Sakura Jiki
"Thank you for being so prompt to concern yourself, Mother," Dr. Gensai said. "It seems that I scarcely ever see your lovely face anymore."
"Flatterer." The small woman sitting opposite him lifted a hand in negation. "This affects my family; of course I'll concern myself!"
"You have found information about the young man, then? He seems nice enough, but with Ayame-chan and Suzume-chan running over there nearly every day... to say nothing of Kaoru-chan... "
"You'd be worried if he were Hougan himself and possessed of all the virtues later ascribed to him in the succeeding periods."
"Ascribed?" the old man asked, sidetracked. "You mean to say that he did not truly have those virtues?"
"Oh, he had some," his mother laughed. "He was handsome enough once Kikka fixed his eyes, he was brave and a commander worth following in battles, and he was great-hearted. But he was hotheaded, had no skill in placating those he annoyed by his hotheadedness, was nigh-unable to dissemble, and could not endure to sit quietly and do nothing. However, we did not come here to speak of Gen Kurou Yoshitsune, did we? You wanted information on Himura Kenshin."
"Hai." Gensai bowed his head, shamefaced. He was a doctor, a man of learning, respected throughout his district of Edo (the Meiji Emperor might have decreed a change in his hometown's name, but the habits of the old are well-set) for his age as much as his knowledge -- but one glance from his mother could return him to an embarrassed schoolboy. And a laughing second could make him forget it all.
"You needn't worry." She removed a ribbon-tied bundle from the sleeve of her pink kimono. "Himura-san has his own demons, it's true, but Ayame-chan, Suzume-chan, and Kaoru-chan could not be in safer hands. This contains, in addition to his official records, testimonials given by his old companions, by his Master in the sword-art -- can you believe, he made an improper suggestion to Sumire-chan?"
"His master?"
"Of course."
"Sumire-san *is* the one I recall -- "
"Yes, she is."
Dr. Gensai and his mother both burst into laughter at the thought of the ultra-proper Sumire receiving an indecent proposal.
"And this longest testimonial is by a woman who's been dead now for nigh fifteen years. One of the points she emphasizes most is that he would not harm young children."
"She, I gather, is to be taken as an authority?" He kept his tone light without being challenging.
"More so than anyone. She knew him best." His mother seemed frail, suddenly, and tired. Her violet eyes were very large, and the regretful expression in them spread to her pale face.
"Then I will commend Kaoru on her good sense, in bringing him home and asking him to stay."
She laughed. "I doubt it were good sense, precisely."
"You believe, then, that Kaoru-chan inherited some of her grandmother's sensibilities? I inherited none of yours."
"I wouldn't be so sure of that, kaeru-chan." The old pet name on her lips nearly gave him a fit of laughter. "You sensed, after all, the demons that ride the young man. And you attached yourself to the Kamiya Dojo."
"You were the one who said that the blood recognizes itself, Mother."
"Oya... soo desu. The blood recognizes itself. So I was taught when I was a child. So I knew when I first met Sakura; her father had been human, you know, and she was very new to the Thousand Gardens.
"She was very like me, kaeru-chan, for all that she looked much as Kaoru-chan does now. And she was very, very skilled with a sword, even if she were clumsy at all other times."
"Poor woman."
"Not really. She was successful before she joined us, and she was successful afterwards. How many people can say that?"
"Kaoru-chan's father even said that Sakura-san was instrumental in his development of Kamiya Kasshin-ryuu."
His mother sniffed. "How like a man." Her expression grew worried. "But I don't understand why she disappeared after the death of her husband. Not the way I did, having news of my death given out in order to avoid awkward questions -- "
"And to free yourself," her son added quietly. "Those last few years, I could see that you were stifling. Neither you nor Kaoru-chan accept readily the restrictions under which a woman must live in Edo."
"So too it was with Sakura. Kaoru-chan has hope that it may change during her lifetime; indeed, in all probability she herself will be one of the instruments of that change. But that alone would not have made Sakura disappear to *us* as well; she can be found in neither world. What might have been so awful that she could not bear even to share it with *me*? We were like two halves of the same roof!"
All Gensai could do was pat his mother's hand as it clenched on the folds of her kimono. The pink fabric seemed almost to swallow her up; his earlier impression of her frailty was reinforced.
"And I can't even bear to look at Kaoru-chan. Not just when she's doing her kata, but everything she does...! You know, if only she did not wear her hair the way we all do -- did -- Tsubaki, Sakura, Bara, myself..." Almost unconsciously, a slender hand went to her pale fall of hair, stroking the thick tresses shortly below their point of convocation atop her head.
"You've changed your hairstyle a little," he observed. "It's higher, and more... more... it's bouncier."
"My hair *is* thicker. And it's *my* hair, and I can do whatever I want with it."
"You changed your hairstyle after Sakura-san left, didn't you?"
She stiffened for a moment, and then let it all out in a long sigh. "Shimatta. My wise little frog, since when have you read your elders with such consummate skill?"
"I *am* a doctor by profession, Mother. A doctor who cannot read people will not last long in business."
"And yet you did not trust your skill in a matter of this importance."
"I dared not trust my skill *because* the matter was of this importance. If I am wrong when judging that Sakura-san left because she was bone-weary of having to pretend to be no more than an ordinary woman and sick at heart from her husband's long illness, wishing for a space in which to distance herself from anything to remind her of that, I hurt no one. But in this..." A smile split his aged features. "And besides, I, being merely human, would be a fool to pass up such assistance as you and your people can provide."
"We are human," his mother contradicted him. "Our... employment has altered us. Changed us. But we are still members of the human race; you would not exist otherwise."
"But what about the people in the stories? The ones who are part oni, or part fox, or part tengu -- "
"That's because of sorcery. Or, better yet, that oni and tengu and so forth are themselves sorcerous. Sorcery has no need to follow the rules that our world made for yours, kaeru-chan. That's why it's called 'sorcery.'
"But we who are of the Gateway between your world and ours, we who must match our time-passing to that of this world -- we also are bound by the nature our folk made. We are only that which is of nature. We can do nothing that is not of nature."
"Even -- "
"Even healing, yes. Even outPhasing and kuuchuu-sampo: in a hundred years, the wise men of your world will be able to guess at how such things may be. Even the ahead-seeing -- oya! I'd forgotten! Yuri-chan had an ahead-seeing about your Himura-san."
"Ill?" he asked, concern, dread and curiosity warring in his voice and in his mind.
"Nothing of the sort!" His mother laughed, apparently having regained herself. "She stopped me on my way here to tell me she'd Seen that because of Himura-san's coming to live at the Kamiya Dojo, Ayame-chan's great-grandchildren would find Suzume's and forge a bond of life-long friendship that would include descendants of Kaoru-chan as well. Isn't it nice when things work out right?"
"That certainly seems a perfect future," Gensai agreed. He could sense that the all-too-rare conversation with his mother was slowly winding down, much as he might hate the realization. "But why should something like Himura-san's arrival effect such?"
"Maybe he'll ensure that they'll *have* descendants?"
And then, in a flash of understanding so world-shaking that he was surprised that neither did lightning smite the roof asunder, the ground quake beneath his feet, or the welkin ring with the sound of a gong the size of the Kamakura Daibutsu, he realized the true reason *why* his mother had left after his father suddenly dropped dead in the prime of his life, why Sakura-san must have fled Edo as fast and as far as she might, why his mother's visits, once so frequent, had gradually tapered off in both frequency and duration.
He, himself, had chosen to become a doctor after watching his mother exercise her healing talent on any neighbor who came to grief. Who, while she laughed that she had not half the skill of some of her kinswomen (there were many wounds, for instance, that were beyond even her skill) was by her own claim able to heal all ills save one. And that calling, no longer viewed through the roseate screens of a child's vision, was still the only one he had ever wanted.
But the one part that had *never* gotten easier, in all his years of practice, was the sitting with those of his patients whom he could do nothing for, making light conversation that although it accepted the fact of their imminent death did not dwell on it. Indeed, the longer it took them to die, the worse it was for him. Ignoring every proof that the body was slowly but surely breaking down. Refraining from marking every sign that their health, never again to be what it had been, was only getting worse. And he had been born and raised a mortal among mortals, expecting and accepting old age and death therefrom to be a natural part of the human condition.
What must it be like for his mother, daughter of a world where time moved as one willed it, where although death was always at hand all her associates were as ageless as she herself?
"I can remedy all ills save old age, kaeru-chan," she'd told him once, when he was small. "I'm afraid nobody's ever been able to come up with a cure for that one."
What must she endure, sitting and talking happily with her children when every week only served to deepen and emphasize the one difference that separated her from them and bound them ever more firmly to their father?
Dr. Gensai tried to picture a younger version of himself, sixteen or twenty, sitting in a room talking naturally to an old, old woman who was his daughter... or Ayame-chan... or Suzume-chan.
He didn't think he could do it. He didn't think he could endure seeing them grow old and die in what seemed only a few years while he went on, ageless and unchanging, seeming to be their elder brother, their younger brother, their son, their grandson, when they were suffering those ailments which he shared with a multitude of the elderly, and those which had fortunately ignored him thus far but which he had seen in his patients, and finally died, clinging on to each day with both hands and both feet and even their teeth (if they had any left); ah, life is wasted on the young. Only the old, who have so little of it left, have some inkling of how truly to appreciate it. The old and his mother, who had seen the ends of so many and yet remained cheerful and perky --
"Mother," he told her as he rose, trying to convey some of the admiration and sorrow and pride that had overtaken his mind in the tone of his voice, "you don't have to see me again. If you don't want to."
"Nonsense!" she said, tilting her head back to look up at him. "Even if it weren't for the pleasure of your company -- " as he had when he was younger, he felt that he might as well have been made of backless mirrorglass as far as his mother was concerned -- "this says that Himura-san is a catalyst." She waved the ribbon-tied packet before replacing it in her kimono sleeve. "Things Happen in places where he is. I *depend* on you, my observant little frog, to give me a bystander's report of those Things, instead of having to depend on the impersonal records that will tell *what* he did but not how the people around saw it." She rose, smoothly and effortlessly, to her feet. "Promise me?"
"I promise."
"And anyway, even if it weren't for *that*, I'd still be seeing you *once* again anyway, so why not -- " She took in his blank look.
"At the end," his mother explained in her this-should-be-perfectly-obvious tone. "I'll be coming."
"*You* will?" The sheer idea of what that would -- must -- cost her, measured in the only measure he had -- what it would cost *him* -- left him speechless.
"Oya, of course! You certainly don't think I'd let anyone *else* do it, do you?"
Unable to find words, or even to form them, Dr. Gensai settled for hugging his mother, for all the world as if he were four sai old again.
And -- as if he were four sai old again -- his mother hugged him back.
"I miss you," he told her as they slowly drew back from each other.
"I miss you too," she replied, turning to leave. "I miss you every day, and I wish you all were there with me."
And with that, she vanished from his sight.
And I miss you, Sakura. Every day.
Dr. Gensai's mother sat on a low brick wall, in an uncharacteristically quiet mood as she recalled that conversation with the son who had proven to be the most like her out of all of her children.
In front of her, Ayame-chan's great-grandson and Suzume-chan's great-grandson had passed from the trading-insults stage to that of trading insults, glaring, clenching their fists, and assuming battle-ready stances. It would doubtless have worried her if not for the fact that the two of them did this several times a day.
And, as he invariably did if he were in the vicinity, the young man who was by blood Kaoru-chan's grandson's grandson stepped in to intervene, calming the both of them with soft words and sharp wit.
I wish you were here, atashi no kaeru-chan. You'd be happy to see Yuri-chan's ahead-seeing come true. You'd be awed to see what Tokyo looks like now, and pleased to hear that its people still call themselves Edokko.
And I wish you were here, Sakura. You'd die laughing to hear that I honestly had no idea who *any* of the three were until I had to read the full versions of their files as their tantei-joshu. I just knew that they seemed familiar, somehow. The blood does recognize itself, even at that far a distance. And you'd be properly horrified to hear of the things some of them get up to -- I'm afraid most of those are the fault of my side of the family, really. And those that aren't are in no way the fault of your blood.
Where *are* you? I doubt even kaeru-chan thought you'd be gone this long. I miss you. I miss all my lost family. But here, when I'm with my friends and my far-kin -- I don't miss you as much, because it's as if you're still here somehow, with all of us.
"Oi!" Suzume's great-grandson's voice was a bit worried (although he'd have vehemently denied it if anyone had pointed it out). "What *are* you thinking about?"
"Nan de mo nai, Yuusuke," Botan reassured him. "Nan de mo nai."