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He only saw Inori’s face once, and it was before he even knew she was Inori.
Even in his memories, his other senses took centre stage. The rain beginning to fall; heavy, fat droplets pattering on the sidewalk. The smell of it in the air – petrichor, Uruha would later tell him, the little poet he liked to think he was. To Samura, it was simply the smell of that very particular kind of weather; the pressure of a coming storm. Breathing it in seemed to restore him, after a long and overwhelming day in Tokyo. Long because he’d arrived at dawn, overwhelming because of the government’s increasing pressure on swordsmen. Swordswomen, too, not that Shirakai would ever speak of them.
It was Shirakai’s dojo he was heading back to. The place he called home, and had called home for a long time. Tucked into the pocket of his jacket was a report from the government which said something along the lines of do your duty. Also tucked into his pocket was a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and Samura was itching to smoke one.
That was what distracted him; he wanted a cigarette, and he was trying to think of where he ought to go. Somewhere out of the rain, obviously, but also somewhere where other people wouldn’t breathe it in. Sure, he was a sixteen-year-old smoker, but he had some manners.
So, he was walking along, thinking of cigarettes and rain, absorbed in the incomprehensibly vast world that was himself in the way that all teenagers are and not really looking where he was going, when he stepped on something.
“Hey!”
He stepped on a foot.
Samura jumped back, and the owner of the foot grabbed his shoulder. A girl around his age, who was very pretty and very angry.
“You’re running off, huh?” she demanded.
“I was trying to get out of your way!” Samura said, instantly defensive. “I stepped away from you—”
“Yeah, running from me.” The girl huffed, blowing a strand of hair up out of her face. The raindrops were starting to settle in it, gleaming like diamonds. This girl was even less prepared for the rain than Samura was. Like him, she had no umbrella, but she also didn’t even have a jacket. All she had on was a t-shirt, tucked into the waistband of what looked like a school uniform skirt, even though it wasn’t a school day. A duffel bag was slung over one shoulder, and Samura realised then as he looked at her pretty face that there was a little bit of glitter, smudged high up on her cheekbone.
He smiled at her; she’d been out last night, straight after school most likely, and was trying to make her way home. “Fun concert?” he teased, reaching out and brushing that smudge of glitter away with the pad of his thumb. The girl gaped at him, and he showed her the glitter. “I wasn’t running from you. Maybe I should’ve done. You’re kind of scary.”
“Scary!” She prodded him with a finger, hard and sharp in the shoulder. “You just touched my face without even asking. I should kick your ass!”
“You’re welcome to try.”
“You think you’re so special, don’t you, country boy?”
Samura balked. “How’d you know I was from the country?”
“You’re hopelessly unfashionable.”
“You’re wearing half a school uniform and no jacket in the rain!”
Passersby glanced at them, two teenagers arguing, getting in everyone’s way. A shiver went up Samura’s spine. When was the last time he talked to a girl? Shirakai’s granddaughter didn’t count, since she could barely speak at all, and the old ladies who lived in the nearby village were all—well, old ladies.
“I’d be home by now if you hadn’t interrupted me,” said the girl, wrinkling her nose when a drop of rain landed on it.
“I didn’t mean to step on your foot,” Samura said, glancing down at the foot in question, where the shiny leather of the girl’s shoe was now scuffed.
“And you haven’t even apologised.”
Samura grinned at her. He knew he looked handsome when he smiled; people had told him so. But if he’d thought it would disarm this girl then he’d thought wrong. She rolled her big brown eyes and tossed her dark, damp hair over her shoulder.
“Typical,” she muttered, and turned to leave—
“Wait.” Samura grabbed her arm, taking a chance that she wouldn’t kick him in the balls. He let go as soon as she looked at him, because it really did seem like she would kick him in the balls. “I’m sorry I stepped on your foot. What’s your name?”
“That’s a pretty lousy apology.”
“I’m Seiichi Samura.”
“Is that supposed to impress me?” She tilted her head. The name meant nothing to her. Prodigal student of the legendary swordsman Itsuo Shirakai; a name which had awed all of the boring government officials he’d met today, and it meant nothing at all to this girl who was his age, someone he would actually want to impress.
“Nah,” he said, trying to play it off. Now, he really wanted a cigarette.
“Well, Seiichi,” she said, testing his name on her tongue, saying it with a playfulness that nobody else had ever said it before, because Shirakai was always barking orders and Ibuki was always sneering at him for following rules and Uruha was always whining at him like he was his damn kid brother. He liked it, this girl who said his name like she was teasing him. “I’m Inori.”
“Inori,” said Samura, nodding, a pretty name for a pretty girl. How the hell could he stretch out this conversation? Did they have time to go to a convenience store, grab a couple of cans of coffee? Did she like coffee? Samura had plenty of money in his wallet. He could buy her a coffee. He could buy her two coffees. “Inori, I—”
And then the heavens opened up and the rain began to pour. Those slow, flat droplets from before were a shower now, and Inori shrieked and lifted her duffel bag over her head. “Whatever!” she cried. “I accept your apology! Bye!”
“Wait—”
“I’m not waiting!” Inori turned on her heel and ran off, one hand keeping the bag over her head and the other one stretched out to wave. “Bye! Nice to meet you! Bye! Bye!”
Samura hurriedly tried to get his jacket off, cursing himself for not offering it to her before, but then he was thinking of the report in his pocket, and he would have to get that out without getting it wet before he could give it to her, and by the time he’d decided to shove it into the pocket of his pants, he looked up and she was gone.
Inori.
Samura sighed. He hoped that someday he’d run into her again, but what good was hope? Maybe he would see her, maybe he wouldn’t; it was all up to fate.
And in the meantime, he would remember that angry, pretty face.
*
In actuality, not a lot of time passed before he met Inori again, but to Samura it felt like a lifetime.
That sixteen-year-old with an attitude, who believed as most teenagers do that he was the centre of the universe, was gone. At seventeen, Samura attained certification in Iai White Purity Style – the youngest to ever do it, though that didn’t mean much. Almost immediately after, he was sent out to fight; to do his duty. That was what they called it, though Samura had never paid much attention to government ramblings before. Criminals needed rooting out like weeds. The rot of the country needed to be cleansed, and it needed to be done so by those who could wield katana.
It had seemed like an adventure at first, but that was the folly of youth. Samura learned quickly enough what the real world was like, and no amount of training with Shirakai could have ever truly prepared him. He thought of the Misaka brothers, both younger than he was, delinquents who did things their own way. He thought of Uruha, who was still just a preteen, a kid who revelled in beating swordsmen twice his age and thought it was so exciting that Samura got to go and actually fight.
And it wasn’t fighting. Half the time, it was pure butchery. Over and over, Samura killed, and he told himself that he was just making the world a safer place, for kids like Uruha and Kiri. Right? Sure – he told himself that, and he never believed it. He tried to talk to Shirakai about it, but he laughed him out of the room and told him that a man’s job was to protect people, so he needed to toughen up.
Once, he asked Ibuki about it. When he was passing through, as he often did, a part-timer who for some reason Shirakai didn’t mind entertaining. Natsuki was foisted off on Uruha, because Ibuki said it built character to put up with people you found annoying. Samura should have known then that he wouldn’t be of any help to him. He asked him if it was hard, because Ibuki was doing the same thing he was. Killing, and acting like it was the right thing to do.
“Why would it be hard?” Ibuki said with a booming laugh.
“You don’t think about it?” said Samura, taking a drag of his cigarette; the second cigarette of the conversation. “You don’t think about their faces?”
“Seiichi, you’re such a moron.” Ibuki lifted his hand and lightning crackled from his fingertips. “I don’t see their faces, do I?”
So, was it Samura who had something wrong with him? Ibuki didn’t care. Natsuki didn’t care. Natsuki was – what? Thirteen? Fourteen? Something like that, and though he wasn’t out on assignment the way Samura was, Ibuki had been showing him the ropes. And Ibuki was out there electrocuting people without a second thought. Didn’t it weigh on him? On any of them? Wasn’t it so heavy that they felt like they were going to be crushed by it? Maybe it was, and they had their own ways of coping. Maybe they could just hide it better than Samura could.
And more and more, he couldn’t hide it. Saving people, he reminded himself. You’re saving people. But how did they end up in this position to begin with? Criminal gangs – sorcerers – extorting them, pressing them for money, taking what they wanted. That was how they ended up needing saving, but those gangs didn’t come from nowhere. They weren’t monsters who’d crept out from under the bed like the stories. They were people too, and Samura couldn’t help but think of that every time the blade of his katana bit into their flesh.
An example; a young man had killed another young man, in order to teach his family a lesson. The lesson being, pay us or we kill your children. What did they want the money for? Nobody told Samura that. If he had to guess, it was so they could offer better payment to stronger sorcerers to use as muscle. He didn’t need to know. He came to the rescue, to do his duty, and he was as dutiful as always as he plunged his sword into the young man’s chest.
Blood spurted from his lips. His eyes went wide with disbelief as he learned that yes, he could die and yes, his story was over. He grabbed for the blade and cut his palms on it. More blood. A whimper slipped from his mouth, then a soft gasp. His eyes went glassy. Samura saw all of this and he thought; How did you end up here? The man was only a few years older than he was, and in an instant it was like he was watching the playback of his life in reverse. Before he killed that other man, he’d told himself he was still in the gang because he had no choice. He couldn’t just leave. Before that, he’d approached them with curiosity, a burgeoning sorcerer who had nowhere else to hone his abilities. That had come about because he needed money to support his own family, and they had no money because his father had lost his job and his mother couldn’t work because of an old injury, but she hadn’t gotten a payout even though it was definitely her workplace’s fault, because they’d been cutting corners, because the government let them get away with cutting corners, and they had no safety net because everything was getting more expensive, and—
And every single life Samura took was like this. He saw it all.
He saw it.
So, really, there was only one solution.
Not much time had passed since that day he met Inori, but it was enough time for Samura to learn that the world was full of sights he didn’t want to see, and it was enough time for him to cut out his eyes.
*
It was the eve of his nineteenth birthday.
The knife had been a gift from Shirakai, and Samura had sharpened it for the occasion. Everything was ready, lined up on the side of the bathtub. A clean cloth, bandages, pads of gauze. Suture strips, because he wouldn’t be able to sew the wounds closed and there was nobody he could ask to do it for him. Not right away, at least; Shirakai would get back in a few hours, and there would be hell to pay, but it would be too late for him to do anything about it. Samura had planned this, and the rigidity of his plan meant that there was no turning back.
But turning back wasn’t a possibility that entered his mind.
Samura took one last look at himself in the mirror. Wavy black hair, damp because he’d just washed it. No stubble, because he’d taken the time to shave that morning. The muscles bulging in his shoulders and arms; he’d left his shirt off, because there would be blood, but he’d elected to keep his pants on in case he passed out. Even now, there was still enough of the teenager in him to be concerned about potential embarrassment.
A deep breath. In the mirror, Samura met the eyes of his reflection. Hollow eyes. Dead eyes. Eyes which had seen too much and couldn’t bear to see more, because there would be more, and it would be so much worse.
Do it.
Swiftly, he made the first cut. Sharp, so sharp that for a second he didn’t feel it.
And then he did.
And he couldn’t allow himself time to dwell on it. Half of his vision was gone, replaced not by the blackness that he’d been expecting but with nothing at all. He could feel the stinging pain, the wetness dribbling down his cheek, the thin blood and something thicker, jellylike, and he couldn’t think about it or look at it because then he might stop.
Samura made the second cut.
He dropped the knife. It clattered on the floor.
Samura fell to his knees and relief washed over him.
It was done.
*
Shirakai didn’t tell him to toughen up when he found him. He didn’t make some quip about weakness or being a man. Instead, he helped him clean up the blood and clean up his wounds, and he sent him to bed with bandages wrapped around his face.
They agreed to tell Uruha and Kiri that he’d been injured on an assignment. It seemed easier.
Samura didn’t sleep at all because of the pain, but he didn’t regret doing what he’d done for even a moment. Eventually, he passed out, both from the agony and the exhaustion, and when he woke up it was like starting again. Only this time, he would have this barrier between himself and what he was doing, and that would keep him safe.
He’d have to learn to live without sight, of course, but Samura didn’t mind. He was up to the challenge.
*
Nineteen and newly blind.
Samura adjusted quickly. For a while he used a cane to help him get around, until sounds seemed to grow louder and clearer, and smells became sharper and more distinct, and his fingertips became more sensitive to changes of texture than ever before. He knew he was ready to get back out there – to go on doing his duty – when he beat every student at the dojo one by one, with nothing but his ears and nose and skin to guide him. He heard the whoosh of the blade slicing through the air, felt the weight of them shift, smelled the sweat on their skin as they grew tired, and he blocked every strike and kicked them to the ground.
Without his eyes, Samura was a better warrior than ever, because he’d cauterised that thing inside him which brought about a pang of guilt when he saw the defeat on his opponents faces; both in the dojo and out in the world.
It was still a struggle – to hear dying breaths and last words – but not as much of a struggle as it once had been.
And that was all he could hope for, really.
*
Less than a year after Samura had blinded himself, Shirakai sent him to Tokyo to meet with government officials again. The dojo was about his limit for tolerating human contact, so it fell to be Samura to endure it instead.
Some situation was getting worse, apparently. Something about spirit energy, reports of fluctuations, things like that which meant nothing to Samura. Not then, at least. He sat in a meeting room and accepted a report and nodded when the government employee who’d been speaking to him told him that Shirakai’s services would likely be needed soon. Weren’t they needed before? What were all these years for, if not for services needed? But Samura didn’t feel like picking a fight. He left, wincing when he stepped out into the hustle and bustle of the Tokyo streets.
He was almost at the station when he smelled something; a hint of perfume. That wasn’t unusual, because he often smelled perfume in crowds, but it was nice enough that it made him turn his head. Rich and floral, expensive but not overly so, and subtle, as if the wearer had only applied the tiniest amount.
Then; footsteps. A sharp intake of breath. A limb, moving through the air.
A hand on his shoulder, and a gasp.
“You!”
“Don’t accuse me of stepping on your foot, Inori,” Samura said with a laugh, turning to her. “I was paying attention to where I was going, this time.”
Inori’s hand left his shoulder, and Samura expected her to take a step back, to be shocked and horrified by his face. But she didn’t; instead, she cupped his face in her hands and huffed. “Did you get into a fight or something?”
“Something like that.” Samura tapped the katana he wore at his hip. “Catching bad guys.”
“Clumsy.”
“I was clumsier before,” he said. “Your foot, remember?”
“I remember.” Inori still had her hands on his face. She tilted it from left to right, examining him, and Samura let her, since it seemed only fair, given the fact that he’d rubbed glitter from her face when they’d met three years ago. “I told my friends that some good-looking asshole stomped on my nice shoes in the middle of the street. I couldn’t prove you existed, though, so they didn’t believe me.”
“Good-looking?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Since I lost my sight, my hearing’s gotten better.”
“You still look the same, y’know,” she said. “And you’re still cocky.”
“I was never cocky.”
“Yeah, you were.”
“And you remembered.” Samura laughed in disbelief. Of all the people he could have run into in this city of millions, it was her. The girl he still sometimes thought about, on lonely nights when he couldn’t sleep. Pretty and angry. He conjured up her face in his mind, the same pretty face as before, but a little older. Cheeks less rounded, perhaps, and knowing eyes. “You remembered, and you recognised me.”
“Call it holding a grudge.”
“My apology back then was pretty lousy.”
“Too right it was.”
Samura grabbed her hand, her hand which still rested against his cheek. She let him grab it, and let him hold it. Inori’s hand was smooth and her skin soft, and he could smell the moisturiser she used. Her finger was calloused; only faintly, but he could feel it. Was she a writer? A painter? It was the kind a person got from holding a pencil. He wanted to ask her about it. “Let me make it up to you,” he said. “I was going to ask you if you’d get coffee with me, but it started raining, and you ran off. I should have given you my jacket.” He laughed. “Forgive me, Inori, and get coffee with me now instead?”
Inori laughed as well. She had a wonderful laugh. It wasn’t an elegant, musical laugh; it was snorty and ugly. A real laugh. Samura’s heat skipped a beat. He felt young and naïve again, like anything was possible, like the stories with the happy endings were all real. He knew better now, but there was still some part of him which thought that maybe some of those stories could be real.
This one, he hoped.
“You’re forgiven,” Inori said, squeezing his hand. “And you’re paying.”
*
It was easy enough to say why Samura liked Inori so much. She was funny and smart, with an answer for everything. She made Samura laugh, and he knew on that first date – because it was a date, when they got coffee together that day in Tokyo – that his heart belonged to her. She enraptured him. Everything she did caught his attention, and at the same time there was a normalcy about her that he craved so much it made his heart ache. Inori wanted to go to university. She wanted to be a journalist, or maybe a novelist, because she enjoyed writing. Samura suggested poetry and she prodded him in the middle of the forehead.
“You just want love poems!” she said.
And he sort of did, if he was being honest with himself. Not that he would tell anyone he was such a sap at heart. He did tell Shirakai about Inori, and Uruha and Kiri too. Both were delighted for him. Uruha asked delightedly if they would get married someday. Kiri asked – also delightedly – if she liked swords. Samura’s answers to those questions were yes and no.
Because he did want to get married. Samura fell quick and hard, and when Inori casually mentioned one day that she saw herself with a husband and a family in the future, his heart did backflips in his chest. That night, he lay on his futon and if he still had his sight he would have stared up at the ceiling. Did she mean me? When she said she wanted a husband, did she mean that she wanted me to be her husband?
He tortured himself with those thoughts, and it was a nice kind of torture until eventually he blurted it out in the middle of a date with her, an evening walk in a beautiful park by a lake. Views for her and the wonderful sound of rustling trees for him.
“I’m not answering that, Seiichi,” she laughed when he asked if she meant him. “You’d have to propose, and then I’d tell you.”
Oh, she had him firmly under her heel. Samura couldn’t bear it. He didn’t even have a ring, but in that park he fell to his knees and asked Inori – begged her, really – to marry him.
She said yes. And she called him a dummy for thinking she might’ve meant anyone but him.
*
Shirakai told him that if it all went wrong, he would always be welcome at the dojo. Samura didn’t have an answer for that. Why would it all go wrong? Why would he think it could all go wrong?
He had a point, of course; Samura hadn’t been entirely honest with Inori.
When he went out and bought her a real ring, and sat down with her in her city apartment to give it to her, he told her the truth about how he lost his sight. Samura was honest, and though he wasn’t ready for the consequences of such honesty, he knew he had to do it.
Inori took his face in her hands. She kissed one scar, then the other.
“You have a good heart, Seiichi,” she said softly. “I might not always understand your world, or everything you do, but I understand that. I love you.”
He pulled her into his arms, hardly able to believe that he could be so lucky.
*
They married in a quiet ceremony, attended by Inori’s family and friends and Samura’s own strange family – Shirakai and Uruha and Kiri – and the people he considered friends. Ibuki and Natsuki, Togo Shiba, and a handful of others.
When Samura leaned in to kiss Inori, it was the only time he felt regret for putting out his eyes. He brushed a lock of her silky hair aside, felt the softness of her wedding kimono. He breathed in the smell of the perfume she wore, the same one she’d worn that day in Tokyo when they’d found each other again, and when he pressed his lips to hers he wised he could have seen what she looked like, this beautiful, brash, funny woman who for some reason had seen in him something worth keeping close.
He couldn’t see what she looked like on that day, but in his mind, she looked like an angel.
*
Later, he would often find himself wondering how he managed to let her slip through his fingers, and he always came back to the same answer; the war. What it did to him and what he did to them. What he let happen. What he failed to stop. His cut-out eyes weren’t enough now to stop him from seeing.
And it was too much.
Inori had told him that she didn’t always understand his world, as she put it, and eventually his alleged good heart wasn’t enough to make up for it.
The day she left, his wife with their little girl in her arms, Samura stood in the doorway like a statue. He waited for the sound of the car door opening and closing; Inori’s sister’s car, with whom they’d be staying, because even though Samura had offered to leave the house and go back to the dojo so Inori and Iori could stay here, she’d refused, telling him that she couldn’t bear to be in this place anymore. Her voice was filled with fury and sadness, the same fury that had drawn him in all those years ago and a new sadness which broke what was left of his fractured heart.
His fingers hurt from gripping the doorframe so tightly. The car started up, and drove away. Samura wait for one minute, two, five, and then he fell to his knees and clamped his hands over his mouth and let out a desperate, anguished sob.
*
In the months and years that passed, Samura often found himself thinking back to that first day, when he’d watched her run off in the rain, the one and only time he saw her face.
There was a photo of her, at the wake. Her sister told him that it was a beautiful photo. Samura wouldn’t know. In his mind, she looked the way she had on that first day. Beautiful, angry, and running away from him.
As the rain fell outside and Iori slept, exhausted with grief, Samura turned his head to the sky and felt the water on his face. He breathed in the smell of it, different here than it was in the city. Earthier; the smell of plants. Of life, on this day so full of death.
He wished he’d seen her on their wedding day. On the day Iori was born. On the day she left him. Any day – he would take any of them, but he just wanted more.
Samura wrapped his arms around himself and shivered.
He would never see her face again.
*
Through so many sleepless nights, Samura tossed and turned and dreamed of that day.
Inori, squealing as the rain began to fall in earnest. Turning and running off. Samura frantically trying to think of a way to stop her, and failing. The damn report in his pocket, the report which didn’t actually turn out to be anything useful, but which he couldn’t risk ruining or losing, so he’d been stuck on how to give Inori his jacket without giving her that as well or getting it wet. Something so small. So stupid.
He dreamed of the glitter on her cheekbone. When they were together, he’d asked her about it once. She’d laughed and put her hand on his cheek. They were lying in bed, lazing around, sleeping in. It was a concert, she told him, like he’d thought it was. Not a very good concert. Some local band her friend wanted to see, but it wasn’t the concert itself that was fun. It was staying out late, taking a risk, going straight from school and changing in a toilet cubicle, her and her friend giggling as they did each other’s makeup. It was putting half of her uniform back on in the morning to go home, a silly disguise. Samura told her that he still remembered the way the glitter looked that day, shining in the wan light coming through the clouds.
Every moment of that day he dreamed about again and again. The smell of the rain in the air. The heaviness of the droplets as the clouds threatened to burst. The people walking past them, annoyed that they were just standing there on the sidewalk and getting in the way. Inori scolding him, demanding an apology. The itch for a cigarette. Everything.
And most of all, he dreamed of her face.
*
He heard her voice, first of all, telling him off, the way she always told him off and which he always liked more than he let on. It was that voice which cut through the fighting, which brought him to a halt, which wrenched him out of the violence he’d lost himself in.
When are you going to let go of the past and look towards the future?
She didn’t say it softly. This wasn’t a comfort; she was demanding it of him.
I’m counting on you to look after her.
When Inori spoke, Samura listened. For so long now he’d failed them both, but Inori had told him once that he had a good heart, and he had believed it. Maybe he could believe it again. And so, more than twenty years after he saw Inori for the first and only time – more than twenty years after Samura blinded himself – Samura opened his eyes.
And he saw her face again.
“Iori,” he said to this girl he’d never seen but who looked so, so blessedly like her mother. “You’ve really grown up.”