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.

In the same episode Kaoru asks him to stay and he promises to return. This is the other half, a farewell and not a see-you-later, and it implies they are unlikely to meet again. Ōkubo, who asked him to go to Kyoto, has been assassinated before the answer was due, and Kenshin's answer is to go the way the Battousai would have gone: alone, 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 farewell plays as a romantic beat and it is not romantic at all. It is a relapse. Kaoru's depression afterward, and Megumi's pep talk, are the show saying so out loud, and the whole Kyoto arc is the cast refusing to accept the goodbye.