The Nobunaga of Seishi Kimata

After the contribution of Kiyoshi Kimata, here's another look at the beautiful illustrations from another children book dedicated to Nobunaga; this time, it's the 24th volume of the Jidou Denki Series (児童伝記シリーズ) released by Kaiseisha. This book was published in 1978, the 15th reprint of the original book first released in 1970.

The illustrator is Seishi Kimata and the author of the biography is Daiji Kawasaki.
I would love to share some illustrations from the book with you guys.

Usually this kind of books sports different artists for the cover art, the inner color illustrations and the other b/w illustrations, but in this pubblication the artist is always Kimata, so I can show off the color pages, too, dedicated to significative moments in Nobunaga's life:
The frontispiece: I really dig those brush artworks!

Sorry if I didn't "clean-up" the pages like last time, but I liked the composition of the pages and how the illustrations fits it so nicely, so I just left them like this.

Since these books are aimed at children, they focus on the younger days of the portrayed heroes (making up lots of stuff!)-- Here is a huge selections of bits of Nobunaga's youth, from his rowdy days to the death of Nobuhide, passing through his "selection" of members for his personal army and his first battle:
This "otsuke" Nobu refers to the period when he met with Dosan:
This is interesting, a reference to the Battle of Muraki! You don't read much about the times of Owari unification, but in this period Nobunaga already showed good strategic and logistic skills.
In an episode about his relation with soon-to-be Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Nobunaga orders Tokichiro to fix the walls of Kiyosu castle, destroyed during a storm. He would succeed in just three days, after motivating the workers, making sure they would connect the sturdiness of the castle walls to their very own safety. Sounds like a retell of the miraculous building of Sunomata Castle...



The night before the battle of Okehazama, Nobunaga performs "Atsumori":
The Okehazama Battle is the most important bit of the book, of course, and it's richly illustrated:
Nobunaga meets soon-to-be Tokugawa Ieyasu:
Fast forward! --We got to Nobunaga reaching for Kyoto to assist Ashigaka Yoshiaki. The infamous rotten fish during the banquet with Ieyasu! Ieyasu didn't touch his favourite fish food, so Nobunaga was prplexed. Ranmaru went and realized that the fish was rotten.
Mitsuhide, rather than asking for forgiveness belittled Ieyasu, which infuriated Nobunaga, that ordered Ranmaru to beat him.
The Honnoji incident was a consequence of this event, as Mitsuhide didn't accept the punishment, since he always worked so hard for his lord.

Thus the book ends with the Honnoji incident: