Evanescent

Prologue

There comes a time in your life when you remember who you used to be. You remember the days when your life used to be simpler, full of life, and when things, in some degree, made sense. When I stood there on the Houmei overlook, standing before a lovely carven memorial, I reminded myself that not too long ago, even when my life seemed chaotic, it seemed to be fuller. It felt like it made some modicum of sense.

Now, standing amidst the bustle dresses from the west in a plain kimono, I felt out of place. Japanese women wore them the same as western women, and the men with them wore the western-style suits that, I mused, they would have been laughed out of nearly twenty years ago had they stepped foot in Houmei wearing them or those ridiculous hats.

I couldn't go back to corsets after wearing the kimono again. It felt right in a way that defied explanation – like this was what I was meant to be.

After the Satsuma Rebellion, as they had taken to calling it, everything had changed. There were no samurai any more. No real ones, anyway. Not the ones that I remembered.

I reached out to the monument and brushed my fingers over the inscriptions bearing the names of the fallen samurai. I remembered them. Every last one. With every name I touched, I could see their faces in my mind as clear as day – their scowls, their smiles –, I could hear their laughter and their cries, see them when they pulled up their hair and pulled on their haori, and when they would meditate together in their little groups.

The samurai of Houmei had been...

What had they been to me?

Friends? Teachers? Enemies, at times? Even I didn't have the words for them. It seemed forever ago that my friend James and I had walked together through those gates as the most scandalous duo to ever be seen in Japan: a Japanese woman and an American man travelling alone with a Chinese-American to a village of samurai to help this American write his novel. It's almost laughable when I look at it, but I would not have traded it for anything.

A woman and a man had arrived up next to me and were relying on a third person in their party to translate the monument, from the way the woman would look to the other man and frown, "What ever does this say?"

"Here commemorates the Samurai of Houmei Village, who fell in 1877 against the troops of Emperor Meiji wielding the weapons of their ancestors. It goes on to list their names..." the second man tried to continue, but the first man cut him off.

"What "weapons of their ancestors"? Swords and bows?"

"So it seems."

"What tragic people," the woman said and shook her head. "How sad that they all ran right into battle like that..."

"More like stupid," the man beside her snorted, and my hand tightened around the handle of my umbrella. "Swords against guns... those idiots never stood a chance."

It took every fiber of my being not to turn and scream at him about how little he knew of the samurai of Houmei, of how bravely the stood against the enemy, of how one of them slew twenty Imperial troops before they were able to kill him and how he did it with only a katana and a bow, and how noble and proud they were until the bitter end. How could they know? They weren't from Japan. They had never lived among those people for nearly a decade. They hadn't seen them live. They only knew how they died, and it was all they would ever know.

I felt my chest tighten as I looked down at the memorial and remembered that morning before the final battle. How the world had seemed to still as Lord Kajiwara had laid out his ceremonial white garments for if he survived.

How Takemaru had watched them all mount their horses in his name and ride out the front gate.

How all I had been able to do was watch.