Kaoru Kamiya Quotes

Kaoru is the character the series is most often accused of having nothing to do, and this is the sort of line that shows the accusation is about screen time rather than substance. The Meiji government abolished the samurai class and its privileges by decree in the 1870s, which is the equality she means, and her dojo is an institution that only makes sense in the world that decree was supposed to create: a school where a fatherless girl teaches a pickpocket a sword style meant for protecting people rather than serving a lord. Her point is that a law can end a class and not end the way people treat each other, and every antagonist of the early episodes proves her right, from the fake Battousai who empties her school with a rumor to the police who still carry swords in the streets. It is the show's actual politics stated in one breath. Kenshin's vow is a private answer to the same problem. Kaoru's dojo is the public one, and it is the one that has students at the end.

Kaoru narrates the first fight, and the choice of narrator is the point. She runs a dojo and has spent the episode being condescended to by a thug and a police unit, 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 nearly breaks Kenshin 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.