These events, compiled from history and legend, take place roughly in 17th century Japan. The warrior general Nobunaga recruits soldiers for a campaign through an elaborate shell game at a fairground. He recruits another kind of service personnel in negotiation with the madam Tamago, who has a tent with her girls hard by the rows of vendou's stalls (wings right). Full of sexual tension bubbling into martial ardour after her teasing dismisssal, he confronts the zen monk Hakuin with a provoking question about Hell. The answer awakens scruples in him, and the battle next morning, which underlines the answer, awakens a resolve to shed the robes of a warrior for those of a monk, leaving power in the hands of his chief lieutenant Nobushige. Does the curiously militant character developed from childhood in Eshun, orphaned and raised by Nobunaga, growing to be a nun herself, owe anything to the divided background, hence character, of her guardia? And what do we make of the poet Wabi, rewarded with gould as chronicler of martial valour and very nearly with death when he too carelessly reveals his conscientious objections? The scritch of his pen is the last sound heard over fade to blackout at the end. (This play has been published (www.thelinnetswings.net) in thier Summer '08 issue and given a live staged reading by The Living Theatre in New York (directed by Steve Capra) April '09.)