Released, ambushed, rescued

Blackthorne tears free of Friar Domingo's clutching confession and walks out into a cool morning, given kimono and clogs where the other prisoners go naked. Past the crosses and lances he braces to snatch a sword and die quickly, but his escort of Grays turns toward the city. Reborn, he babbles English at them ("that's my eighth life gone"). He remembers Alban Caradoc, legless against a gun carriage, whom he killed with a belaying pin as a mercy. Osaka's swept streets astonish him. His legs give way; the friar's Japanese ("Gomen nasai, dozo ga matsu") earns him a kaga. In a wood, thirty Grays greet his escort, then impale all ten in an instant, strip to rags and masks and march him back as their prize. A party of Browns and Grays blocks them; Kasigi Yabu limps out of his palanquin and charges, and the bandits flee. Blackthorne thanks Yabu in Japanese and, "not prisoner", takes the palanquin to Toranaga.

An action chapter that is entirely stagecraft, though neither Blackthorne nor the reader knows it yet. Clavell writes the rebirth walk, the Caradoc memory and the ambush at full emotional weight so that chapter 18's reveal can retroactively turn them into Toranaga's theatre. Yabu's charge earns him a gratitude the plot will spend.