Nobunaga's Ambition:
The Honno-ji Incident Was a Bit Odd

Synopsis

Oda Nobunaga was the greatest coward of the Sengoku era.

For as long as he could remember, he lived in dread of the day an assassin would come for him, a gentle child who couldn't bring himself to kill so much as a bug. But he never ran from his fear. He couldn't. So that he might survive any attack, he drove his body like a madman, training it to its limits.

When his terror reaches its peak, something inside him switches over. Drenched in cold sweat, his vision going white, on the verge of fainting—in that instant, the switch for survival flips. His personality turns inside out, and he becomes a berserker who fears nothing, cutting down every last enemy before him. And when he comes back to his senses, he weeps aloud before the mountain of bodies. "I never meant to kill anyone."

Those tears, the blood spattered over him, the sight of him screaming as he tore through the enemy—his retainers mistook it all for the wrath of a demon king. And so was born the charismatic terror: Oda Nobunaga, the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven.

The guns he bought up to keep assassins at a distance became the greatest collection in Japan, and his craze for all things nanban, born of wanting a nanban cuirass that could stop a bullet, was hailed as the vision of a genius of a new age. At Okehazama, in Mino, on the march to Kyoto, on Mount Hiei, his weakness, his kindness, and his knack for self-preservation were mistranslated into legend every single time, until, never wanting any of it, he found himself racing up the stairs to rule the realm.

He wept every time he cut someone down, piling guilt upon guilt—when all he ever wanted was to farm a quiet little field in the countryside with Kicho.

This is a Sengoku story to make you laugh and cry, about the greatest coward of the age struggling to become "just a kind, ordinary man" again.