Eight days after 坂本龍馬 (Sakamoto Ryōma) was assassinated, men with a score to settle were already waiting in a private house along the 伏見街道 (Fushimi-kaidō) Road.

近藤勇 (Kondō Isami) had not been born to any of this. He came into the world in 1834 as Miyagawa Katsugorō, the son of a farming family in Kami-Ishihara village in Musashi Province — present-day Chōfu, on the western edge of Tokyo. He picked up a sword in his early teens and discovered that he was, in some essential and difficult-to-explain way, extraordinary at it. At around fourteen he began training at the Shieikan dojo, the home school of the 天然理心流 (Tennen Rishin-ryū) style. He proved so skilled, so devoted, and so clearly the natural heir to everything the school represented that the dojo master, Kondō Shūsuke, adopted him — and on September 30, 1861, he became the fourth-generation master of 天然理心流 (Tennen Rishin-ryū), taking the name 近藤勇 (Kondō Isami).

A farmer's son had, through skill alone, been adopted into the samurai class. It was the kind of story the old Japan was not supposed to produce.

The 新選組 (Shinsengumi) he built was a product of the same logic. Founded in 1863 as a pro-shogunate sword corps commissioned to police Kyoto during the chaos of the 幕末 (Bakumatsu) — the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate — the 新選組 (Shinsengumi) was staffed largely by men of commoner or low-ranking backgrounds. Kondō the farmer's son. 土方歳三 (Hijikata Toshizō), his lieutenant, had been a medicine seller. They were not hereditary warriors. They were men for whom the sword was not a birthright but a choice, a discipline, a way of clawing upward.

The 新選組 (Shinsengumi) enforced a code so strict that its own members were executed for unauthorized dueling, infractions against unit discipline, or unauthorized departure from the corps. Their most famous operation — the 池田屋事件 (Ikedaya Jiken) on July 8, 1864 — had them raid a meeting of Chōshū loyalists planning to set fire to Kyoto, killing or capturing the conspirators before the plot could be carried out. The shogunate gave them official recognition. In Kyoto, they were feared.

But by late 1867, the shogunate itself was dying. 徳川慶喜 (Tokugawa Yoshinobu), the fifteenth and final shogun, had submitted his formal resignation — 大政奉還 (Taisei Hōkan) — on November 9, 1867. The old order was ending in slow motion, and inside the 新選組 (Shinsengumi) the cracks were showing. A faction led by 伊東甲子太郎 (Itō Kashitarō) had broken away to form the 御陵衛士 (Goryo Eiji) — Imperial Guard — declaring loyalty to the Emperor rather than the shogunate.

Kondō's response was decisive and cold. On December 13, 1867 (old calendar), he lured 伊東甲子太郎 (Itō Kashitarō) to a private meeting, had him plied with drink, and then sent agents to kill him on his way home. The assassination succeeded. The same night, Kondō's men ambushed other 御陵衛士 (Goryo Eiji) members, killing 藤堂平助 (Tōdō Heisuke) and several others.

Surviving 御陵衛士 (Goryo Eiji) members, including 篠原泰之進 (Shinohara Tainoshin), did not run. They found a house along a road Kondō traveled routinely, and they waited.

On December 18, 1867 (old Japanese lunisolar calendar), Kondō was returning from the Fushimi Magistrate's Office to Nijō Castle. The ambush was sprung from cover. A rifle shot struck him in the right shoulder. His retainer 島田魁 (Shimada Kai) pulled him away before the attackers could close in and finish the job.

The wound did not kill him. But it did not heal cleanly either. When Kondō reached Edo weeks later, a physician named 松本良順 (Matsumoto Ryōjun) had to remove bone fragments still embedded in the shoulder. The bullet had done something to him that no sword had ever managed.

The 幕末 (Bakumatsu) was bleeding out from all directions at once. Eight days before Kondō was shot, 坂本龍馬 (Sakamoto Ryōma) — arguably the most visionary figure of the entire era — had been assassinated in Kyoto. The 戊辰戦争 (Boshin Sensō), the civil war between shogunate loyalists and imperial forces, was weeks away. The first major battle, at Toba-Fushimi, began on January 27, 1868.

Kondō fought it with a shoulder that never fully recovered. The 新選組 (Shinsengumi) won small engagements, delayed what could not be delayed, and was finally broken. Kondō was captured by imperial forces in April 1868. On May 17, 1868, he was beheaded at 板橋 (Itabashi) at the age of thirty-three. His head was displayed publicly — the fate of a rebel, not a hero, in that particular moment.

土方歳三 (Hijikata Toshizō) fought on without him, longer and further north than anyone thought possible, until he was shot dead at the final battle of 函館 (Hakodate) on May 11, 1869. He was the last major samurai commander to die in the 戊辰戦争 (Boshin Sensō).

The ambush on the Fushimi road did not decide anything by itself. But it is a precise, small image of the entire era: the sword that had never been beaten, stopped by a gun fired from a hiding place on a road it had walked a hundred times before.