ANOTHER NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR WTF?

Anyway, so thank you all for reading this fanfic. You all know what happens after Tomoe leaves, so this epilogue is kinda redundant. It's not necessary to the plot to read it- I was just experimenting with this particular writing style.

The epilogue in this fanfic was inspired by the epilogue in Margaret Atwood's novel, "The Handmaid's Tale." Basically, I wanted to explore how modern-day historians in the Rurounk Kenshin universe would react to details about his life.

So again, this epilogue is totally not necessary to the rest of the fanfic. Don't feel obligated to read it if you don't want to (wow, I am wasting sooo much space right now. Me and my stupid insecurities. Bah!)

Oh, and to all those wondering: the little girl that Tomoe kept thinking of is supposed to be a young version of Kaoru.

ONTO THE EPILOGUE!

Afterward:

Notes from editors Takahata Shiori and Tabitha Fuller

Unfortunately, Himura Tomoe did not survive her encounter with the Yaminobu. On the day of her last diary entry, December 28, Tomoe was killed. We don't know how. If there were any written accounts of her death, then they have been lost or destroyed in the years since the Bakumatsu.

The Diary

Tomoe's diary was found in 2004 by a group of contractors that were renovating an old Buddhist temple in Tokyo. According to the journal of one of the monks, Nitta Toya, the diary was brought to the temple in 1880. "…An old homeless man, calling himself 'Geezer' gave [the diary] to us." Nitta writes. "He told us that it was an important item. So we placed it with the other things people want us to hold on to."

Who Geezer is, how he came to posses Tomoe's diary, and how the diary made it to Tokyo when she died near Kyoto, are all among the mysteries that surround Tomoe.

After the diary was found, the contractors gave it to the Edo-Tokyo Museum, where it fell into the care of historian Takahata Shiori. Takahata, who specializes in the Bakamatsu and the Meiji Era, quickly realized how important Tomoe's diary was. Not only did it tell about life in Kyoto during the Bakumatsu, it also confirmed the existence of the legendary Hitokiri Battousai.

Takahata sent the diary to Tabitha Fuller, a professor of document restoration at Harvard Univeristy. While Fuller and her students worked on the diary, Takahata tried to scrounge up the missing pages from the diary. She found some, but unfortunately, most of the pages from the end of the diary (between July and December) are missing.

Once the diary was restored, Takahata and Fuller began work on transcribing the diary into an electronic format, and researching what they can about Tomoe's loved ones.

The Yukishiro Family

Unfortunately, not much is known about the Yukishiro family during and after the Bakumatsu. However, we found out that Yukishiro Enishi never returned home. Enishi disappeared for several years, before finally surfacing in Shanghai in 1875. By then, Enishi was the most powerful illegal arms dealer in Asia, and was under the watch of the Chinese and Japanese authorities. Enishi returned to Tokyo in 1878, and kidnapped a teenage girl. He brought her to his private island off the coast of Japan, for unknown reasons. A few weeks later, he was arrested by the Japanese police and brought back to Japan. However, he escaped as soon as he reached Japan, and disappeared forever.

Tomoe's father is even harder to track down than Enishi. Yukishiro Genji was a lower-level retainer to the Shogun, without any notable characteristics other than his sense of humor. After the Bakumatsu, he lost his home and title to the new Meiji government and disappeared. He never saw his children again.

Himura Kenshin, "Hitokiri Battousai"

Before the discovery of Tomoe's diary, Hitokiri Battousai was considered to be a myth from the Bakumatsu. However, the diary proved that he actually existed, and gave us his real name: Himura Kenshin. With Kenshin's name, we were able to find a surprising amount of information about him.

Kenshin survived the attack from the Yaminobu. Whether or not he ever found out about Tomoe's involvement with them is unknown. But according to the diary of Katsura Kogoro, Kenshin was with her when she died.

After Tomoe's death, Kenshin immediately returned to active duty. Instead of an assassin, this time, Kenshin was the Inshin Shishi's main line of defense against the Shinsengumi. He disappeared after the Battle of Toba Fushimi, leaving the legend of Hitokiri Battousai for future generations.

However, Kenshin reappeared a decade later in Tokyo. According to police records, Kenshin kept his promise to Tomoe by defending the helpless. And even in the most dire situations, he never took another life.

In 1879, he married a young woman named Kamiya Kaoru. They had a son, Kenji, later that year. Himura Kaoru was the master of a kenjutsu dojo called Kamiya Kasshin-Ryu (notable students include Myojin Yahiko and Tsukayama Yutaro). The Kamiya Dojo is still open to this day, and in the same original spot it existed in over a hundred years ago.

Kenshin died in 1912, at the age of 72. He was among the last of the Inshin Shishi to die, but he was never recognized as one when he passed away. However, in a letter to a friend after his death, his wife Kaoru wrote, "He never wanted to be remembered as a hitokiri. He just wanted to help others."

Tomoe

In Tomoe's diary, we see the story of a brave young woman. She left home, alone, to go to an unfamiliar city in order to find her lover's killer. She saw the true chaos and horrors of war, but came out of it nobler than before. She even changed one of the harshest warriors of the Bakumatsu into a gentle pacifist. We, Takahata Shiori and Tabitha Fuller, hope that Tomoe's story will affect you as it affected us.