In this essay I provided a writeup of the circumstances under which former "samurai assassin" Kenshin Himura came to reside in a small Japanese town in the late 1800s, and how he made a small coterie of friends who also became his aides in battle. I won't repeat any of that information here, in large part because the arc examined here is almost entirely a flashback to the "origin of Kenshin." The hero relates this narrative almost non-stop to his allies in order to prepare them for an anticipated assault by one of the samurai's deadliest enemies.
About thirty years previous to the main continuity, Kenshin, an orphan of no high estate, has become allied to the Ishin Shishi, a reformist movement in Japanese politics, one aimed at overthrowing the conservative shogunate. Because the reformers lack martial forces to equal those of their enemies, Ishin Shishi seeks to undermine the shogunate through assassination of various functionaries. Kenshin, though a man of conscience, has dedicated his life to paving the way for reform in this bloody manner, and the men that he slays one night in 1864 are just three more of his usual targets. Only one factor stands out: one of the three men, Kiyosato, manages to leave a mark upon the samurai-- a facial scar Kenshin bears from then on-- despite the fact that Kiyosato possessed no skill comparable to Kenshin's.
Much later, Kiyosato's death will have more extensive consequences for the samurai. Shortly after intervening to drive off some drunks hassling a woman at a local bar, Kenshin is attacked by shogunate assasssins. He kills them all, but the woman witnesses the killing. Kenshin knows he's expected to kill any witnesses, but instead he takes her to Ishin Shishi headquarters.
Kenshin's cohorts are quick to point out that the woman Tomoe, though somewhat older than Kenshin, matches him in her dispassionate demeanor. She breaks his ethos down into "bad people carry swords and good people don't" in order to show its absurdity. Yet she recognizes his pain, and tells him she will become "a sheath, to hold back your madness." And eventually, due to her calm insistence, the two of them are married.
For the first time, Kenshin gets a taste of happiness that's more than merely theoretical-- in part because the forces of Ishin Shishi have been routed, and the reform movement is in tatters. The shogunate enforcers are aware of Kenshin's retiring ways, and they plan to execute him, in part with the help of Enishi, Tomoe's little brother.
This revelation leads inevitably to one of even greater consequence: Tomoe too is a shogunate agent, though only out of circumstance. She had been engaged to Kiyosato before Kenshin killed him, so with the help of the shogun-agents, she inserted herself into Kenshin's path, beguiled him with her seeming indifference, and then married him-- all with the aim of setting him up for murder. But though she didn't love Kiyosato so much as feel gratitude toward him, she fell in love with Kenshin. Kenshin forgives her, but she naively seeks out the assassins in the neighboring "Forest of Barriers" with the intent of misleading them.
However, the assassin-leader gleans that Tomoe has turned against them, and instead he uses Kenshin's wife as bait for the samurai. Kensin plunges into the forest to rescue his wife, only to find that, because of magnetic anomalies in the area, his "sixth sense" of samurai intuition has become dulled. This doesn't keep the hero from slaying his first attacker, but as he continues, the assassins use other methods to assail his hearing and his sight.
One of the assassins-- who has a remarkable resemblance to Marvel Comics' Venom-- escapes to be a thorn in Kenshin's side later on. But when only one assassin is left, the blinded and deafened Kenshin engages the killer in battle. Tomoe tries to intervene on Kenshin's behalf, and thanks to his sense-deprived status, he kills both Tomoe and the assassin with one stroke. On top of his grief, the Ishin Shishi reach out to Kenshin once more, requiring him to kill for the cause. Though Kenshin agrees so that all his previous executions are not without purpose, he swears that when the "new age" comes, he will never kill again. And this is the oath he keeps once the shogun declines, for the Kenshin who comes to settle at Kaoru's dojo does indeed refrain from killing, even under the most onerous temptations. And the next arc sets up one such temptation, as thirty years later Enishi seeks vengeance on Kenshin for his sister's death.
The consequences of that arc are outside the concerns of this essay. Taken by itself, "Remembrance" exemplifies one of the enduring themes of RUROUNI KENSHIN. There's no flinching from the fact that history is always built upon the slaughter of both the guilty and the innocent, and not just in feudal Japan. But, to borrow some terms of Francis Fukuyama, this historical setting gives creator Nobuhiro Watsuki the chance to portray a transition from the old way of *megalothymia* to the more egalitarian way of *isothymia." In THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, Fukuyama wrote:
Megalothymia can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven. Its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people. Megalothymia and isothymia together constitute the two manifestations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition to modernity can be understood.
"Remembrance" appeared about two years after END OF HISTORY was published, but no direct line of influence seems likely, or even necessary. Watsuki, writing about Japan's last feudal period, engages with the transition to modernity in terms of emotional valence. Kenshin is the epitome of the master swordsman, having reached a pinnacle of discipline few of his contemporaries can attain. Yet, though he says that he loves the sword-art but not killing, he's drawn into the life of an assassin in the hopes of putting an end to the old, megalothymotic ways. His own emotional needs are soothed by embracing the simple life of marriage-- the life of the "common man" of isothymic relationships-- but ironically, he would never have met the first love of his life had Kenshin's enemies not been using her as a pawn against him. Additionally, had Kenshin not been an assassin, Tomoe probably would married Kiyosato and enjoyed a pleasant if passionless existence. Thus Watsuki puts his hero in a position where he's caught between the two opposing principles of human desire and history.
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