Enishi Yukishiro Quotes

Enishi is Tomoe's younger brother, and his revenge is designed around the fact that Kenshin cannot be punished by death. A man who has accepted that he deserves to die is not hurt by a threat to kill him, so Enishi's plan, which the manga calls jinchū, human justice as opposed to heaven's, is to take from Kenshin what Kenshin took from him and then leave him alive with it. That is why the arc's centerpiece is Kaoru's apparent murder rather than a duel. The line states the method plainly, and it is more disciplined than it sounds; Enishi is not sadistic in general, he is sadistic about one person, and he spends fifteen years and a Shanghai fortune on the specificity. The 1996 anime never got there. It ended before the manga did, and the Reflection OVA later compressed the whole arc into a frame story, which is the reason a viewer of the television series can know Kenshin's history with Tomoe in detail and have never met the boy who watched her die.

Enishi's sword style has no guard, and the reason he gives is the reason the whole arc turns on. Tomoe was the only person he had, and Kenshin killed her, so a technique that includes self-preservation would be admitting there is a self worth preserving. The manga makes the same point with a picture: Enishi sees his sister's face in his mind and she is smiling, and the smile is what tells him he is on the right course. Kenshin's counter is not a better attack. It is the vow itself, and the fight is the series' strongest argument for it, since a man who will not kill and a man who will not defend himself are two answers to the same loss and only one of them leaves anybody standing. What breaks Enishi is not the sword; it is being shown, by an old man in a ruined village, that the sister in his head stopped smiling a long time ago. The 1996 anime skipped all of this, which is why the most famous line from the arc gets credited to Kenshin online. It belongs to the old man, and this site has a fact-check saying so.