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A man grips a red spear shaft in both hands, and the shaft runs the whole width of the sheet. The pink slip above his helmet names him: Yasuda Sakubē, one of the Akechi men. Tradition credits him with the first spear into Nobunaga and with killing the page at the door.

Oda Nobunaga is sleeping in a temple with a few dozen attendants, which tells you what he thought of his position. By the summer of 1582 he had broken or bought every serious rival in central Japan. The warrior monks were burned off their mountain. The Takeda cavalry was shot down at Nagashino by his massed guns, and the emperor was politely managed. Half the country was unified by a man who had started as the reckless young fool of a minor province. His armies were away finishing the job, which is why the most powerful man in Japan lay nearly unguarded at Honnō-ji, a temple lodging in Kyoto, on the night of the twenty-first of June. One of those armies was 13,000 men under Akechi Mitsuhide, ordered west to reinforce a siege. At the Katsura river outside the capital, Mitsuhide turned the column instead and gave the order that every Japanese schoolchild can finish: the enemy is at Honnō-ji. Nobody knows, to this day, why. A public humiliation avenged, ambition seizing an open door, fear of being discarded, some plot on behalf of court or rivals: four centuries of theories, and the man himself explained nothing. By dawn the temple was surrounded. Nobunaga woke to shouting and took up his bow until the string broke, then fought with a spear until a wound drove him inside. The buildings were burning around him and his young page Mori Ranmaru was holding the door. He ended it himself in the fire. His body was never found. In a politics run on proof, that mattered: no head meant no trophy, and no grave. The temple had been full of treasure that mattered as much as heads. Nobunaga ran politics partly through the tea ceremony. He licensed his generals to hold formal tea as a privilege and paid them in famous utensils the way other lords paid in provinces. The evening before the attack he had shown dozens of celebrated pieces to guests from the court, and much of that collection melted with the building. Among the household that night was Yasuke, an African retainer the Jesuits had presented to Nobunaga, who had made him a salaried warrior at his side. Yasuke fought at Honnō-ji, cut his way to the heir's position at Nijō, and was captured. The attackers, unsure what to do with him, sent him back to the missionaries, and history loses him there, alive. What followed was the fastest week in samurai history. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, besieging a castle 125 miles west, made peace overnight, force-marched his army back through summer rain, and destroyed Mitsuhide at Yamazaki 11 days after the temple burned. The would-be shogun fled and was speared in the dark by villagers hunting fugitives. Japan remembers him as the 13-day ruler, and remembers Hideyoshi, the sandal-bearer's son who avenged his lord, as the man who caught the country Nobunaga had built and finished the unification. Nobunaga had a favorite piece from the Noh theater, a dance he performed before his first impossible battle, with its line that human life is 50 years, a dream within a dream. He died at 48. Meiji print sellers staged the temple's last hour again and again for the popular presses, spears through the sliding doors, the lord in white at the edge of the frame. The sheet here was printed in Tokyo in September 1893, 311 years on, and the publisher's block in the corner still gives his shop address in Nihonbashi. The temple was rebuilt on another site. At the old one, a small stone marks the spot where the body of the man who unified half of Japan was never found.