Kenshin Himura Quotes

Quoted on its own, the sentence sounds like Kenshin's philosophy, and it is the opposite. He says it to Gohei Hiruma, the thug who has been passing himself off as the Battousai to empty Kaoru's dojo, and it is Gohei's position he is stating, accurately, before turning it down. The next breath is the actual point: Kaoru's sword-that-gives-life is sweet, innocent talk that only someone with clean hands could believe, and he would rather have the sweet talk than the truth. A former assassin choosing a naive doctrine with his eyes open is a very different thing from a naive person holding it, and the first episode is careful to show which one he is. Hiko, forty episodes later, says the same first half back to him almost word for word and means it as a rebuke. The series spends its whole run testing whether a man can know the truth about swords and live by the lie anyway, and this scene, which listicles cut in half, is where it tables the question.

Kaoru has just asked him to stay, and he has just promised to come back. Then he says this, which is a farewell and not a see-you-later, and the episode lets her understand the difference in real time. Ōkubo's murder has made Shishio the government's problem, and Kenshin's answer to being asked to go to Kyoto is to go the way the Battousai would have gone: alone, at night, without the people who might get killed for standing near him. What makes the scene work is that he has spent thirty episodes building a household precisely so that he would have something other than a sword, and the moment it is threatened he reverts to protecting it by leaving it. The firefly scene is the most quoted romantic beat in the series and it is not romantic at all. It is a relapse. Kaoru's collapse afterward, and Megumi slapping her out of it, are the show saying so out loud, and the whole Kyoto arc is the cast refusing to accept the goodbye.

Three words of that sentence do more work than the rest of it. Kenshin refers to himself as sessha, an archaic, humble pronoun that roughly means this unworthy person, and the English adaptations split on what to do with it. The Viz manga went with this one, which keeps the strangeness and makes him sound like a man talking about himself from a slight distance. The 1996 dub dropped the pronoun and gave him a tic instead, the that I do and that it is tacked onto his sentences, which carries the politeness and loses the self-erasure. The manga's choice is the better one for this line in particular, because the vow is not really a moral claim. It is a way of holding himself apart from the person who did the killing, and a pronoun that will not say I is that distance made grammatical. When his eyes go amber and the sessha drops out of his speech, as it does against Jin-e and again against Saito, the audience knows who is talking before he has drawn the sword.

Saito's objection deserves a better answer than it gets here, and the series knows it. His question is how a man who will not kill can protect anyone, and Kenshin's reply concedes the whole scale of the argument: not the nation, not the era, only the people in front of him. Set beside Saito's own creed, which is national in scope and requires corpses, that is a small ambition, and Saito treats it as one. But the concession is the position. Kenshin was the man who tried to protect an era with a sword during the Bakumatsu, and the result was a hundred assassinations and a wife dead by his own blade, so a philosophy that limits itself to arm's reach is not modesty, it is a lesson paid for. Whether it holds is the Kyoto arc's question, because Shishio is a threat to the whole country and the man who says this line has to go and stop him anyway. He does, and he still does not kill him; Shishio's own body does that. The series arranges the ending so that Kenshin's small answer survives a large test without quite being proven.