The Black Cat at Sendagaya: What Okita Sōji Could Not Cut

In the spring of 1868, Shinsengumi first-captain Okita Sōji was bedridden at the Sendagaya house of a gardener named Heigorō, in Edo. The Boshin War had opened at Toba-Fushimi in January; the Shinsengumi main body under Kondō Isamu and Hijikata Toshizō had withdrawn to Edo and then fought their way north through Kōfu and toward Aizu. Okita, in the late stage of his tuberculosis, could not follow. The single most famous anecdote of his last weeks is the story of the black cat in the garden.

Where the Anecdote Comes From

The black-cat story holds that Okita tried to strike a black cat that appeared in the garden, drew his sword, and ultimately could not cut it — the swordsman of his generation finding, at the end, that the sword would no longer obey. The story has no direct contemporary documentary source. The version that circulates today comes principally from Shimozawa Kan's 1928 Shinsengumi Shimatsuki, which had heard it as a Meiji-era oral tradition by the time of writing. The first-hand sources from the Shinsengumi period — Nagakura Shinpachi's Tenmatsuki and the like — do not record it.

Why the Story Took Hold

The black cat held because it concentrated Okita's whole arc into a single image. The Tennen Rishin-ryū head student, the man who led the charge into the Ikedaya, the sword instructor at the height of his powers — and at the end, a sick man in a garden who cannot cut. The fall is compressed into one black cat in one garden, and the symbolic shape of that compression has powerfully held later writers. Shimozawa Kan's Shinsengumi Shimatsuki and, later, Shiba Ryōtarō's Shinsengumi Keppūroku built their Okita around it.

The Death at Sendagaya

Okita died at Heigorō's house on May 30, 1868 (the fifteenth of the fourth month of Keiō 4 in the old calendar). He was twenty-five or twenty-seven; the date of birth is uncertain. In his last weeks his sister Mitsu was visiting to nurse him. The Shinsengumi main body was already north of Edo by then; Hijikata Toshizō received the news by relay during the march. Okita was buried at Senshō-ji Temple in Motoazabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo. The grave still stands and is a pilgrimage point for foreign Shinsengumi enthusiasts.

Between Tradition and the Record

Beyond the black cat in particular, the portrait of Okita's personality owes much to modern creation rather than to the thin contemporary record. The boyish-bright temperament, the prodigy of the sword, the tragedy of early death — the three-point image of Okita is largely a late-nineteenth and twentieth-century construction. What the historical Okita was actually like, beyond the few lines in Nagakura Shinpachi, has to remain conjectural. As a place where tradition and record blur and the figure remains beloved anyway, Okita stands as one of the archetypal samurai images modern Japan produced.

"He could not, at the end, cut the black cat."