Rurouni Kenshin Manga Translations
Volume Fifteen--A Giant Against a Great Man
Part 124--Shadow of a True Desire
Misao: Now the tables are turned! Beat ‘em up, Kaoru!
Kaoru: Wait, Misao. Kamatari . . . will you surrender? You can’t win now, without your
scythe. There's no point in any further.
Misao (boiling mad): Hey wait a minute!! I’m not going to agree to that! Not only did that
freak humiliate me, he broke my ribs!!
Kamatari (to Kaoru): You make me laugh. (waving at the broken bokutou) You can’t win either,
can you?
Kaoru: That’s not true. The essence of the Kamiya Kasshin school is the sword that protects
life. The idea is not to kill your opponent, but to control him. (Holding out the bokutou,
now only a foot long) Therefore, one can fight without a blade, even with only a hilt.
Kamatari (raising the bladeless staff): You don’t sound like you’re bluffing. But I’ve got a
broken-weapon technique too.
Misao (thinking): He’s not smiling anymore. (aloud) So Kaoru finally got you to
take us seriously.
Kamatari: What are you talking about? I took you seriously from the start.
Misao: LIAR!
Kamatari: It’s true. You can’t be a transvestite half-heartedly. No matter how hard I wish, I can never
have a woman’s body, so I’ll never be able to compete with Yumi of the Night. And no matter
how hard I train, I’ll never be as good as Soujirou, the best of the Ten Swords. As a man or
as a woman, I’ll never be Lord Shishio’s favorite, I’ll always be the odd one out. Since it’s
all I can do, I fulfill my duties perfectly. With all of my heart. Fighting for Lord
Shishio is all I have! I can’t let anything stop me!
(He drives the barbed end of the staff into the links of the chain and twists, pulling it up
into a windmill and hurling it at Kaoru.)
Honshuu-style Great Scythe techniques Benten Mawashi!
(Kaoru dives in under the chain.)
Kamiya Kasshin school Tsuka no Gedan--Hiza Hijiki!
(She breaks the bokutou across Kamatari’s knee, crushing the kneecap.)
Kaoru: I’m sorry . . . but I promised to go back to Tokyo with Kenshin and everyone, and I
couldn’t let anything stop me either. It’s over. Tell your troops to draw back. Those who
are hurt and cannot move, including you, will be treated . . .
Kamatari: You must be joking. (holding a tiny stiletto up to his throat) I could never go
back to Lord Shishio in such disgrace.
(Misao whacks him across the head with her wrist guard, and he falls unconscious.)
Kaoru: Misao .. .
Misao: I hate him, and I really don’t get this cross-dressing thing . . . But wanting to
fight for the one you love--that I can understand.
Kaoru: Sympathy.
Soldiers: This is insane . . .
First Lord Henya, and now Lord Kamatari, one of the Ten Swords, is defeated by two
girls . . .
Captain: Don’t lose your heads! There’s still the Round Demon! Lord Iwanbou’s going to
fight!
Soldiers (chanting): Lord Iwanbou, Lord Iwanbou!
Iwanbou (turning to look at them, with a goofy look on his face): Gufu?
(They step back, aghast.)
Soldiers: No--he’s too stupid!! Run for it!!
Iwanbou (finding himself alone): Gufu.
(He turns to look at Okon and Omasu, then Kuro and Shiro, then Misao and Kaoru.)
Misao: His--his head just turned one-eighty degrees . . .
Kaoru: It’s gotta be some kind of illusion.
Iwanbou: GUFU!!
(He bounces up over the rooftops and away.)
Okon: Hey, he ran away!
Okina: Don’t bother chasing after him. Our goal is achieved. Good work, everyone.
We’ve won.
(Suddenly, a massive shadow falls over them.)
Saitsuchi: So you routed Kamatari and the others. All the better, then.
(A huge sword cuts through the building opposite the Aoiya. Saitsuchi appears, riding in the
hand of a giant fully twice as tall as the buildings.)
Saitsuchi: That means we have you all to ourselves!
The Makings of the Characters--Honjou Kamatari
A gay character who fights with a scythe--my assistant started it all with these few words.
As I said in the section about Usui in the fourteenth book, most of the Ten Swords started
as my assistant's ideas that I developed, and Kamatari was the first we decided on. Well,
it’s all very well to decide this, but when I actually thought about it, I couldn’t settle
on what to do with him. At first I thought I’d do a character who looked completely masculine
but whose personality was all woman, then I thought about one who looked like a totally sexy,
sultry woman on the outside but who acted like a guy, and finally a macho, bearded gay; I just
kept thinking of things and rejecting them, thinking them up and turning them down, until a
friend of mine said "How about a cute girl type?" It’s pretty conventional, but I drew it,
and he ended up being tenth in the polls . . . So I tasted another secret at the depths of
the art of manga--overthinking an idea.
I meant his personality to be more thoroughly light and sunny, but in the end his serious side
came out and I changed my mind. (Serious is the next thing to being dark. Soon, I’ll have a
bad habit of tending that way, proof that I’m still inexperienced at writing.)
Thoroughly sunny plus the character’s thoughts--that’s my task for the next time we meet
Kamatari.
As for the design, to put it simply, his face is based on Ikari Yui from Evangelion.
His body was drawn completely ad-lib, so there was no design. My analysis is that the overall
triangular silhouette was influenced by Reirei in Vampire Hunter. Also, the great scythe is a
real weapon. But, to get the force you saw, I exaggerated the scythe part quite a bit, and
you can’t really wield it like Kamatari does. (Well, you shouldn’t be able to.) The real
great scythe is a chain scythe with a long handle and is used like a mix of the usual chain
scythe and a chigirigi. It’s an interesting weapon, so I think it would have been more fun
to show a more realistic way of fighting with it, so I’m a little disappointed.
(by the way "a gay man who fights with a scythe" is "okama no kama-tsukai" in japanese, so it's a little bit of a pun--maigo-chan.)
translations by maigo-chan