Chapter Thirty-Four Sen #2
“I should have ended things the day we lost the rebellion,” he said. His words sounded too calm, like the stories her mother would read her in bed when she was a child, words that didn’t matter because they belonged to someone else. “I have been living in shame and cowardice since then.”
“Then why did you come back?” Sen said, her voice thick with tears. “Why did you bother training me if you were always going
to... to...” She trailed off, fighting back a wave of nausea.
“Because I needed your help, Sen.”
He reached for his blade, and Sen flinched back instinctively, but he did not draw his long sword. Instead, he drew a tantō,
a double-edged dagger that he rarely used, that he always said was more barbaric than a longer katana, meant for stabbing
rather than cutting.
It wasn’t the tantō but the look in her father’s eyes that gave it away—he had never before looked at Sen so earnestly, as
if he was truly seeing her.
All the blood in Sen’s body pooled in her feet, her skin cold. “No,” she whispered, backing up against the door. And when
her father didn’t correct her, didn’t seem confused by her response, she understood.
Tantō were also used for seppuku, when a samurai would disembowel himself so he could die with honor rather than at the hands
of his enemies.
The ritual called for the assistance of a skilled kaishakunin. When the dishonored samurai stabbed himself and pulled the
blade across his stomach, the kaishakunin was supposed to strike from behind and cause a partial decapitation, with only a
thin band of flesh binding the head to the body. To fail and decapitate the samurai completely was a great disgrace.
This is what he’s been training me for ever since the failed rebellion , Sen realized, closing her eyes against the scalding tears that seared down her cheeks. Not to fight, but to complete this ritual for him.
“You didn’t need me for this,” Sen said through clenched teeth. She felt like a starving wolf as she glared up at him, blood and snot and bared fangs. “You could have split your own belly on the battlefield and never come back.”
Her father shook his head. “The ritual is traditionally—”
“ What do you care for tradition? ” Sen said. “You write your own rules! You always have. Tradition says you should have died with the other soldiers.”
“Is that what you want for me, Sen?” her father said. “For me to slowly bleed out in pain, alone?”
Sen stilled, and as her father’s words sank in, she realized at last why her father had actually come home.
He was scared to die.
Cutting his own abdomen would be a slow, agonizing death. Only a kaishakunin guaranteed a swift end.
She let out an incredulous laugh. For so long, she had thought that the creature who’d returned from the forest was a monster
who had eaten her father’s soul and worn his skin like a glove. But he was only a man who could no longer pretend to be a
hero.
“I won’t do it,” Sen said, clenching her fingers in the blood of her family. “I’ll never help you.”
Her father closed his eyes, then bent down, and to her horror, bowed to her. He pressed his forehead to the pool of blood,
rippling Sen’s scarlet reflection.
“Please,” her father said, the first time he had ever said such a word to her. “I don’t want to die in chains. I want to die
knowing that the last samurai of Satsuma lives on without the shame of her father.”
The last samurai of Satsuma? Sen thought, choking on a breath when she realized he meant her .
Sen knew he was only calling her a samurai now to get what he wanted, and she gritted her teeth against the sting of the lie.
“What good is it to live without shame if I’m alone?” Sen said.
“All of us are alone,” her father said. “We live and die alone.”
Sen shook her head. “Don’t ask this of me,” she said, her voice trembling.
“It is the last thing I will ever ask of you,” he said. “So think on it.”
The he turned the tantō on himself.
Sen reached out to stop him, but she wasn’t fast enough. She was never fast enough.
Her father plunged the blade into his abdomen and yanked it across, tearing through his robes and flesh. Blood and intestines
gushed across the futon, a broken cry falling from his mouth. He fell forward onto one hand, then slid to the floor, panting
at Sen’s feet. She covered her mouth because otherwise the scream building inside her would escape.
“Please,” her father gasped, clutching her feet with bloody hands.
She stood up even though her knees trembled, breaking away from her father’s grasping hands. She couldn’t stand the thought
of her father dying at her feet, begging. The man who had taught her to be strong above all else, had lied to her about his
plans for glory, had made her think that she was special because she was born to a samurai family, but in the end, he was
only a coward.
She picked up her sword from the pool of blood at her mother’s feet and stood behind her father. Her hands trembled violently,
the blade shuddering in the darkness.
Samurai kill in one strike , she heard her father saying as she tried desperately to steady her grip.
She is not a warrior. She’s just a maimed hare limping through the forest. Put her out of her misery.
“Shut up,” Sen whispered, the blade nearly slipping out of her sweaty hands.
“Please, Sen,” her father whispered, shuddering on the ground, choking on his own blood.
She tried to take a steadying breath, but her hands hardly felt like they belonged to her anymore, her whole body racked with shivers, her breath coming too fast.
“Sen,” her father groaned, curling up around his wound.
“Stay still,” Sen whispered. “I can’t—”
“ Can you do nothing right? ” he said, the words a bitter whisper. “One simple cut is all I’ve ever asked of you, and you can’t even do this much for
me? I should have—”
Sen brought the blade down.
There was a thump as her father’s head hit the floor, and he fell silent. The sword slipped from Sen’s fingers and clattered
to the ground.
Sen let out a broken cry, falling to the floor and scooting back against the wall. She gripped her hair and tried to breathe,
but it felt like the whole house was collapsing on her.
She had failed. Everything her father had trained her for had come down to this moment, and she had struck out in anger instead
of strength.
Maybe she still could gather herself and defeat the soldiers when they came for her. The last samurai of Satsuma , that was what her father had called her. The failed rebellion was her father’s shame, and now that dishonor had been lifted
and Sen could live on as she pleased. She could have her own children and raise them as samurai, and someday when the world
wasn’t expecting it, the samurai could return. That was what her father had intended.
Sen picked up her father’s tantō and examined the gleam of blood on it, her hands now strangely steady. She tipped her head
back against the wall and imagined another life in which her father had been quietly stripped of his samurai title like everyone
else, had gotten a new job, maybe working wood or metal. Her family had stayed in Satsuma and she had gone to school and never
had a reason to raise a sword to anyone.
I won’t do it , Sen thought, the tears drying up on her face, her blood running cold, her breath slow and even. This is what I think of your last request.
She turned her blade on herself and sliced across her abdomen.
The pain was blinding, but it pulled her away from the sight of her dead family, so she let it consume her, bloom inside her,
steal away her vision, her senses, her dreams of what her life might have been. She could only exist here and now, her belly
warm with blood and bright with pain. Her blood spilled through the floorboards, into the earth beneath the house.
She collapsed back against her closet door, which thunked and slid open.
On the other side, there was a man.
If Sen had had any strength left to move, she might have jumped back and drawn her sword at the sight of a foreigner in her
house.
But this man was not a threat. He was barely even there at all.
Covered in blood, paler than snow, lips blue. His chest rose and fell quickly as he panted for breath. He looked up at her
with eyes the color of a forest.
Sen felt, somehow, that she had seen him before.
Maybe in the soft edges of a dream, or while meditating. Or maybe in another world, a life she might have had.
All of us are alone , her father had said.
Her vision blurred, and she leaned her head against the side of the closet, unable to move her gaze from the sword held limply
in her hand, the sword guard with gold turtles. In her fading vision, the turtles leaped from her sword guard and swam in
the pool of her blood, leaving ripples behind them as they circled her feet, which she could no longer move.
She thought of the story her mother had told her about the fisherman who rode a turtle to the bottom of the sea, only to return
three hundred years later. Sen imagined she was there now, in her mother’s arms, when everything was warm and quiet.
“When Urashima Tarō opened the box,” her mother had said, “all the years of his life washed over him, and he became an old man and turned to dust.”
“But where did all the time go?” Sen had said.
“Into the fisherman,” her mother said, and that was supposed to be enough of an answer.
Sen wanted to shake her head, but she was too comfortable with her cheek pressed against her mother’s soft skin. That’s not how time works , she’d wanted to say. The fisherman lived another life with time borrowed from a goddess. Where did the time go after he could no longer use it?
The turtles were now golden shadows dancing across the walls, swimming across the paper doors. Sen felt like Urashima Tarō,
her life washing over her like the cool pull of the tide, dragging her toward an ending.
The man beside her coughed, and Sen used the last of her strength to set her cold hand in his. His skin warmed at her touch,
the edges of her vision fading to darkness. All of us are alone , she thought.
“I remember you,” the man said. Then he closed his eyes and his chest went still.
Sen didn’t remember the man, but she remembered the feeling of her hand in someone else’s. She remembered white sky and dreams,
cold rivers and quiet words, a world made of sunbeams and kind shadows on paper doors. Maybe somewhere, somehow, she had opened
a different door and lived a life better than this one.
She closed her eyes, and the last thing she felt before the world turned to ashes was the warmth of the man’s hand in hers,
a feeling that lingered on her skin even after he was gone.