Spoilers for the early arcs of The Elusive Samurai.
Most manga villains come with a clear moral valence. You understand why they’re the antagonist. The story tells you.
Ashikaga Takauji is different. The series presents him as something close to a force of nature: incomprehensible, terrifying, operating on a logic that doesn’t quite connect to normal human motivation. Japanese readers who encountered this portrayal brought something to it that Western readers couldn’t: decades of genuine historical disagreement about who Takauji actually was.
What Japanese schoolchildren learn about Takauji
In the Japanese history curriculum, Ashikaga Takauji occupies an uncomfortable position. He betrayed the Kamakura shogunate to support Emperor Go-Daigo’s restoration. Then he turned against Go-Daigo and established a rival court. He ended up founding the Ashikaga shogunate, which lasted for over two centuries. Whether this makes him a traitor or a pragmatist or something else entirely has been debated in Japanese historiography for about seven hundred years.
For most of the modern era, the dominant framing in Japanese education was negative. Takauji fought against the Southern Court, which the Meiji government had officially designated as the legitimate imperial line, which made him retrospectively a rebel against legitimate authority. This framing softened in the postwar period but never fully disappeared. Ask Japanese adults what they remember about Takauji from school and the word that comes up most often is “裏切り者” — traitor.
Matsui’s Takauji arrives into this ambiguous space and makes it stranger. The series doesn’t present him as a traitor or a pragmatist. It presents him as something harder to categorize: a man of enormous charisma whose actual motivations are genuinely unclear, who seems to operate from a position beyond normal calculation. The phrase Japanese fans settled on: “底知れぬ怪物” — a bottomless monster. Not evil exactly. Something more unsettling.
The two reactions
Japanese fan responses to Takauji split in a way that’s worth documenting. One group found him compelling, drawn to the charisma, to the sense that something interesting was always about to happen when he appeared. The specific language: “カリスマ性半端ない” — charisma off the charts. “目が離せない” — can’t look away.
The other group found him frightening in a way that went past normal villain response. “ノリで歴史変える理不尽さ” — the unreasonableness of someone who changes history on a whim. The complaint here isn’t that Takauji is powerful. It’s that his power doesn’t feel grounded in anything comprehensible. You can’t predict him. You can’t reason with him. You can’t even properly hate him because you don’t fully understand what he wants.
My read: this is the most interesting thing Matsui does with the character. A villain whose motivations are unclear in a specific way: not mysterious in the romantic sense, but genuinely opaque, produces a different kind of dread than a villain whose evil is legible. Japanese readers who brought seven hundred years of historical ambiguity to Takauji felt that opacity as authentic rather than as a storytelling gap.
There’s a subcategory of response worth noting: readers who liked Takauji despite themselves. The phrasing was often self-aware. “尊氏推しになってしまった” — I’ve accidentally become a Takauji fan. “時行が可哀想なのに尊氏が好き” — I feel sorry for Tokiyuki and I still like Takauji. The character’s appeal operates somewhat independently of moral judgment, which is exactly what the word “カリスマ” is supposed to convey. You’re drawn to him before you’ve decided whether you should be.
What the historical Takauji was actually like
The gap between historical consensus and the manga’s portrayal is interesting and worth naming. The historical Takauji was, according to recent scholarship, considerably less cold and calculating than Matsui’s version. He was known for indecisiveness, for weeping at losses, for a warmth toward subordinates that sits oddly with his military ruthlessness. Historical sources describe someone who was simultaneously capable of extraordinary violence and genuine emotional responsiveness.
Matsui strips the warmth and indecisiveness and keeps the capacity for transformation. His Takauji is all forward motion, all uncanny certainty. Japanese readers who knew the historical record noticed this and discussed it. The comparison that came up in some fan analysis: Matsui’s Takauji is what the Meiji-era villain version of Takauji might have looked like if you removed the moralism and replaced it with pure narrative threat.
That’s a deliberate creative choice, not a failure of research. Matsui knows the history. He’s made a Takauji who serves the story’s needs, which is a Takauji who can stand as a genuine counterweight to Tokiyuki’s survival instinct. You can’t outrun someone you can predict. The incomprehensibility is load-bearing.
If this portrayal of Takauji interests you, this post goes deeper into how Japanese readers split on his historical accuracy:
