Kaoru Kamiya Quotes

Kaoru narrates the first fight, and the choice of narrator is the point. She runs a dojo, so when the harmless wanderer she took in starts cutting through Gohei's men she is the one person present qualified to describe what she is seeing, and the show lets her. The description is also accurate about the style in a way that matters later. Hiten Mitsurugi-ryū is built on speed and on reading an opponent's next move, which is why Sōjirō, who has no readable intent because he has no readable feeling, is the fighter who breaks Kenshin's reverse-blade sword in Kyoto. Kaoru has identified the engine and its weak point in one breath, in episode one. The scene does one more thing: it makes her the audience's teacher rather than its love interest, and the series is better in the stretches where it remembers that.

Episode one gives Kaoru two kinds of disbelief, and this is the small one. He offers to make it thirty if that would please her, she says it would not, and he sighs that this is not going to be easy. In the same episode Kenshin calls her talk about the sword sweet and innocent, the kind only people whose hands have never been stained with blood can believe, and then says he prefers it to the truth. So in the same episode where he all but says what he has done, the thing she refuses to accept is the harmless number. Thirty episodes on, the disbelief has become something heavier. When he leaves for Kyoto, the line Wikiquote records from her is two words, stay here, and the next episode is titled for her choice. By the battle at the Aoiya she is inside his war, with Misao refusing to stand by and let her die. The woman who would not take his age on trust ends up taking the rest of him on it.