Editing Horizon:Volume 8B Preface (section)

==Installation==
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Christina


This one is from my notes before drawing up a rough illustration.

It came together well enough that I had Ya-san do his design based on this, so there isn’t a main design image this time.


She is normally discussed as Christina in the story, so I will explain Lady Nagaoka here.

I think more people will know her as Lady Gracia than as Akechi Tamako. She is well known as Akechi Mitsuhide’s daughter, but she was really his third or fourth daughter. There are discrepancies between the different records when it comes to Mitsuhide’s children, but there are always more girls, which kind of gives you a certain image of the Akechi family.

She initially got along well with her husband Tadaoki, and that was thanks to Nobunaga, but the Honnouji Incident put Tadaoki in a poor position and he isolated and confined his wife. Thanks to Hideyoshi’s mediation once he had taken over, she was moved to her Osaka home two years later, but she was still confined to her home. That was where she was baptized by her maid, Maria, and took the name Gracia.

Just before Sekigahara, Mitsunari’s forces tried to take hostages from the families of those who lived near Osaka, so she had her home surrounded. After letting her family escape, she had herself killed and blew up the house to not leave behind a body.

This incident was turned into a drama by the Jesuits who were in charge of her baptism and, after crossing the ocean, it was long performed in Australia.

Now, her husband was a bit of a pain. He had absolutely insisted that she made sure she died alone, yet he disinherited his oldest son after finding out he had fled the home instead of staying with her. He also held a memorial for her at a Kyoto church on the first anniversary of her death. Kind of an extreme tsundere if you ask me…

But he was actually a cultural person, so the year his wife told him about her new faith, he had a church built in their home. He seemed to understand her well enough, so if only he could have been more honest about that.

Anyway, she was blessed with children and she was stuck at home, so she ended up being quite a doting parent. When her third son was sickly, she was so worried she arranged to have him baptized, so you can tell she did everything she could for them.

And of her three sons, the oldest was disinherited due to her husband being an extreme tsundere, the second was beheaded at the Siege of Osaka, and the third inherited the family and even became the first lord of the Kumamoto Domain.

That third son later called the oldest son back and reconciled with him, but the oldest son had already made a name for himself as a monk and poet. He declined to return to the family and went back to Kyoto, but I feel like the way they overcame that previous falling-out shows that their grandfather Mitsuhide’s talents as a politician and their father Tadaoki’s talents as a poet were cultivated in them through Lady Nagaoka’s parenting.


For her design, I made her look like an elegant Japanese-style beauty at first, but with some European elements like the blue eyes.

Her clothing is primarily meant to be reminiscent of burial garb and the explosives are, like I’ve said before, due to history.

The historical version was the same age as her husband, but this one was given the inherited name early by the Testament Union as a link between Europe and the Middle East, creating the age difference.

(Kawakami Minoru)

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