Oodzume Hakubo

I had thought momentarily that it was over, but I realized why it was not only shortly after returning to the tea-house. I was then directed to a guest, who said he knew me. These kodachi were alike, but there was a third blade, the wakizashi that was missing. I held deathly still there, holding the two in my arms. Tsuki Tategami remained in my obi. I had no need to fight him, not yet.

“Oda-Sama.”

He truly had not forgiven me, as there, before me was the man who kept a hand carefully close to the peripheral of his right eye so as to protect himself. This man, alive again in more ways than one, whose swords were in my hands. I had not killed my brother, not the man just a few hours ago. That man had been a ronin follower of a stronger ronin

My brother, now, wished his swords returned to him. Of course, no man before me would have such a thing so simply. That’s not the way of the samurai or ronin. My brother, the ronin, was set on vengeance.

I stood in the doorway, and then slowly set the two swords down on the low table before him. I took a seat myself, kneeling across the table from him. He acknowledged me with a small smile and a formal bow. In his time apart from me, he had lost the stiff formal bow of a samurai and now bowed to me more as a friend than an enemy.

“Sanna-sama,” I said to him, addressing him properly, bowing in return. “ I had thought you dead. Here you are again, though… How?” I asked. I felt light, as if time itself had stopped and we had progressed without it.

“Jubei-kun,” he said smiling softly and waving the gesture of a bow away. “I did fall, a great fall that I only barely remember. I’ve learned a lot… I made my way then to a village at the bottom of the mountains to the south and learned to be strong.”

“Strong?” I asked, frowning slightly. “You were strong when you died, what makes you believe this new training would have improved you?”

“When I was crippled, I thought the same,” he told me. He raised a hand slowly to brush away a few locks of hair from his right eye. A casual gesture that would have slipped by a man less than his brother. I caught it.

“When you were crippled,” I repeated, urging him on. Ronin or not, I had a sudden lust to find and understand his ways now. He smiled at my question and nodded sitting back and looking to the ceiling of the tea-room quietly, and then back down to me.

“I was crippled because I allowed myself to be in such a way. Now, I am greater than ever I was before,” he told me. “I no longer believe you stole anything from me.”

“I did steal your sight, but you forgave me of that… Who was it I killed at Shun’s shrine?” I asked. I had decided that if he wouldn’t tell me what made him so great, I wanted to know what had happened a few hours ago.

“When I found that village, in the mountains, I was broken, but I was still a warrior. They had a dojo with no master, and I agreed, since they kept me alive, to train their men to be samurai.” He told me. “He was one of my students, you killed him, to take my swords back, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know peasants were allowed by law to carry weapons yet,” I responded, raising an eyebrow. Of course, Sanna was not a peasant, but I was sure that the man I had fought did not have the blessing of the Shogun to be Samurai. He grinned at me in a way that was truly like the Sanna of my childhood. The carefree and reckless Sanna who didn’t care for the rules that brought us down.

Even as children, we had always been able to adapt impressively and become the best at whatever we set out to. Our abilities grew with every practice session and every lesson learned. We were growing in power all the time, until we broke one too many rules.

I can’t quite remember if it had been raining that day or not, but it feels like a dreary day to me. The day I had inadvertently cut his right eye, we had decided we were too big to play with dull and wooden blades, we decided to try a true pair of blades, and for a while, we had. Until I remembered what my father had once done to save my life as a child, against a ninja attack. I don’t know where Sanna and my mother had gone.

But I tried the technique I’d seen that day and… Sanna had paid the price. He’d lost his sight, but he hadn’t wanted anything in return as a child, or even as an adolescent. He didn’t complete his training as a Samurai, but he had been a warrior still, an excellent bowman, even with his disability.

I’d offered a hundred times to give my life in shame of what I’d done, but he’d let me live. He’d denied me the right to die when he would never be a full warrior. I hadn’t seen it myself, but I was sure I’d been wrong to think so. He had trained a warrior that I had believed to hold his skills, and it had almost been my undoing. I refused to make that mistake again, but there were few ways to test someone of their identity beyond appearance.

I watched him carefully, but his face betrayed no expression that seemed out of place to the brother I had been with so long ago.

“I think, given the years that have passed without you, I would enjoy serving you tea,” I told him. He raised his eyebrows and nodded his head slowly, sitting up straighter and bowing slightly. I had seen the teahouse girl form the nights before bowing just within the rice-screen doors and waiting to see what we would want, if anything.

I stood and smiled to her, bowing slightly, as much as samurai did to friends, more than peasants and nodded to her. “Please, may I have the tools and water for tea?” I asked. She bowed lower than I had and nodded quickly.

“Hai,” Yes. She bustled out the door and off into the kitchen and cabinets to obtain the utensils and such that we would need and I smiled, sitting and bowing to the one who had become my guest.

“Ohayo, my honored guest,” I said to him, bowing low, to the ground and smiling. He smiled and returned the gesture.

“You’re very kind to have me here, my host,” He responded quietly, now all formality.

The Tea Ceremony is a very formal act, where both parties, host and guest must remain very formal to each other, while one makes tea and serves it to his guest. Even in years later, Centuries, this would remain in Japan as a scared ritual. I only needed time, but the time I was getting brought back painful memories.

I remember the times when we were children, both of us having that mutual combative relation to one another, we wanted so desperately to win against the other one. I suppose we were the perfect brothers, even now. We wanted to get better by defeating the other, but neither of us ever learned without the other.

The implements for tea were brought to me and I uncovered a tatami mat and started a fire under the kettle. Tea was not poured by maidens, as with Sake, a rice wine, it was something to be poured by the host, and prepared by the host.

While the water heated, I ground up the tea leaves in a pestle and mixed them with a little water, and then using a bamboo whisk to mix them up and waiting for it to separate, I loosed the dirtied water into the kettle and scooped the leaves into the small bowl with tiny holes in it, and set it in the inside of the kettle, where it hung, submerging the leaves in water.

We sat patiently, listening to the small crackling fire and watching the sun pass, filtered through the rice screen walls outside. He didn’t shift uncomfortably like most men would while waiting for tea, he sat still, almost inhumanly so, just watching the fire and breathing softly.

It shocked me a little bit to find my brothers’ face so relieving. Having imagined him dead, I had simply pushed the thought away and never even thought to dwell on it, but now he was here, before me again.

Like an oni himself, he was presented in such a way, I found it hard to steady my hands while the water boiled, and I took the ground-up tealeaves to boil in the hot water. He seemed to emanate a coolness I couldn’t recall. He’d always been more calm than I, but it was funny now; He was more so than ever I recalled.

“Sanna-sama,” I said softly, presenting the cup of tea, head bowed, holding it out in both hands, at the base so he could take it with a comfortable grip. He took in gingerly and blew on it to cool the hot liquid and then sipped gently, as I drank at the same time. We sat in silence, enjoying the brewed tea of the other, as two brothers should sit; A hundred years seemed to have passed since his death. It was like he’d been reborn again, as my brother. Maybe he had been, and all the kami spirits had blessed him with a second life.

When we’d both finished our tea, we set the cups down on a single tray and we each cleaned up the small mess that we’d made of the tea-leaves and the tools. Sanna was the one to call for the maid, who came and cleared the tray up silently and carried it off, checking only once to see that we had everything we needed.

The tea-ceremony was a thing only a host and his guest were supposed to perform, not a maid and a guest, because it was formal; much like shaking hands, almost all educated samurai were well versed in the tea-ceremony.

Sanna and I had been educated better than many of our time; Our father believed that we needed such wisdom to thereby be the best heirs he could ever have had. So we studied as much as we ever learned to fight, with all the weapons we had ever seen, though our main discipline, like most samurai, was first the bow, and then the sword.

Many samurai, after learning these two schools of fighting, would move into more weapons, learning to master themselves and their hands. Our learning had involved jujutsu, the art of bare-handed defense and then it had come to be the spears, and then we had moved to advanced swordsmanship, which is where Sannas’ training, as far as I knew, had ended. With my blade.

Our eyes locked, for a long moment, and I was sure that we were imagining the same last moments of Oda Sannas’ binocular vision. He wasn’t angry looking, even the eyelid that was on his face seemed to be a natural part of his face. In a way, the two of us were identical, but in the same way, his jaw was a little broader than mine, and his eyes a darker shade of brown. We were obviously twins, but not perfectly symmetrical, as some thought.

“ Where have you been?” I asked, breaking eye contact first, I looked back out, to the shadows playing over the rice screen and waited for an answer.

“I’ve lived in caves and in the wild, stopping at inns to sleep and taking bodyguard jobs for money. After I went missing, I felt that I was unworthy.” He said, following my gaze, and then coming back to me. “What have you been doing, Jubei-kun?”

The question shook me. For some reason, when his gaze met mine this time, it was as if he could see everything I’d done since we’d been parted by our lives, and now it felt meager, trifling. I’d been a samurai under my father for so long, now, three years after my specific training period, and five after my basic samurai skills were completed, it occurred to me that I had never truly had any ambitions. My life now was only equitable to that of another samurai under my father.

On the path I was on, I hadn’t yet transcended my father, as I should have already done, with him so old, and me his heir. I wondered if Sanna…. Was he greater than me already?

The only thing I could say for myself is that I’d avoided the most sinecure of jobs while my now anomalous brother had been getting strong.

“Sanna, I am a judge of our fathers’ fief. Tell me… there was a man I met when I went to visit Shun,” I told him, watching him carefully. “ You say he was your…student?”

“Hai, Jubei. He was one of my disciples.” He told me and cocked his head to the side slightly. “Did you best him all at once, or did it take some doing to overcome him?”

“I wouldn’t be beaten by such a man. He was a fool to cross blades with me.” I said, lowering my voice. What insolence! He’d sent a peasant with swords, knowing I would ride out to meet him. A peasant!

“I’d be careful, were I you, brother.” He chided, smiling. “He was a strong student, very…. Diligent in his studies.” He said, waving a hand, as though I should know what he meant.

“He killed a woman here, not many days ago,” I said, holding up Ohisama Mouko.

“No, he did not.”

“The tsuba-print told me differently. This sword was definitely the weapon used to slay her.” I set the kodachi down to my right, with Tsuki Tategami to my left.

“That may be, but I was the one to kill her.” He said. “I’ve been in this tea-house for a few days, watching you work on it.” He added, smiling affably, as though I should applaud his insolence.

“Then you must come with me. Father will be lenient with you, I can’t guarantee amnesty, but only if you come back can you live.” I told him. I didn’t want to harm my brother, not again, like I’d killed the last man.

“I’ll go in my own time. Let us walk among the sakura trees a while.” He said. I was annoyed.

“I am your brother second. I am sworn to be a judge first, for the entirety of my life, Sanna.” I told him, standing up and bringing the Lion to my side. He watched me with curiosity and sighed. I was getting annoyed. I hated to enjoin him, but we’d prated long enough. Quite long enough. His axiomatic contempt for the law was grating.

“Then we shall walk towards father, but only with the Tiger and the Lion beside one another, as brothers, no captive to be seen,” he said. I watched him carefully. It was shameful to be fooled, but even more shameful to be led through towns and cities as a criminal. In Japan, criminals were spat upon, humiliated as they walked the streets.

We left the teahouse, leaving a stamp of my fathers’ crest, which would send the bill we’d both run up to him, so we didn’t have to worry about paying for it, not right now.

I told the stable boy to send my horse along next time soldiers came through, to give the oldest and most frail my horse to ride to the capitol. He obeyed me quietly and bowed as we walked away.

Sanna had been right to request a walk through the sakura trees that day. It was quiet, and no others were out there, save the flying petals of the cherry flowers. As children, we’d always enjoyed watching them, but only for a few moments, with our attention spans. Now, we were older, and it was somehow more pleasing to watch them as we walked.

“Sanna, have you repudiated us?” I asked him, as we stopped, I put my hand against the cherry-skin bark and looked back at him. He was watching me carefully, as though I might infer that this was once more not Oda Sanna.

“Iye, Nii-san.” No, brother. He told me. He looked as though I’d inadvertently brought up a painful subject for him. He seemed to grow weary all of a sudden and he held his Ohisama Mouko in his hands.

Hakubo 3, The Realization.

私は太陽、兄弟のトラである。 あなたの刃は私の接触で溶ける。

I am the Tiger of the Sun, brother. Your blade will melt with my touch.

I am an of the most erudite judges of the Kanto region, son of the daimyo Oda Jun, my name is Oda Jubei. Here, I am a sort of constable, a samurai who polices the area where I live, in the autonomous lands my family are centered in, what would one day be called Shinjuku.

To those who are curious, my family name is the one who would be passed down to the man known as Oda Nobunaga, who would later rule all of Japan for a time, but that is far off, into the future. Right now, I am the judge of this area. Me and my Tsuki Tategami, The Lion of the Moon. My sword is measured at over three shaku (90.9 cm), and that classes it as an odachi. Many samurai of my time find this blade to be very unweildy, but I prefer the power of a long blade, over the versatility of shorter blades.

In past manuscripts I have told stories of my brother, Oda Sanna, who escaped me. Sanna is my twin, whom I blinded as a child, and for years he was thought to be dead, from a scouting accident. When he returned I was filled with a vicarious sense of decadence. No man was supposed to survive falls like he had supposedly taken, a plunge off a steep cliff to the north of where we used to live. I hadn’t attended his sepulchral, when, even though his body had never been found, he was counted dead. I had been away, consoling farmers that no kami or spirts would disturb their crops, not telling them that the local children had been playing in their fields.

Sanna is the one who returned, still half-blind, but non-the-less, he had ameliorated his strengths over three years and had returned, exhorting me strongly to lay down my life, ex officio of a samurai, as payment for his lost sight. After he accused me of being an oni, a demon, I fought him and found the man I battled to be skilled and promsing, but callow in battle. I defeated him and had only begun a journy home, when I crossed another man, with a likenss to my brother. We made tea for one another, but when it was done, we moved out of the teahouse, and inveighed one another.

We fought again, this time to find he my better, for all of the aplomb ways I’d held myself over the years, I’d let my skills slip, as a vassal to my father, I’d tenously slipped to an amorphous sword-fighter. My skills had reached a decadent state, and Tsuki Tategami had only barely survived after holding me body alive.

While I lay there, wounded again, he stood over me and told me a story of how he’d learned to aggrandize his aura, speaking to me in terms that were both vitiolic and affable.

All along, my brother had always retained the proclivity to be sangfroid with me, whereas I had only a nominal ability to remain my patience and remain neutral. In this way, we were always at odds…

In any case, Sanna had taken an assignment from my father, after I had maimed him and he forgiven me, sedulously making his way up through the ranks as a normal samurai, he’d been extremely stringent with himself, and had decided that he would be best used as a shushou, a captain. He led a handful of men on scouting parties, teaching them many things we’d learned with our shishou, our master as children.

They’d been making their way carefully down a ridge, a small outcropping on a cliff, really that wasn’t normally taken by most, and had found themselves trapped by the weight of all his men and himself, the ridge had begun to crumble, and Samna had taken a miraculous step in turning his short-sword into a foot-hold, he boosted most of them up the mountain, to their destination, but he and the final man fell, the rocks sliding and slipping down, they plunged with their horses down the mountainside.

No bodies ever found, the men told my father, who had his funeral arranged. I’d gone myself to look for him, but the only thing I’d ever found were the trails too and from the ridge where he’d fallen. It infringed on my heart to know he was gone, but not enough. The thoughts of growing stronger had already permeated my mind, and I brushed it aside as an inconsequential happening.

The thought never even occurred to me that the wakizashi he’d wedged into the mountain wall was now only a hiatus in the mountain wall, and had gone missing. It seems that I’d been too jaded by my own ambitions to notice also the lurid fates that met all of the men who lived and returned to the province my father ruled.

They were all victims of a horrible oni, a terrible ogre that came from their past, to intercede for their souls, on expostulate of Buddha to dissuade them from living on. It is clear to me now that the events that occurred, which left them all either committing seppuku, ritual suicide, or leaving were played out by the will of my brother and his only disciple. With approbation, he told me they formed a coalition of their guilt and came to him, only to elicit some sort of forgiveness.

When my brother had fallen, he’d had a sort of epiphany, I surmise, and met a kami of his own, one who gave him another eye, under the lid, where his old one had gone, and this kami exhorted him to take his life back. This being the intrinsic life he was deserving by birth. He became an interloper for a time,

The eye he had been given by the kami he referred to as Mouko, Tiger, seemed to give him an extra ability, the power to see on the right side, where, without an eye, he would be axiomatically blind. Sanna seemed to find this an equitable price for his old life, and had become this new person, a ronin who sought his old life, if only a nominal life, he would kill those who ‘stole’ it from him, by extricating their lives from what he was supposed to have.

He was only beginning his scourge when he met Mouko, and had learned to use his eye for two years, after he’d coerced his old and vapid samurai into his rule, and once again made them subservient to him, but their ennui for his vendetta had struck him as heinous and he cut down most of them himself, as insurgents.

He found when he killed them, that the spilled blood of those who he played demagogue to gave him an extra strength, from his new eye. Surreptitiously, he’d killed more and more, moving from the small caves he’d lived in so far removed from society, back towards the lands of my father.

There, he’d killed in places both holy and desecrated everything my father would have felt holy, permeating these places with blood and thereby transmuting from the man who was my brother, to what Mouko had turned him into.

He told me all this as I lay on the ground before him, curled slightly and clutching the handle of Tsuki Tategami in my hands, still raised, but with the long slices he’d inflicted on my arms and legs, and the final one to my side, he knew I was stalwart, but vulnerable in every way to him. He’d subjugated me with his eye as a man who takes a child to reprove.

Redoubtable, but I was sure that he’d taken the eyes of his follower, the one who’d slain our shishou and then I killed myself, only to better his own eye. Whatever he’d thought he was doing, it didn’t mitigate how I was feeling now.

Disconcerted and pillaged of my strength, I wept openly, and the tears felt like they washed the blood off of my face. He’d since turned from me and was sheathing Ohisama Mouko and was sliding the two blades into his sash, the grey haori he wore was open, his torso bare, he had an iruzumi, a tattoo, like nothing I’d ever seen on his back. A tiger with the brilliance of the sun, his back rippled, causing the ink under his skin to move and glare at me.

With the gray clouds to match his torn haori, the skin that remained unmarked by the ink seemed to me to be cadaverous, dead. He was clearly, to me, more of an oni than a man now. His Mouko had clearly born him devil-swords and the eye of a demon.

“Do you feel as though you can still stand?” He asked me, looking over his shoulder. “You were so sure of yourself when you drew your Tsuki Tategami on me earlier….”

“Oni…” I groaned, sitting up and grinding my teeth against the pain of the blood that welled up in reprove to my movements. “You….” I groaned and pulled myself to my feet slowly, wincing in the pain and held Tsuki Tategami before me again, and threw myself forward, at his back, even though it would impugn my honor later, I had to bring the demon down now.

He turned in response, and without drawing his sword, he gripped the blade of the Lion of the Moon, holding it firmly, and it did not slice through his flesh like it would have a man. He gripped it tightly and pulled it closer, his hand bleedling as though he’d merely ran his hand across the blade. He tossed the sword and me with it aside, as though expurgating a word from a letter, flinging us to the ground aside and he laughed softly, a crass tone to his voice, something I hadn’t noticed before, and when I managed to look again, he was gone.

I was dispassionate, but ashamed at the same time. I’d been assigned to stop what was killing in this area, and failed. I would die for it, and even though I’d tried to do something so ignoble, I’d lost anyways. The difference between us was unfathomable.