:
Our days in this castle mark a time shining with light and immortality, such as we will never experience again. Can’t you hear the ticking of the flower clock that measures this time in our lives?
Ishimure’s depiction of the massacre is faithful to history: there are no survivors. The Tokugawa overlords wanted to make an example of this rebellion, and they certainly did. But Ishimure’s achievement is to make the reader feel the lives that were lost, to hear their voices, and to honour their dignity.
In its evocation of suspicion toward foreign faiths, the massacre at Hara Castle foreshadows the insularity of Japan’s sakoku (self-imposed isolation) era. In its portrayal of merciless obedience, it hints at and echoes events that would resurface centuries later in wartime atrocities. But at its heart, it is about humanity and compassion: the will to live, and the will to love.
Although not a page-turner, Spring Castle is ambitious and unforgettable. Ishimure devoted half a century to it; Allen has carried her devotion across languages. Together, they have given readers a requiem for the 37,000 nameless—and a reminder that even in silence, the flower clock continues to tick.