Mariko walks to the gates

At noon Mariko, in pale green under an iridescent sunshade, leads the column out of the gates: twenty Browns ahead, her open palanquin, then Kiri and Sazuko with the infant, samurai women and children lining the avenue among the Grays. Captain Sumiyori steps into her path and asks for papers. "Please kill him, Yoshinaka-san." Yoshinaka beheads him and is dropped by an arrow. The killing becomes ritual: twenty Grays block the road, Browns and Grays duel one to one until every Brown is dead, a fresh Gray always stepping calmly from the ranks. Mariko takes up Yoshinaka's sword and attacks Captain Kojima herself; he parries and retreats, refusing to strike her, until she is spent. A mother makes her son watch: "You are samurai." Mariko bows, tells Kiyama she will commit seppuku at sunset and asks him to be her second. The whole avenue bows to her. In the cha house she weeps for the dead.

The set piece the Osaka movement exists to reach, staged as theatre with the castle for audience. Clavell slows the violence into ritual, so that Mariko's own attack reads as choreography she has authored. Her sunset announcement converts a failed exit into a public trap for Ishido.