The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

‘there are a million ways to tell the same story. Our job as jaseliwu is to find the one the listener needs to hear. Not necessarily the one that makes them the happiest or the one that gives them the most information, but the one they need to hear to do what they need to do.’

We can’t claim to be crime-fighters if we disrespect life just as much as the criminals we fight.”

You were supposed to look a fighter in the eyes when you killed him;

“Most strong things are rigid. If you are water, you can shift to fit any mold and freeze yourself strong. You can be strong in any shape. You can be anything.”

You learn over time that the world isn’t broken. It’s just… got more pieces to it than you thought. They all fit together, just maybe not the way you pictured when you were young.”

listening never made any man dumber, but it’s made a lot of people smarter.”

Maybe she still had some growing up to do herself.

A decade later, a fifteen-year-old Hiroshi would become known as the youngest swordsman ever to master the Whispering Blade. What the world would never know, was that he was the second youngest.

I did it, he thought, and the blood spreading from his body seemed unimportant. Tou-sama, Kaa-chan, I did it! He couldn’t wait to tell them!

But the first aid to arrive didn’t come from the government. It came from the surrounding villages. Fishermen, farmers, and smiths,

Mamoru’s blow had been the final one… which could only mean that her boy had fought through the injury that ended his life. Even with that hideous wound in his side, draining his blood and disabling vital organs, he had fought.

She would let a fonyaka pull her life from her mouth, she would give her soul a thousand times over, if she could just bring Mamoru’s back.

“Do you remember that morning, Mamoru? After you had that fight with Kwang Chul-hee and asked for my help? You asked me if one day I would tell you about my school days, about my life before Takayubi.

“I know I have no right to ask anything of you, but please… if your poor, stupid mother can ask one last thing of you. Let me hold you one more time. Just one more time, you’re going to let Kaa-chan hold you and treasure you the way I should have the day you were born. Then I’m going to let you go on with all my blessings. Is that all right?”

The best Misaki could do was hold her baby, and love him, and love him, and hope it was enough that she could let him go.

“It is enough that, even for a moment, I had a son like you. It is enough that Hiroshi, Nagasa, and Izumo will have a brother like you to look up to as they become young men themselves. It is enough,”

“Who says that children belong to their fathers? We carry them, we nourish them inside us, we bring them into the world, we do all the work in raising them. Then these men—these men think they can just take them and kill them?”

Something bigger than myself, she realized. “I’m Matsuda Misaki,” she said with pride and honesty she never attached to those words before. “I’m your wife.”

So many years, he had avoided touching this porcelain doll he had been given for fear of breaking her. He hadn’t wanted to see this beautiful, strange woman crumble the way his mother had. Somehow, he had broken her anyway, but she hadn’t broken quietly like porcelain. She had broken like black glass and ice—jagged and more dangerous than ever.

As the tiny woman matched his steps, Takeru was forced to realize that he had spent fifteen years sleeping obliviously next to a combatant very nearly his equal in skill.

What sort of a man closed his eyes to the world and called it clarity?

For his whole life, Takeru had been certain that he was right to cast his pain off on the mountain, that it was the only way—because how could one possibly hold so much suffering in something as small as a human form?

It wasn’t just the challenge of responsibility he was accepting as his hand touched hers; he was accepting her.

In the falling snow, Takeru stared at the woman he had married and saw her for the first time.

“But there are worse things than fighting,” Misaki said. “I like a bit of fighting. It’s silence I can’t stand.”

Because it was nighttime and no one was around to see, Misaki reached out and found her husband’s sword-calloused fingers. They had been married fifteen years. It was the first time they had ever held hands.

person’s tragedy doesn’t define them or cancel all the good in their life.

I’ve had four wonderful children, whom I love. I still have three of them, and now, after all these years, it turns out, I have a good husband.”

Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.

“What are you doing, love?”