Inosuke Arai scuffed through the remains of last fall’s leaf litter.
It’s not like I want to make weapons to kill people. If I wanted to make efficient killing weapons I’d make bombs anyway. I just want to know about the steel.
How do you put a sword’s edge on something like a gymnast’s ribbon? How do you get a blade to sharpen itself by flaking little bits off the edge? How do you forge something like that? How do you temper it? How do you make a sword with the sharp edge on the back so most of your striking is done with the flat, and still make it able to absorb the force of shearing through metal?
“We don’t make weapons,” Jiichan says. As if you can’t kill somebody just as dead with a kitchen knife.
I just want to know how you get steel to do that stuff.
Inosuke scuffed through the woods, thoroughly disgruntled. At least when he bugs me about that he’s not bugging me about girls. He shuddered. He didn’t like the stupid twittering dimwits. Didn’t like their high voices, didn’t like the way they always chattered about nothing, about feelings, didn’t like the way they smelled, and as for…
He just couldn’t tell Jiichan that it was guys who filled the fantasies of his lonely nights.
He heard a sound, and a muffled oath. It was coming from the clearing, from what he’d always thought of as his special place, even though it wasn’t on his family’s land and he knew he wasn’t the only person who ever went there. But what…
He stopped. He stared.
Before him stood the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, a real, live bishounen, as exquisite as if he had stepped out of the doujinshi he’d seen girls reading on the bus. Almost his own height, slim as a willow and nearly as graceful, he wore his thick brown hair in a long ponytail (and how does he get away with that?). He had taken off his school-uniform jacket, and the dark pants and white shirt only accented the trim lines of his body. Delicate features, an expression of serious concentration. Inosuke wondered what he’d look like when he smiled.
The strange boy was engaged in weapon practice, throwing kunai at a dead tree. No, wait, those were too big to be kunai… what in the world… spatulas?
Ukyou Kuonji swore and picked up the spatulas again. Damn, I’m hitting the tree! Why can’t I get them to stick?
This has to work. It’s not that long before I turn sixteen. I promised I’d go after that asshole Saotome. But I remember how hard the old fart trained Ranchan, and they’ve had ten years to keep doing it. I could never beat Ranchan in the old days, no reason to think I can now. I’m pretty good, but… I’m gonna need an edge. A weapon. Something nobody’s gonna question my having. Nobody thinks twice about an okonomiyaki maker having lots of spatulas.
She threw her weapons again. Her throws were perfect… and completely ineffectual.
“You’ll never do it with those.”
“What the –” She rounded savagely on the newcomer.
She stopped when she saw it wasn’t that pest Kurenai. It was one of the older boys from the nearby high school. She didn’t know his name, but she’d seen him around.
“If you’re trying to use it like a throwing knife, it won’t work. It’s balanced wrong. And it’ll never hold an edge anyway, it’s the wrong kind of steel.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
He laughed. “My family makes knives and stuff.” He held out a hand. “Inosuke Arai.”
“Ukyou Kuonji.”
They had ended up in a small kissaten, and Ukyou sipped coffee while Inosuke sketched on napkins and told Ukyou more than he had ever wanted to know about knives, weight and balance, and the difference between the steel in a spatula and the steel in a sword.
“Wow. How do you know so much about it?” Ukyou asked. His face was alive with interest, the way his eyes sparkled made Inosuke think of a spring in a forest.
Gods, he’s lovely! “Like I said, it’s what my family does. We used to be sword-makers, and then when everybody quit wearing swords an ancestor of mine switched to making kitchen knives. But he used the same kind of techniques to make his knives, so they were really good, and well, we’ve been doing that ever since. My grandfather’s actually a Living National Treasure, and he’s been teaching me since I was six or so.”
“I guess that means you’re gonna be a Living National Treasure too?”
“Maybe some day. But what I want to do is… my ancestor, not the one who started making knives, but his father or maybe grandfather, was a swordsmith and, well, he didn’t just make ordinary swords.”
“What do you mean? Really good ones?”
“More than just good. The guy was an innovator. Jiichan’s got his notebooks, he keeps them locked up, but sometimes he lets me look at them. There was a sword that sharpened itself as you used it.”
“Sharpened itself?”
“Uh-huh. Bits would flake off the edge of the blade, but in a regular pattern, so it was always new, and kind of serrated.”
Ukyou stared in shock. “Eew, imagine using that on a person, you’d have to be psycho or something.”
“Maybe not on a person, but what if you had a knife like that? If you never had to sharpen it…”
“Yeah, but where do the bits that fall off go? You don’t want pieces of steel in your food.”
Inosuke stared, then scratched the back of his head. “Uh… I didn’t think about that,” he admitted. “I mostly want to know how you get the steel to do it in the first place. Then there was another one, that was super long and thin, like a steel ribbon – but perfectly controllable!”
“Sounds pretty scary.”
“Maybe. But he was someone who tried to look for new ways of doing things. I admire that. And I admire what he could do with steel.” He looked across at Ukyou, suddenly curious. “What were you doing anyway, trying to use a spatula like a throwing knife? Why do you want a weapon?”
Ukyou stared into her coffee cup. “There’s these two guys, a father and son, wandering kempoists. A long time ago they… did somethin’ to my dad and me. I promised I’d make them pay for it. I’ve been working, training for most of my life, just for that, and I’m almost ready to go out after them. But… they were always better than me at hand-to-hand, so I thought a weapon… something that would go along with making okonomiyaki…”
“So you thought about adapting your tools into weapons. It can be… I think I can do it.” He took one of her spatulas and examined it. “Can I take this?”
She nodded.
“I’ll meet you next Sunday, at the same place where you were practicing.”
She stared at the floor. “I… I can’t pay you or anything…”
For you… for you to smile for me, really smile…
Careful. Slow. He’s young, he’s not thinking of me that way.
“Hey. The challenge is enough. It’s a chance to make something real for a change. Okay?”
He almost didn’t get the things made. To begin with, there was the usual row with Jiichan, who didn’t want to let him look at the notebooks just to make a set of spatulas. Then the old fart wanted to know why he was using knife-steel and why he was being so fussy about the balance. He made up some nonsense about knowing a girl who had gotten involved in an Iron Chef-type challenge at her cooking club. It sounded hopelessly lame the moment he said it, and he didn’t think Jiichan would buy it, but… Jiichan was so overjoyed to see him actually paying attention to a girl that he fell all over himself being helpful.
Thunk!
A single spatula quivered in the target set up on the tree. Then two. Then four.
“Wow!” Ukyou breathed. His eyes were shining.
“Like ’em?”
“They’re great, sempai!” Ukyou gathered his new weapons up to throw again.
“Ukyou-sama…? Ukyou-sama?” A new voice, high-pitched and plaintive.
“Oh no,” he groaned. All the lovely light in his eyes went out. “How’d that pest follow me here?”
“Ukyou-sama?”
The girl who tiptoed into the clearing was very cute. She wore a pink ruffled dress and her straight brown hair was tied up with a pink ribbon. Most guys would have been falling all over themselves to get close to her.
“Tsubasa, how many times do I have to tell you? I’m not interested, so get LOST!” A barrage of spatulas chased the girl out of the clearing. “Feh. Jackass,” Ukyou muttered, retrieving his weapons again. “What did I ever do to deserve Tsubasa Kurenai?”
So he doesn’t like guys who cross-dress, Inosuke thought. He couldn’t figure Kurenai at all. The guy dressed and acted like the most simpering fool girl in the neighborhood, but usually confined his advances to real girls. Inosuke’s one tentative overture had been met with shuddering feminine distaste, and he had never tried a second time. It was strange to find him hanging around a guy, even one as exquisite as Kuonji.
“Wish I had a spatula and a griddle big enough to fry him!” Ukyou muttered.
“Come on. Let’s go someplace.”
“This is the Hakusan Shrine,” Inosuke explained. He and Ukyou each clapped twice and bowed their heads for a moment, then tossed a few coins into the offering box. “My ancestor’s last sword used to be dedicated here as a gift to the god, a long time ago. It’s not here now, I’m not sure what happened to it. But I come here when I want to think about stuff, or just, well, feel peaceful.”
“It is peaceful here.” Ukyou gazed thoughtfully out over Kyoto. “I don’t get to do that much, listen to the silence.”
“What does it say to you?”
He gazed at the paving-stones. “Stuff I don’t know if I want to hear. Like maybe I should just live my life instead of going after those two. Just give it up, open a restaurant… find somebody to share it with.”
“So why don’t you?”
He shook his head. “I can’t. It’s a promise, and more. It’s part of who I am now. If I didn’t go after them, I wouldn’t be me somehow. Nine years… it’s a long time when you’re fifteen.”
Inosuke was silent for a long time. “My ancestor… the one who did all that stuff with steel… he spent his whole life trying to make the perfect weapon. The perfect thing to kill other people with. Other swordsmiths thought of him as a heretic, because he tried to make killing weapons rather than simply good sharp swords. All the things he did with steel were to that end, to make better ways for one man to kill another. Then at the end, his last work, his greatest sword… was a reverse-edge sword… a sword designed not to kill.”
“I wonder why he did something like that.”
“Maybe… it was the very beginning of the Meiji era and he’d done most of his work for the Ishin Shishi, maybe he wanted to remind everybody, to remind himself, that after you win the battle you have to live in the world it decides, so you ought to be sure it’s a world you want to live in… and that you’re fit to live in it.”
“Is that what you brought me up here to tell me?” Ukyou stood up. His eyes were dark, bleak.
“No! Ukyou… I just wanted… after you find them… you’ll still be here, you know. You can… do what you were talking about. Open your restaurant, find somebody to share it with, have your own dreams.”
Ukyou sat back down. “I never thought about afterwards. It’s like everything I am is focused on this one thing. I can’t see past it. Anyway, I found out where they are so I’m going as soon as break starts.”
“Where?”
“North Tokyo. Nerima.”
To Inosuke it felt like a gut-stab. “I… I won’t see you…”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.” He tried to put on an air of nonchalance; it felt clumsy and he was sure Ukyou could see through his pretense. “I was looking forward to your coming up to high school, is all. Spending more time with you…”
“Arai-sempai…”
“Can’t you… can’t you say my name even once, Ukyou? Can’t I even hear what it sounds like when you say it?”
The younger boy’s eyes took up half his face. His hand went to his mouth.
Damn it, Arai you screwup, it’s Kurenai all over again!
“Inosuke…”
Ukyou’s eyes were pure misery.
“It’s all right, Ukyou. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I… I know I’m different, and I didn’t really expect you to feel the same way about me.”
“I can’t… I’m not…”
He managed a little smile. “Your girlfriend is going to be very, very lucky.”
He wasn’t expecting the blow that knocked him off the bench onto his back. “Jackass! I am a girl!!”
Inosuke lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. His eyes burned. She sure had me fooled.
Absolutely nothing about Ukyou Kuonji said girl. Girls didn’t look you in the eye and ask intelligent questions. Girls didn’t understand about needing to innovate, to push the envelope, to do something that nobody had ever done before. Girls didn’t put a double handful of throwing spatulas into a mailbox simply because it hadn’t been there yesterday. (Of course the mailbox turned out to have been Tsubasa Kurenai in disguise – didn’t that idiot ever give up?) Girls simpered, they twittered inanities, they didn’t even understand the difference between one of Jiichan’s knives and a piece of cheap junk from a discount store.
Give it up, open a restaurant… find somebody to share it with…
It’s like everything I am is focused on this one thing…
What would it be like, with a girl? With a girl who could meet your eyes, a girl you could actually talk to? He tried to picture Ukyou as a girl, but all he could come up with was Kurenai’s exaggerated feminity. No, Ukyou was… was Ukyou. Male or female, she was… he was…
Why does it even matter?
Ukyou was a friend. Whether or not she would ever be anything more, he couldn’t tell. But Inosuke knew he didn’t want to lose Ukyou’s friendship. He didn’t want her to leave hating him. I have to tell her…
After you win the battle you have to live in the world it decides…you have to be fit to live in it.
Yeah, but first you have to win. He sprang off the bed and rummaged through his own notebooks. I hope I’ve got it here… no way in hell am I gonna be able to sneak into the forge this time of night.
He was in luck! He had copied the passage from Shakku’s notes! Change it so, and that was how to make the blade… the handle would be trickier, it needed to be hollow to save weight, but it had to be able to take impact. And then there was balance…
By the time he finished, the sun was rising and the birds were greeting it outside his window. The floor around his desk was littered with crumpled sheets of paper and broken pencils. But he had a complete design and forging notes for his farewell gift to Ukyou.
Now to get the thing made…
The timing actually couldn’t be better, he thought as he listened to the door close. Jiichan was going to Tokyo for some cultural conference, Sis was on a school trip, and Mom had some do with the neighborhood association. He’d be on his own the whole weekend! The thought was exciting – but scary too. He’d never made anything without Jiichan looking over his shoulder… and what he was about to do was entirely new, maybe the closest thing to real innovation he’d ever do in his life. This is what I dreamed of…
He took his notes and went out to the forge.
With a sense that he was doing something irrevocable, like stepping off a cliff, he purified himself in the old way, with water and salt. He made the sacred fire the way Jiichan had taught him. They didn’t do it this way most of the time, only for the most important pieces, but Jiichan had insisted that he learn the ritual. It seemed right for this.
Selecting the steel was the tricky part. Most of his training was for making things with edges. This weapon wouldn’t even have an edge; the striking surface would be broad and flat. It had to be hard enough not to buckle or dent, and flexible enough not to crack. That part had kept him up most of the night. I hope this works… Heat, pound, fold, pound, over and over. Watch the color… feel the way it changes under your hammer… One of Jiichan’s friends said you had to treat steel as if it were a woman. Going back to the fantasies he’d had about Ukyou before he found out she was a girl, the remark made an odd sort of sense. He could feel the metal changing, responding to him, yielding. Pound and fold, his whole being caught up in the rhythm of his hammer. Morning became afternoon, afternoon became evening, he worked in a trance, as though the steel were shaping him. And maybe it was…
“I’m sorry. Kuonji-kun moved out this morning,” the landlady said. “Packed all of his things into his yatai and said he was going to Tokyo.”
Chikusho! I thought she’d wait till the end of school! “Do you know which way he went?”
“I think he took the northern way. He’d have to, wouldn’t he? He couldn’t take that yatai on the train.”
“Thank you.” Inosuke got back on his bike and pedaled off at top speed, toward the northern road.
He was almost to Otsu by the time he caught up with her. “Ukyou!”
The yatai stopped. She turned around. “Arai… sempai?”
He skidded to a stop. “Whew! I thought I’d never catch you!”
“Whoa, catch your breath, sugar! Whatcha come chasin’ me in such a big hurry for anyway?”
“Spent most of two days… making this.” He handed her the bundle he had been carrying strapped to his back.”
She unwrapped it slowly. A long, slow whistle came from her lips as she inspected the gleaming weapon. “You made… this?”
He dropped his eyes. “Yeah. I thought… if those guys are as good as you say, you might need something more than the little ones.”
She hefted it experimentally, raised it over her head, and brought it whipping down to strike the ground with so much force that Inosuke felt the vibration through the soles of his feet. “Wow, this is great!” She grinned. “It is gonna feel so good to pound that asshole into the ground…”
“It’s… it’s the first thing I ever put my own forge-name on. You like it?”
She looked away. “I… after the other day… Why?”
“’Cause… ’cause before you can live in the world your battle decides, you have to be the one who wins. ’Cause I want to see you open that restaurant, even if I’m not the one you share it with.”
“Sempai…”
“’Cause finding out you’re a girl didn’t change the way I feel. And I still like the way my name sounds when you say it.”
“You jackass… there’s no way I can ever pay you back for something like this.” She ran her hands over the weapon’s shaft, raised it to look at the forging-pattern in the blade. “It’s… nobody ever gave me stuff, y’know? And something like this, it’s like… I dunno. Like a legend, like something out of history.” She scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t deserve anything like this.”
“Hey, I got something out of it too, you know!” Inosuke retorted. “I got to make a piece on my own, do something nobody’s ever done before! It might be the only chance I ever get to fulfill my dream.”
“Inosuke…”
“Just take it, Ukyou. Win your battle… build your own new era.” He grinned. “And if I can’t be the one you share your restaurant with, well… I’ll be your best customer!”
“It’s a deal.” She grinned. “With something like this, I can’t lose. I’ll whip their butts!”
“Yeah, well… I have to get back. An order came in, a presentation set, and Jiichan wants me to help him.”
She nodded. “I gotta get movin’ too. It’s a long hike to Nerima. Inosuke…”
“Hmm?”
“See ya. And thank you!” She turned, pushing the yatai in the direction of Seta.
Inosuke watched until her figure was lost in the traffic of vehicles and pedestrians. Then he got back on his bike and pedaled slowly toward home.
A long time ago I saw somebody’s fic that mentioned Ukyou’s battle-spatula being made by a master swordsmith in Kyoto. That didn’t feel quite right to me… but then I got interested in Rurouni Kenshin, and well… Seiku Arai the master knife-maker, his father Shakku, the satsu-jin-ken and the sakabatou… it fit. At least I thought it did.
I have probably played fast and loose with Ranma canon by giving Ukyou her trademark weapons this late in her life. The Hakusan Shrine exists, I turned it up on a website of places to visit in Kyoto, though my mental picture of it comes from Watsuki and I’ve probably mis-located it. I know Kodansha publishes a bilingual map of Kyoto, but I don’t have one… Inosuke is my own creation; I thought it would be fun to play with Ukyou’s masculine persona again.
Otsu and Seta were post-towns on the Nakasendo, the northern highway between Kyoto and Edo/Tokyo.