The Fiction of the Ninja

The claim that the legendary thief Ishikawa Goemon attempted to assassinate the warlord Oda Nobunaga by dripping poison down a thread into the latter’s mouth is a staple of English-language histories of the so-called ‘ninja.’ Despite its widespread circulation in popular histories of Japan, there is good reason to believe that this famous assassination attempt never actually happened. In this article, I trace the Ishikawa Goemon legend through a range of Japanese-language documentary and literary sources, attempting to find a source for the poison-thread tale. I conclude that the story is not only fiction but modern fiction, resulting from a misunderstanding of the climactic scene of a 1962 ninja movie, Shinobi no mono, as depicting an historical event. The poison-thread technique, I also suggest, is not an authentic historical technique at all but a borrowing from a 1925 novel by the mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo. The article concludes by exploring how the poison-thread story managed to circulate unchallenged for more than fifty years, and by offering some observations on the serious methodological flaws of English-language ‘ninja’ histories to date.