Makoto Shishio Quotes
2 quotes from Rurouni Kenshin, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Kenshin's successor as the Ishin's assassin, burned alive by the government that hired him and back a decade later to burn the government. He is the only villain in the series with a fair grievance against the hero, and he knows exactly where to press it.
“If the revolution is over, then I'll start another one!”
Shishio was Kenshin's replacement. When the Battousai walked away from assassination in the last years of the Bakumatsu, the Chōshū faction hired another man to do the same work, and when the war was won they shot him, doused him in oil and lit him, because a hitokiri who knows where the bodies are is a liability to a government trying to look respectable. That is the biography behind the sentence, and it changes what kind of villain he is. He is not a reactionary who wants the shogunate back and not a nihilist who wants the country burned. He wants the revolution to keep going until it produces a state that would not have done that to him, and the fact that the state he imagines is worse is, from where he stands, the Meiji government's fault for teaching him what winners do. Kenshin is the only person who can answer him because Kenshin is the only other person who was used the same way and chose differently. The series knows this, and it never lets Kenshin claim the moral high ground in that fight without Shishio pointing out who is standing on it.
Read Makoto Shishio's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Shishio dies of his own body. The bandages cover burns the Ishin government gave him when they set fire to their own assassin to erase him, and the injury left him unable to sweat, so that any sustained exertion cooks him from the inside; the fight with Kenshin has a fifteen-minute clock on it for that reason, and by the time he says this the clock has run out. So the line is the creed of the strong delivered by a man whose flesh is catching fire, and the series stages it as exactly that. He has been right about one thing all along, which is that the Meiji government used him and Kenshin the same way and only one of them got to be a hero; his whole revolt is that grievance dressed as social Darwinism. What the ending commits him to is a definition of strength that his own body fails. Kenshin never lands a killing blow. Nothing in the philosophy accounts for a fire that does not care who is stronger, and Yumi, who understood him better than his doctrine did, is already dead beside him.