"Chandeliers and caviar,
The war can't touch us here."
"Prologue" Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.
Before leaving for battle, Lord Kamiya Koshijiro summoned his three children and assigned them each a duty to perform while he was away.
His eldest son, Sanosuke, approached him first, looking worse for wear after a night of drinking and brawling. Lord Koshijiro shuddered to think how much money the boy had gambled away last night. "I've picked you out a wife," he said. "An early marriage should straighten you out."
Sanosuke bowed to his father, then walked away with a smug grin. His intended bride, Megumi, was said to be a great beauty and was the sole heiress to the fantastically wealthy Tanaki family. Little did he know that Takani Megumi would soon wipe that smug grin off his face.
Lord Koshijiro's younger son, Yahiko, approached next. "Why can't I go with you, father?" He said.
The boy dreamed a being a great samurai like his ancestors before him. His fencing lessons were the only ones he didn't need to be dragged to kicking and screaming and didn't try to avoid if he could.
"Someone needs to stay here and protect your sister." Lord Koshijiro tousled his younger son's hair. "Kami knows your brother's too useless to do it."
Sanosuke's mouth fell open like a fish. The sister in question giggled behind her fan.
"And what is my task?" Kaoru, Lord Koshijiro's middle child and only daughter, said.
"The most important task, my dear. Please leave offerings at your mother's grave whenever you can."
Kaoru looked from brother to brother to see their jealous faces. She never could resist rubbing it in that she was their father's favorite.
Lady Saito Atsuko, Lord Koshijiro's wife, was buried at a temple three miles away from Wolf's Castle in Mibu, the power base of her brother, General Saito Hajime. General Saito took in his late sister's children while their father was at the front. Sanosuke and Yahiko served as a squire and a page respectively and Kaoru, a pretty girl of marriageable age, would find a husband among General Saito's officers. They all found time to keep their promises to their father. Sanosuke married Takani Megumi and she came to live with them. Whenever Kaoru could get away for a few hours, she made the three mile walk to her mother's grave. She made these trips without telling her brothers because they would insist on going with her for "protection."
"The roads aren't safe," Sanosuke would say. "They're crawling with bandits and ronīn and other kinds of Choshu scum."
Kaoru smiled and nodded but ignored his words. Hadn't she studied the family fencing style, Kamiya Kasshin Ryu, even though she would only ever be expected to wield a wooden bokken in sparring matches with her brothers? Didn't she practice with her naginata every day? She could take care of herself.
And leaving offerings at mother's grave was a sacred duty father had entrusted to her alone.
While at the temple, she also prayed for father's safe return and that Uncle Saito would choose a good husband for her.
"She needs a man who can tame her," Kaoru's sister-in-law Megumi said one evening during a small party General Saito's wife held in the moon-viewing pavilion.
She was referring to the group of suitors gathered around Kaoru and trying to out do each other with poems comparing her beauty to the full moon and themselves to the blossoming cherry trees that basked in its radiance. Kaoru was too engrossed in the peaceful scene around her to give them more than the occasional polite nod. Gazing upon the moonlight and cherry blossoms, she could almost forget that there was a war happening only a few miles away.
Sanosuke accepted a bowl of sake that his wife had gracefully poured for him. "Or a man who can handle her as she is."
"But even the hardest of hearts, unhardened,
suddenly, when he saw her there.
Persephone in her mother's garden.
The sun on her shoulders; the wind in her hair
The smell of the flowers she held in her hand,
and the pollen that fell from her finger tips.
And suddenly Hades was only a man,
with a taste of nectar upon his lips."
"Epic, Pt. 2" Hadestown.
The swordsman wondered if the girl would visit the shrine today. The nice weather had encouraged dozens of pilgrims from all the nearby villages to come admire the flowering fruit trees on the shrine's grounds and taste the wine that the priests had brewed from last year's cherries and plums. And to flirt, of course. Blossom season was the time for flirtation and matchmaking and pilgrimages provided plenty of opportunities for romance to bloom. Would the girl be among the young women lighting incense on the altar to Ōkuninushi or buying amulets of Benten in hopes of finding a husband or lover?
Not that she would need a kami's help to find one. The swordsman was certainly not the only man who noticed her when she entered through the shrine's torii gates, breathless from a long journey on foot.
The girl pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and mopped the perspiration from her brow. A bead of sweat rolled down her blooming cheek and down her snowy-white neck before disappearing underneath the neckline of her kimono. She took a long drink from her bamboo bottle, water dribbling onto her bosom.
The swordsman's lips curled into a smile. His pulse quickened and his blood boiled. Would she strip off her wet garments and let him see what was underneath? Oh what would it be like to take her into his arms and press that soft young body to his own? To lay her down in the grass and make her his as cherry blossom petals fell like snow around them.
He splashed his face with water from the shrine's purification spring to banish these lustful thoughts. An honorable man shouldn't ogle respectable young women as if they were prostitutes displayed behind bars in the pleasure district.
And wasn't he supposed to be hopelessly in love with another woman? The woman whose betrayal was said to have turned him into a bloodthirsty monster. If the swordsman was being honest, he rarely thought about Tomoe anymore and he'd never seen the point of fighting to take back a lady who'd left him for another man. But he'd waded into an ocean of blood nonetheless.
Lusting after this girl in front of him made him feel like a man rather than a demon. Promising himself that he would have her someday kept him sane.