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 waswearing 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.
Perhaps that day would come sooner than any of them wanted.
Sen had heard whispers in town, people searching for Iwasaki Itaro, the name her father had abandoned. The government, for all its demands, was not foolish. They had counted the bodies. They knew her father’s name. They knew he had fled. They would find him, because as long as there was still a samurai, there was always a threat.
Sen’s father finished his bowl of rice without comment, then turned and looked out the window at the moonlight beyond the trees, his sword clutched tight in his lap.
Sen woke to the sound of rain, and then arguing.
The rain felt glass sharp in its coldness, tiny shards of it pricking her feet, which lay pointed toward the open door. Sen hadn’t closed the rain shutters, so she rolled to her feet and pulled them closed, wincing at the cut of water, the air so humid she could drink it. Out in the garden, the world had turned gray from heavy clouds.
Then, the voices.
“Kotaro isn’t growing,” her mother said. “He needs more food.”
Sen was wide awake now. She remembered what happened the last time there wasn’t enough food to go around.
“Things will not be like this forever,” Sen’s father said, his voice so low she could feel it through the floorboards. Sen drew closer, but her parents’ voices grew quieter. Even now, she loved her father’s voice, the way it felt like a bath of warm water rising over her head. She stepped out into the hallway, over the servants sleeping on their futons, and crouched down so she could listen without casting her shadow across the wall.
“Perhaps you could get another job,” her mother said gently.
