Women
4 November 1998
by Ed Rubin

Naoki stood up from the banquet table. The food had been serviceable, but that was only to be expected at the table of a Lion. Naoki was certainly glad to have left Violence Behind Courtliness City, where very little good had occurred. Yes, they were still all alive, yes, the geishas had been excellent, but it was certainly better as a memory than as a current situation. Now in Lion lands, in transit back to another, hopefully more hospitable part of the Crane lands, Naoki's mind turned back to a conversation he and his mother had during the previous winter.

It had started innocuously enough, with his mother asking of the people he had met, their stations, their natures, and other personal qualities. Finally she had asked, "Haven't you met any women?" Naoki had of course reminded her of Marako, a fine traveling companion, and of Shosuro Rei and Usagi Tomoe, now a Shosuro as well. She had pressed, however, of course not heavily, and Naoki had admitted that there were not many other women whose names he could recall, let alone others with whom he had interacted on any basis.

She had then let loose her underlying motivation: "You must remember, my son, that you are the eldest, and no longer a child. Yours is the duty to carry the family into the future, yours is the responsibility to secure for this house an alliance that will strengthen it and expand its influence. Your father is not behaving foolishly in sending you out into Rokugan. You have greater opportunities with these travels than you would if you were doing nothing but walking the wall."

She was, of course, correct. His father had admonished him to study the other clans carefully, to understand them better, but he had also urged Naoki to meet individuals, to form relationships that might evolve into alliances. The hint had been there, though his father would not, could not, have been a fraction as direct as his mother had been.

Naoki turned his mind to the travels he had undertaken since those conversations. Strangely, nothing much had changed: He still had not met many women. The heimin of Fukawa village didn't count, and there had certainly been no women at the monastery. Even Tomoe had been gone to Shosuro lands when they all had revisited Usagi Castle. Indeed he had met many females along the voyage through the Crane lands to arrive at Retsu's festival, but they had been geisha, so again, they did not count. Where were all the females of the Samurai class?

Naoki scanned the room, and saw a Lion Samurai-ko near the entrance to the hall. Naoki started to walk towards her, studying her as he approached. She was dire, severe in a way that chilled the living core of Naoki's spirit. She gave the appearance of having no such spirit, of having nothing but honor. It looked like, if you needed protection in a female bathhouse, she'd be the one to choose, but what a strange idea that was: Who cared?

Naoki walked past her, and out into the garden off the passageway beyond the entrance. He breathed deeply, letting the night air lift his spirits, until a smile once again had the boldness to appear on his face, a brash confrontation of the seriousness of his Lion surroundings.

"I have perhaps become entirely too military in my thinking," he mused, "not all samurai women are bushi, clutching their virginity even more tightly than the hilts of their katanas." Some were, he knew of course, shugenja, like his mother or Tomoe. Crab shugenja women could be quite fun, Naoki knew, and were not nearly as uptight as the average samurai-ko.

At that moment, Naoki came to the realization that he had not been paying sufficient attention in his travels. What other samurai class women had he been ignoring simply because they were not bushi? Was he as narrow-minded as the samurai-ko who regarded honor as the only important component of life? Well, he would change, he determined, recalling a saying of his sensei's: "Seeing the problem or difficulty is like grasping the hilt of your katana. If you don't do at least that, you'll never be able to draw it out, let alone use it." He had grasped the hilt of the solution to this problem now, Naoki felt, and could therefore draw if he wanted to, but the next step would be to clarify for himself a better understanding of the battlefield.

"Ah, well, I guess military metaphors will always come easiest to me," Naoki sighed, and then chuckled. Turning, he rejoined his companions, and together they returned to inn.