Chapter Three Sen #2
her little brothers, and tried not to look Sen’s father in the eye.
She hated the garden, the way the temperature dropped and rose starkly depending on what side of the house she was on. In
the southern yard, it was the burning height of summer, and in the shaded northern yard, she couldn’t stop shivering as she
looked out at the dark sea.
Sen also hated her room. It was the most exposed, facing the forest, where the soldiers would attack from. But that was why she’d chosen it—there was one small window that she could see through even when lying down. If someone came in to attack her family, they would have to go through her first.
The one thing she didn’t understand was the sliding door to nowhere.
Where there should have been a closet behind a sliding door in her room, there was only a cement wall. Sen wondered who had
lived here before her family, why they had made such a door.
A shadow filled the doorway.
Sen dropped the mosquito netting, drew her sword, and spun around—a clean turn that brought her to her knees, because the
ceilings here were too low to strike while standing.
Her blade clanged against another, the reverberations of pure metals echoing across the yard through the open door. Sen’s
father lowered his blade, nodding in wordless approval. He offered no praise, because praise was only for when Sen exceeded
expectations, and her father had long stopped underestimating her.
Her father—at least, the man he had been before—was a man of shadows. He existed in the spaces people forgot about, was only
seen when he wanted to be. His skin was bright with scars, his dark eyes keener than his blade. Sen’s mother always said that
Sen looked so much like him, and nothing made Sen prouder. Her little brothers had round, happy faces, like full moons. They
weren’t meant to be warriors. But Sen and her father were too sharp to hold in your hands, too bright to look directly in
the eye.
The man who had returned from Satsuma wearing her father’s face had lost his hard edges—he was blurred and soft and gray, like a storm cloud.
His blade sliced cleanly through the air with the exact strength and precision it always had, but now it looked more like a practiced dance than an extension of his soul.
Sen could sense the hollowness in his eyes, like he was trapped somewhere far away.
Sen knew this much to be true: her father never would have returned from Satsuma alive. He was the most traditional samurai
Sen had ever met, and if he hadn’t been killed in battle, he would have spilled his stomach on the battlefield in shame.
Whoever had returned home was not her father.
Sen tried to spoon mushy rice into Kotaro’s mouth, but it rolled down his chin, wasted. If only he understood how hard food
was to come by these days, he would have been more grateful.
The whole family sat down at dinner, which was only some barley mixed with rice, and miso soup with a few cubes of tofu. Sen
remembered back when they’d had yellowtail with shiso, devil’s tongue noodles, prawns and boiled greens, daikon mixed into
every dish. But those days were long gone. The Shimazu clan no longer existed, so they could no longer pay their retainers.
Sen’s father did odd jobs in town, but he had no skills in any kind of manual labor, and there was no need for Confucian scholars
or hired arms anymore. There hadn’t been for a long time.
Today, her mother’s food was even more tasteless than usual. The rice felt gray as it scraped down her throat, leaving her
just as hungry as before. Perhaps the rice had become too thin and her mother had mixed some strange new herb into it. But
Seijiro loved to complain, and he didn’t seem bothered by it, so Sen didn’t dare bring it up. Her father hated being reminded
of how far they’d fallen.
“Sen, you’re making a mess,” her mother said, snatching the spoon from her hand and feeding Kotaro herself. “Do you want your
brother to go hungry?”
“He doesn’t like it,” Sen said, shrinking back. “It’s not my fault he won’t eat.”
“You claim you can wield a sword, but you can’t even manage a spoon?” her mother said.
Seijiro laughed and their mother beamed at him, jamming a spoonful of rice into Kotaro’s mouth.
“Onēsan doesn’t know what to do without a katana in her hand,” Seijiro said. He turned to Sen with an impish grin. “What will
you do when you get married and your husband asks for dinner?” he said. “Will you say just a minute, darling! and start chopping cucumbers with your sword?”
Sen’s mother and Seijiro laughed, which made Kotaro laugh even though he didn’t understand, dribbling more rice porridge down
his chin. Sen didn’t laugh, but none of them seemed to notice. Sen’s father ate in silence beside them.
“You can’t cook or use a katana,” Sen said to Seijiro.
The smile dropped off their mother’s face. “Be kind to your brothers,” she said, adding another spoonful of porridge to Seijiro’s
plate, even though she’d already given him the biggest portion. “And he’s right, Sen. You don’t have any skills a husband
would want.”
Sen poked at her porridge. “You don’t think being able to cut someone in half in a single strike is a useful skill?” she said.
When no one answered, Sen looked up. Seijiro’s face was screwed into an expression of disgust, and her mother’s face was pinched
with disapproval. Kotaro stared at her open-mouthed, likely because no one was feeding him, but the weight of their stares
felt heavy all the same.
“Don’t be disgusting, Sen,” her mother said after a moment. “We’re eating dinner.”
If you can call it that , Sen thought, but she lowered her head and took another bite.
Sometimes, Sen felt as though she’d been born into the wrong world.
Her mother and brothers lived together, her father had his own fortress, and Sen sat on an island in a thousand miles of dark
sea.
“Everyone be quiet and eat,” her father said at last.
Sen’s mother and brother turned back to their food in silence, expressions perfectly blank. Maybe one day, if Sen became enough
like her father, they would listen to her as well.
Sen glanced at her father in the corner of her vision and watched him eat in silence. He spoke less and less since his return,
like he could no longer remember the words he was supposed to say.
For as long as Sen could remember, she had been training under her father. It didn’t matter that the samurai class had been
abolished when she was eleven. The samurai of Satsuma had continued training their children in secret military academies because
they knew there was no such thing as an ending for the samurai.
There, Sen had studied Confucian Analects, Zen Buddhism, Bushido, and martial arts, priming herself to become a Shimazu retainer.
She knew her father would have preferred to train his sons, but they were too young, and when your very existence was illegal,
you did not have the luxury of time to grow up.
But they all thought they’d have just a little longer.
Then, last December, the military police had attacked the academy. The samurai had killed them all, of course, but they knew
what it meant. The time for training was over.
Her father had forbidden her from joining him, so all Sen could do was wait as the snow melted away and summer seared through
the valley, and still her father hadn’t returned. She’d spent every night by the window, waiting.
She didn’t see her father again until September.
He appeared at the door one day in the same clothes he was wearing when he departed. He looked faint, like the sun had stripped the color from his complexion, his eyes so bloodshot that his irises looked like dark whirlpools in a sea of scarlet.
Sen’s mother had fallen to her knees sobbing, while her brothers had run to hug him. Only Sen had stayed back, because only
Sen understood the ways of the samurai, that this return wasn’t possible. She stood in the shadowed hallway, and from the
front door, her father met her gaze.
I see your shame , she thought. Her mother and brothers might have been glad he’d returned no matter the cost, but Sen could see the curse
that clung to his shoulders, ran its fingers across his ribs, lashed its tongue across his cheek—the dishonor, which he had
taught Sen was worse than death.
But the man who had returned did not look ashamed. He stared back at Sen as if challenging her.
“Come here, Sen,” he’d said.
Her mother and brothers stepped back as Sen drifted down the hallway, standing before the man who was never supposed to return.
“I came back for you,” he said to her. “I will continue your training, and when it’s safe, you and I will start another school
together.”
Her father never would have said such a thing. This was the man who hunted squirrels and gathered leaves all day during famine,
cracked the spines of burglars with his bare hands, had dragged their family out of hell a thousand times over. He was strength,
and honor, and he did not tolerate weakness, so he did not tolerate Sen.
Sen would have been well within her rights to strike him down and cast him out as a demon, or ask him why he hadn’t taken
his own life in shame. Sen could tell when people lied—her father had taught her how to read people’s souls through their
eyes, and in this stranger’s eyes, she saw nothing at all.
She took a tentative step forward, then another. Then she fell to her knees, wrapped her arms around her father’s legs, and cried.
The stranger wearing her father’s hands petted her hair and wiped her tears away, and she leaned into his touch.
They packed their bags and hitched rides out west, to the house that her father’s friend had told them about, should they
ever need it. That was how they’d ended up in this house, hidden at the bottom of a sword fern grove, far from their old house
on Shimazu land. This was a house you couldn’t see easily from the road, a house that was easy to forget. And that was exactly
what her father wanted—to be forgotten until they were ready.