Dominic Sandbrook

And then at the age of six, he gets packed off by Kiyomori to a monastery north of Kyoto on the slopes of Mount Karama, a great mountain north of Kyoto.

And Kiyomori's plan is that Yoshitsune will grow up

in harmless and ignorant seclusion as a monk.

He doesn't know who his father is, doesn't know that he's a Minamoto, and he's a monk, so therefore, hopefully, he's not going to grow up to become a samurai.

But clearly, he's now out and about fighting warrior monks on a bridge.

That plan hasn't worked out.

So basically, the big question is, what's been going on in his life?

How has he ended up this great warrior?

Yeah.

And it becomes the best beloved of all the samurai tales, almost the kind of the archetypal samurai tale.

And it tells how he's this young boy in his monastery, and then a servant who is loyal to his father's memory reveals to him his true identity.

And Yoshitsune then goes up onto the side of the mountain of Mount Kurama, and he meets the great Tengu, who is the spirit lord of the mountain.

And very fortunately for Yoshitsune, the greatest teacher of martial arts anywhere in the cosmos, and the great Tengu instructs Yoshitsune in swordsmanship.

So in a sense, he is Yoda to Yoshitsune's Luke.

Yes, yes.

I mean, there is something archetypal about this story.

There's no question about it.

And the great Tengu then leads Yoshitsune to a palace that is deep within the mountains, so embedded within the rock.

And here he meets with his father, his dead father, the guy who'd been killed in the bath, Yoshitomo.

And Yoshitomo, who's been reborn as a Buddha-