1/KOHAI

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The imagery in this chapter is almost straight from the Yuki Onna segment of Kwaidan.

Basically, I was watching Kwaidan - which is a great movie, by the way - and was struck by the (highly superficial) similarities between the Snow Woman/Tomoe and The Wife/Kaoru. The shocking moment of the Kwaidan segment is, of course, the transformation - the realization that the cheerful, industrious, innocent wife is in fact the chilling (literally) snow spirit.

It was only a passing fancy, but once I realized that the boy in the story would have to be Kenshin, and the identity of the old man could only fit Akira... Suddenly the idea of doing a Shinta + Akira brotherly bickering ficlet was simply too much to resist. Thus Yuki Onna version RK was born.

I actually wrote a chapter 2 that led nowhere and eventually deleted it. Having created the setup of a samurai and his apprentice coming across the snow woman, I had no idea where to take it. I had no further inspiration.

That was 2002.

The fic languished.

For years.

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2/HUSHED

So it had always been in the back of my mind - this fic I had started and couldn't finish. Every now and then, it would haunt me - a recurring itch. I try not to abandon a project at all, but if I do, it's usually because I know exactly where it's going and I'm bored by the prospect of actually sitting down and writing it.

With Yuki Onna, on the other hand... It had been such a simple idea - take the very straightforward snow woman story and do a character swap - but once I had written the first chapter it was actually nearly impossible to imagine how it would play out. For one thing, switching the wood cutters (cameo appearances in this chapter, by the way!) to samurai suddenly made the whole story immensely more complicated, because samurai have much more complicated lives. And from the other angle, inserting Tomoe and Kaoru into the story knotted everything up, because as RK characters, Tomoe may be highly introverted but she's no ice demon, and the idea of Kaoru being a mask for Tomoe is not only absurd but insulting.

So I was stuck. For years.

But then one day last fall, somehow, the answer just dawned on me.

This could only work if the snow woman and the wife really were Tomoe and Kaoru, true to themselves. Tomoe could be a lonely and isolated snow spirit but not cruel, and Kaoru had to be her own person - a woman who has no past, a woman possessed by this frightening spirit.

And the idea of possession - to have the horror story not only from the boy's (Shinta's) point of view but from the wife's (Kaoru's) point of view - that caught my interest.

Yuki Onna was back in business.

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3/A LISTLESS SPRING

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Thus began the saga of navigating the reborn RK Yuki Onna. Every turn in the story presented a new question, a new problem - and I was the one writing it!

One of the first things I realized I had to do was try to get inside the Snow Woman/Tomoe's mind - since she's a different creature than either Kwaidan's Snow Woman or RK's Tomoe, I couldn't just write her, I had to get to know her. I wrote a few pieces from her point of view - they could only be poetry, because her thoughts and perceptions wouldn't follow a normal human cadence. Some of that would up in the story itself. I wish I had the rest, but unfortunately the hard drive it was stored on crashed.

So anyway, this is how I developed the relationship between Tomoe and Akira. It's actually pretty similar to how I think of them in RK, but the key difference is that as the Snow Woman, it isn't that Tomoe doesn't express her emotions but rather that she really doesn't feel them the way a human does. So she has loneliness, and she responds very strongly to Akira's open heart, but she doesn't fall in love with him the way a human might. Instead, she develops this overpowering yearning to experience mortal life - because she's gotten a small taste of what she's been missing. And Akira has a wry sort of sense of humor about it, dying of love for a spirit (or as a consequence of loving a spirit) who could never die of love for him - or even know what that feels like.

That took forever for me to figure out.

And even here, very early on (I hadn't even realized how early) this story takes on a very sad, very lonesome tone...

4/SUMMER and 5/TRANSFORMED

So then with Tomoe and Akira out of the way - at least the core of their characters - I had to figure out Shinta - which again was unexpectedly challenging.

Part of the reason I had started this fic was the charm of writing a teenage Shinta without Hiko, without the Bakumatsu. I really liked the idea of him being kind of bitter and surly but not *broken* the way Kenshin was by his war.

Which worked fine... until I realized that I had already written him as the apprentice to a samurai - so I had already introduced issues of violence and class differences. And then I killed Akira, so Shinta still had to cope with an early adulthood...

Once I gave him a sword, it seemed silly to keep up the pretense. Especially as I was still doing a modicum of research at the time and learned that, traditionally, a samurai adopted a new name upon reaching maturity. So he became Kenshin after all.

Kenshin - but with some differences. His story became more about the fact that he had his roots in the peasant class but he had been plucked out of it and inserted into the wealthy and violent oppressor class. Whereas RK Kenshin has this huge guilt complex over how unique he is - he has this enormous killing potential, and he uses it - here it's a much more... humble sort of guilt. Less personal. More structural.

There's injustice in the entire society - but rather than guilt over his actions in a revolution trying to correct the society, Shinta feels guilt over actions that maintain the status quo. Without quite realizing it, I was shifting from a world that had had some light comedic elements (Shinta griping in chapter 1 to a blithely oblivious Akira - at least I thought it was funny) - to a setting even more brutal than the prequel OAV.

So by chapter 5 I'd established that, while he's no Hitokiri Battousai and Hiten Mitsurugi heir, Shinta is still a talented warrior and one who is troubled by the violence he inflicts. I also laid the groundwork for some rival clans - thinking I'd given myself a nice, easy plot to move my main characters together, yet again having no idea of what I'd actually gotten myself into.

Here you can add a thread of blood-drenched and emotionally stark samurai epics as a recurring influence on this fic.

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