The Great Meireki Fire of 1657 (Meireki 3), which burned Edo Castle’s keep, samurai residences around Takebashi and much of the city (lunar 1/18–20 = March 2–4 today), is often called the “Furisode Fire” for its supposed cause. Even the memorial at Honmyo-ji — then in Nishikata 2-chome, Bunkyo Ward; moved to Sugamo, Toshima Ward, in 1910 — the temple named as the origin, uses that wording (photo above).
A report by the Central Disaster Management Council’s expert panel on passing down disaster lessons, “The 1657 Meireki Edo Fire” (March 2004), also runs a column on the “furisode legend,” drawing mainly on an anecdote in Soun Yada’s “From Edo to Tokyo” (1920). The outline is as follows.
The only daughter of the Enshu family, pawnbrokers in Azabu, fell in love at first sight with a page (a boy serving the abbot) she passed at Honmyo-ji. For consolation she had a furisode made in the same pattern as his. On the 16th day of the first month of Meireki 1 (lunar 1655) she died of longing at 17. The Enshu-ya covered her coffin with the furisode and, after the funeral, gave it to Honmyo-ji. By custom, robes brought to the temple’s washing place became drinking money for the workers and were sold to a secondhand dealer. A year later, on the girl’s death anniversary, the same furisode was again given to Honmyo-ji at the funeral of a 17-year-old daughter of the paper merchant Daimatsu-ya in Ueno. Sold once more, it returned a third time the next year, on the same day, at the funeral of a 17-year-old daughter of a koji dealer in Hongo. The abbot, now frightened, consulted the three families and decided to hold a service and burn the robe. On the 18th day of the first month of Meireki 3 they cast it on a bonfire. A whirlwind dropped from the northern sky, lifted the flames eighty shaku above the main hall, and the great fire began — so the story goes.
It can hardly be taken as fact. Why, then, did it spread? The report guesses: “Lyrics about a furisode appear in the original of the ‘Shibagaki-bushi,’ a popular song of early Edo that was in vogue before the fire, and a furisode was then a page’s garment. People in Edo may have taken the song as an ill omen of the Meireki fire… That was the ground in which the ‘furisode legend’ could grow.”