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Bansai breathed in for the twentieth-ish time and panned his eyes around. He didn’t remember how he'd got there, he didn’t even know where it was. He couldn’t recall what was taking place before this. He knew who he was, he knew what happened throughout his life, its milestones, and their orders. He didn’t, however, have any idea of which was the one leading to where he was now.
He was sitting on a log, under a solitary pergola of wisteria. A drastic curtain of purple was formed on one side, and a shorter, but not any less majestic, fringe on the other. The ground below the pergola was covered in small pebbles, which fizzled with his every move, and outside of it was a field of grass running vastly to the horizon.
It should have felt calm to be here, except Bansai’s experience told him otherwise. It was peaceful and quiet, and peace and quietness were not the words to describe how anything in his life should play out. Still, something about him was off, as if there used to be an always-on button to trigger his flighting reflex and the button was now jammed, forcing him to enjoy the tranquillity he never expected.
Bansai closed his eyes and opened them again, only to be met with the same scenery. The only change of view he was offered was the slight squirm of the wisteria as the wind ruffled through the vines. The curtain of purple in front of him wavered for a few seconds, leaving spaces for glints of sunlight to sneak through and haphazardly flicker, waltzing in a bizarre harmony over the pebbles on the ground.
The wind over the wisteria sounded like a message to him, delivered with a soft voice, slim like a whisper, in a language he unfortunately never understood. Bansai could hear his low sigh of disappointment mingle with it, forming a mellow melody. It should be soothing music to his ears, yet Bansai wasn’t in a situation where he could enjoy it.
He could tell the back of his head was alerted, as it should be, considering the suspicious situation, yet his instinct seemed to have a different idea. For the first time, probably in his whole life, Bansai’s instinct clashed with his logical thoughts, spreading its claws and seizing his senses, not to trigger any warzone on the verge of breaking out inside of him, but to tell him to relax.
After another round of clearing his head for nothing, Bansai gave in and did as he was told. He trusted his instinct, despite its occasional terrible judgments. In case this was one of such occasions, he secretly hid the wariness in the corner of his head, where the alert started earlier. He didn’t let down his guard, but he allowed himself to take a look at his surroundings, this time with less caution and more adoration.
From the first look, the place seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. No one was there, but Bansai knew better than to get tricked by the outlook. This place could be remote, but it wasn’t that far from civilization. The ground was too clean, the logs to sit on were placed too neatly on the floor, the grass seemed too evenly groomed and the fringe of wisteria was too perfect to be the work of nature only.
Still, it was hard to imagine a human being able to keep this place in such a state. Perhaps he was also wrong to assume that it had to involve humans. Perhaps it was a species of Amanto born dedicatedly to gardening. Perhaps it wasn’t even the job of any entity he could ever encounter. Perhaps it was the closest thing he ever had to the High Lord or whatever religious people were so fussy about.
He arched one hand up and tried touching the wisteria near the ground, intending to find the frame. It was common sense to assume that there must be something for the wisteria to climb on, like rafters and beams, and struts and posts to connect the pergola to the ground. Much to his surprise, his hand felt nothing of such, and no matter how hard he tried, Bansai failed to detect any part of the presumed frame.
Which was hard to explain, and even harder to believe. He could tell, by the volume of wisteria, that the plant in total was heavy, and the vines couldn't carry all of them on their own, let alone spread out that wide and majestic. There had to be a frame, a core, a base on which the wisteria leaned to grow, and the fact that he couldn’t find such an apparent thing in such a tiny place made Bansai feel stupid.
He tried again, scrambling through the pebbles, looking beneath the logs, touching the grass, and running out of the pergola to see it from afar. He tried every way he could think of, squeezing his head out for an answer, examining even the most improbable explanation available. None of them seemed to apply to this place, and after a long while of messing around and pissing himself off, Bansai accepted defeat.
He returned under the pergola and leaned on a log, darting his eyes up above, where the sunlight danced along with the rhythm of the wind, and the wisteria fluttered, mocking him with their hazy whispers. Bansai wished to understand their language. Perhaps only then could he see through the mystery of the wisteria that stood by themselves, and figure out the secret of this bizarre place.
Time had passed. For how long, Bansai didn’t remember. He’d lost count. Time in this place didn’t flow in the way Bansai was familiar with his whole life. The sky above was always blue, the clouds were always white, and the wisteria was always purple, elegantly and gently, delivering a secret message, in the form of incomprehensible whispers.
It wasn’t like he should keep track of the time. He had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. He couldn’t leave this place. He’d tried running away, but it was only the wisteria that he saw, silently awaiting his arrival. No matter which direction he chose, the pergola would end up there, at the end of the journey, looming over with its majestic curtain of purple and waving, like a gesture to welcome him back.
After a while, Bansai had given up on escaping. The pergola seemed to be the only destination he could ever reach. A final destination, the place that marked the end of it all. There wasn’t supposed to be anywhere further, there wasn’t anything beyond.
From the depth of his heart, Bansai knew what it meant. The idea came to him and had refused to leave his head since he suddenly showed up here without a reason or any idea of what'd led to it, but he postponed the thought. He wasn’t the type to give up without trying, and he wouldn’t accept defeat without making sure there was no way to get out of it first.
And now, as all of his efforts didn’t pay off, he could finally bring himself to welcome the reality. He once thought that it would bite, with teeth like daggers stabbing him to the core, and the realization would swallow him whole to the depth of despair, leaving not a single piece to hope. It was more tender than that, just a rustle of the wind through the curtain of wisteria.
Bansai walked under the pergola for the twentieth-ish time, panting because of the run, and eventually getting rid of the alarms and wariness.
Bansai leaned over the log he was sitting on, breathing in the wisteria fragrance, feeling its benevolent caress tending to his senses. It was soothing, and he had learned to embrace the comfort without raising his alert to the top. He closed his eyes, shielding them away from the flare of the sunlight, and smiled, recalling the moment when he acknowledged his defeat.
He had only accepted defeat three times in his life. The battle with Gintoki, the moment he met Shinsuke, and this one. Losing to an object of gardening that couldn’t even wield a sword, or move, sounded humiliating, but Bansai knew his opponent this time wasn’t simply the wisteria or the pergola. It was the entity that no being could match, an old friend that Bansai thought he’d met at a younger age.
What he wasn’t aware of was that Death would look so calm and feel so peaceful. Throughout his life, Bansai was taught that Death presented in the form of an atrocity, dark and troubled – a skeleton, a man in a black hood, a godly entity carrying a scythe, a spooky strand of black smoke, or monsters of any kind. Now that he’d seen Death, all of those descriptions were proven inaccurate.
Death was far more colourful than that. Death was the purple of wisteria, the green of the leaves and vines, and the vast grass field. Death was beige like the pebbles under his feet, brown like the logs he was leaning on, and blue like the sky. Death could take any form, and not all of them should be associated with terror.
Bansai didn’t know why Death chose a wisteria curtain to present him, but he had a theory about that. The form of Death reflected the way one felt about it. Someone who feared Death would see it as terrorizing, someone who despised it would only see sinister. Bansai never flinched at the thought of dying, he saw Death like a console acquaintance. Then a nice place it was, for him, as his life ended and the afterlife opened.
He smiled at the thought and recalled the moment when he decided to give up. He didn’t feel disappointed at the realization, but defeat was probably something he’d foreseen before forcing himself into hopeless attempts to escape. He remembered standing there and staring at the pergola for the last time. Right after that, the angry stare turned into a look of acceptance, and the remaining of his grudge scattered into a pile of ash, blown away by the next visit of the wind.
He remembered walking toward the pergola and gently lifting the wisteria fringe, and walking inside. He remembered putting a hand over his chest like a gesture to imprint the place into his heart, no longer as somewhere to run away from, but as a home to stay for eternity. He remembered realizing, like an idiot, after a very damn long while, that he had no heartbeat.
Bansai opened his eyes. He placed his hand over where his heart should be, feeling the stillness. His heart had been put to rest and he didn’t expect it to wake up again. A dead man no longer needed a heart. He wondered if he would have realized the situation earlier if he had focused on the heart in the first place, but soon shook off the idea.
It wasn't important. It’d be a matter of time to realize that he was no longer alive, and time meant nothing in a place that was under the control of Death.
Bansai didn’t feel the urge to sleep, but he closed his eyes, here and there, for the sake of letting himself have a pretended rest. He didn’t need to rest for real anymore, he was, by all means, resting in peace, but he missed it when he could zone out and let his mind wander off to the places his physical body couldn’t visit. So he was sleeping, and then he woke up and was struck by a cluster of purple.
A gust of wind, stronger than usual, had ripped a vine of wisteria off the pergola and brought it down closer to where Bansai was lying. He reached for the flowers above him, feeling the silky petals with every touch. He’d never seen the wisteria here this close – they didn’t look any different from those in the world of the living – and the novel proximity this time made him smile with excitement.
The wisteria was purple, from afar and below. The colour didn’t seem to deepen as he watched it from a closer distance. It would be a blatant lie to say that it was the first time Bansai associated death with purple. Purple, to him, had a lot of connections with death. It represented not exactly an entity, like the Grim Reaper or the Angel of Death, but the state of deceasing, dying or killing, of something approaching the end. It wasn't, however, an absolute end, but rather the mark of a fresh beginning.
He’d experienced it before, the feeling of death creeping in and grasping him within its claws, not to take him away, but to give him the once-in-a-lifetime chance to be born anew. It was the one night before his execution, also the same night when he first met the man of purple. Bansai the Manslayer was buried that night, under layers of locked-up memories, paving the way for the rebirth of Kawakami Bansai of Kiheitai.
As the reminiscences came to him, Bansai couldn’t help a soft smile. He should have known earlier, yet he let it slide, that the damp prison cell of that fateful night was a stage for that man to put on a show and allured Bansai to him. The man told him his name, which he kept to his heart and called so dearly later on, Shinsuke, and spoke about his bloodlust, his hatred toward this mad world, his plan to always slip out of Death's grasp, and his desire to destroy.
Aside from the name, none of them sounded like the appropriate thing to lure a person to one’s side, and none of them worked. It wasn’t Shinsuke’s words that entrapped Bansai into his ideology – Bansai hadn’t properly listened to any of them from the beginning. As always, Bansai only paid attention to what mattered – music. He agreed to join Shinsuke because of the man’s song, a bloody and elegant reflection of the void inside his heart.
Shinsuke may have managed to hide it from the world, but Bansai was a well-trained musician who sensed what others couldn’t. He knew a broken melody when he heard one, and Shinsuke’s melody was more than merely broken. It was shattered into pieces with razor-sharp edges, stained with the smoke of his bygone days and of the blood from everyone he detested and loved, killed and refused to kill.
It was a wrecked melody that shared a lot of similarities with Bansai’s desperate one. He knew, from the first look at Shinsuke and another at himself, that nobody was able to fix their songs to the way they used to be, but it wasn’t what they needed from the start. The desperation in their songs referred to a call for a companion, someone who saw through their wounds and pains, who found and tendered the leftover of their former selves, someone who willingly walked along with them on their blood-stained, dimly-lit path of life, and probably also of death.
That, Bansai could do. That, Bansai wanted to do. He initially accepted Shinsuke’s deathly invitation as a means to save both of them from their everlasting solitude, but their connection soon got more serious. Bansai stayed with Shinsuke, even after the man’s alluring play ended and the curtain fell, revealing the tattered man he really was. Especially then. Bansai remained within Shinsuke's reach, under his command, loyal and well-trusted, not just as a subordinate, but also as his companion for life.
He could tell that his former self had withered that night, right at the moment he said yes to Shinsuke’s offer and his play was unveiled. A new one was born. A monster, fresh and ruthless, more chaotic and deranged, knowing no mercy or compassion, answering to nothing but his song of bloodlust, kneeling before no one else but a forsaken demon samurai, whose name could make the toughest Amanto quiver.
If there was anything Bansai disliked about this place, it would be that he didn’t have his shamisen with him. He’d only thought of it recently, when he had all the time in this world for his thoughts and memories, and realized the shamisen’s presence in all of them. The flashes back weren’t exactly comfortable – most of them were grief and trauma – but his shamisen always carried with it a sense of comfort.
Bansai didn’t know where soulless objects went as they died – provided getting destroyed was equivalent to dying. Probably nowhere. They had no soul, nothing for Death to lead to the afterlife. Their bodies either remained where their owners discarded them and were forever forgotten like a piece of trash, or got remade into something else – perhaps that was their version of rebirth, or, the afterlife.
Either way, it seemed like Bansai wouldn’t have the chance to reunite with his shamisen. It’d been his longest companion, human and non-human counted. It chuckled as he laughed, wept as he cried, and chanted along with the echo of his soul. It stained its strings with the blood of his victims and played them the song of farewell as he sang them the last verse of their lives.
It wasn’t easy to acknowledge that he would never get a hold of his shamisen again, never listen to its music again. It was even harder, knowing that it was him that let it get destroyed on the battlefield, without even a chance to bid a proper adieu.
Wait.
The battlefield.
The thought of his shamisen had brought back a lot of memories, but not until then did Bansai realize that it was the memory he’d been dire seeking. He’d been wandering about the event that marked the end of his living period and opened up the beginning of it all, the wisteria, the pergola, the land of the afterlife. He hadn’t given it a lot of thought before, because he hadn’t known where to look. Now he knew.
And with it, other memories were unveiled, little by little. Like a picture slowly emerging as the puzzles came into place, his last battle was brought back, more vivid than ever, a stark contradiction to the tranquillity of the wisteria whispers.
Shinsuke was what he was calling then, his last word. The name imprinted in his broken heart, lingering in his mind, as his soul departed the agonizing world it was forced to endure, aiming to the embrace of Death.
Shinsuke was probably the last note ever sung by Bansai, with his shamisen, in a state of his mind. It could very well be the last piece of music the shamisen ever played, before dying along with its master.
“Shinsuke,” was what Bansai called, among the clasp of wisteria, his first word ever in this tranquil land of Death. It echoed to the sky above and sprinted through the grass, dashed to the endless horizon, and then reverberated back to Bansai’s nonexistent heart.
It was the only thing he could do then, plunging himself into the enemies, paving a route for Shinsuke to escape. It was the only thing he could do now, calling Shinsuke’s name, hoping and praying that the man had made it to safety. That he would put an end to the war and could finally find love and peace again. That their reunion in this place, despite how much Bansai yearned for it, would be postponed for as long as an eternity.
Bansai peered his eyes through the purple curtain, watching the quiet world around him, letting the strange feeling clasp its hands around his rhetorical heart. It was not easy to recollect the experience of dying in such vigorous surroundings, and yet it made the perfect sense to recall his dying moment, as he was, literally, sitting in the land of Death.
He looked again, taking to memory the comfort of the weather, the wisteria, and the silence. The atmosphere was uplifting, the breezes were occasional visits of the wind, and the sunlights were just fine strokes compensating for it. The jiggling fringe of wisteria over Bansai’s head was a treat for his eyes, and his ears were filled with the sound of utmost silence.
It was a rare feeling that Bansai was still not used to, even after a long while staying in this place. He didn’t remember the last time he had experienced the absolute absence of music – perhaps it was never. The world he used to live in was a ruptured place, overflown – and infested – with living souls. Each of them played a song, conveying within their melody hidden messages he simply couldn’t ignore.
But it was the world he had left behind, and the life he no longer lived. Now he was here, existing in a place totally out of the grasp of the living, where everything he’d known was faltering, challenged, and overwritten. Now the wisteria was his only friend, and their whispers were his only source of music. Not that Bansai complained, but he needed more time to adjust to it.
His own song had stopped playing, which never happened before. Bansai could turn off others’ songs by simply isolating himself from the crowd, but his own would remain, sometimes as a thoughtful companion, sometimes as an inspiration, rarely as a piece that accidentally matched the verses of the songs he was writing, and most of the time as an unexpected obstacle, a mere annoyance.
That was to say, the echo of Bansai’s deranged soul had been a part of his life, and its existence wasn’t something he could control. It’d probably been there when he arrived in this hellhole of the world, as a lousy welcome gift from whichever entity above that loved to disturb his life even more, and it’d departed with him, hand-in-hand, as he decided to stay back on the battlefield.
There was only one reason why it had stopped, and he knew why. Death snatched his ability away before ripping him off from the world of the living. With a stroke of pain, then an inevitable collapse, at one moment his ears were bombarded with a cacophony of Amanto’s babblings, then the next there was no song but his, and even it was fading, turning feebler, dimmer, slowly merging into nothingness.
He also remembered vaguely seeing Nizou at his curtain call, but hearing no song from the man. It’d troubled him then, but now Bansai knew why. Dead men had no heartbeat, hence no matching song. It was probably a favour of Death, because Bansai couldn’t imagine getting stuck in such a quiet place and still being annoyed constantly by a melody that, guaranteed, did not go well with any of the scenery.
As he thought again about his death and the reason behind his sacrifice, Bansai could not help a cracked smile. He wasn’t able to tell the emotions in it apart, nonetheless. There was a stroke of sadness and a sprinkle of regret, there was more of joy, of relief, of comfort and hope. Shinsuke and Matako could have made it to safety. They should have. They must have.
The world couldn't afford to lose any of them just yet. It could bear to lose him, however, someone of no significance, a sacrifice at arm's length. A manslayer at war was no different from an outcast in Kabuki-chou, or a no-one in an unremarkable background. Bansai knew his position, and he was glad that he could live his life like that, standing in the dark, letting light reach the people who deserved it.
He leaned back, putting his mind at ease and enjoying the wisteria’s fragrance. He heard a slight whisper in the place of his song and smiled again. He’d grown familiar with the wisteria whispers, and although he never understood what they conveyed, he would like to think that they mean well. An echo, perhaps, of the wish he’d constantly made, to his beloved friends, for the peaceful lives all of them should live.
Bansai didn’t know how long it had been, in here, and also in the world of the living. Must be a few minutes, or almost half an hour. May as well be days, weeks, or years. Ages, or lives, even. The wind is unchanging, and the wisteria remained exactly how they were the first time he looked at them, looming over him with its soothing embrace of purple fringes.
Or at least it was as he thought.
A flower fell on his face, just as Bansai “woke up” from the periodical closing his eyes and zoning out. He could tell it was not normal, given that he’d never seen the flowers falling out of their clusters before. He’d seen vines pulled out by the wind, usually to deliver him a piece of calmness on the looney occasions when his thoughts wandered off too far, but the flowers always stayed in their places.
Anything in this world happened for a reason. Anything out of the ordinary should mean something more serious was on the way. Bansai swallowed and blinked, trying to recall the alarm he had put to rest at the back of his head. It wasn’t there, as he’d got rid of it, along with his will to escape, the moment he accepted defeat earlier. The logical part of his mind told him it was merely a flower, a change of view, and he shouldn’t worry.
But he couldn’t help feeling a slight churn of the guts, a clear sign of his instinct. Knowing that it was right earlier when it called for relaxation, Bansai chose to trust it once more and kept his eyes alert, running from the vastness of grass to the horizon, from the fringes of wisteria to the uneventful sky over his head.
One more flower left its place, landing on Bansai’s shoulder, and clung there, refusing to leave. The purple stood up against the colour of his jacket. Bansai blinked, and suddenly he heard the wind rumbling louder than ever, enhancing the volume of the whispers. It was almost as if the two things took place at once, the wisteria on his shoulder, and the resilient voices in his ears.
That was the start of them all. Bansai stayed where he was, eye-wide, as more and more flowers shredded, covering the ground with their purple petals. The pebbles under his feet fizzled, but he could barely hear them. His ears were filled with the blaring noises of the wisteria whispers, each getting louder by the moment, like an urgent attempt to draw his attention, to make him listen.
They were still meaningless words, merely a cacophony of babblings. But then something struck Bansai. It was never words that captured his attention since the start. It was never words that he’d listened to when he was alive, it was never words that charmed him and led him on his path of life. It was sound, it was music, it was the echo of the soul that mattered.
The wisteria whispers were a melody, not a language.
As the thought snapped, Bansai shifted his focus on the rhythm of the whispers, he detected, for the first time, a familiar melody. It was the same melody he heard in that damp prison cell, on the stage a certain man put up to convince him to join his force. It wasn’t loud enough earlier for Bansai to make out, but it was deafening now, like an alarm, a desperate message that he had to hear.
And Bansai realized that he knew why. All of a sudden, among the melody and the whispers, he heard a word, from a voice he’d never expected to meet again, at least not anytime soon. It was calling for him, his own name.
“Bansai?”
A silhouette showed up, out of nowhere, not even approaching close by from the horizon. It was just there straight away, among the purple petals. Then a hand lifted the fringe, leaving the space for an eye to peer through, into the drastic scene of wisteria shedding. A voice rose, breaking out of the silence.
“Bansai?” was what he said. He looked not a year older than he was as they departed, but Bansai knew he should look older. It could be due to the sense of long time Bansai’d had in this place, but it could also be a piece of knowledge suddenly showing up in his mind, letting him know that Shinsuke had indeed lived the peaceful life he deserved before reuniting with him here.
It didn’t matter, how this world worked and how it put the information into Bansai’s mind. What mattered was that Shinsuke had made it through the war, and led a full life, and now he was here. And Bansai was here. They were eventually together. It was all that mattered.
“Shinsuke?” Bansai said, finally finding his voice. It sounded peculiar, after a long while of not using it, but it was all he needed. A chance to call Shinsuke’s name again, and this time, with him there to hear it.
“You wait for me?” His beloved commander, or ex-commander, asked.
“All day. Every day,” Bansai said, finally realizing the nature of his lingering here, under the wisteria, listening to their whispers. “I have made a promise, and I’m a man of my word,” he smiled, tasting his tears, “I daresay.”
Their fingers entangled. And Bansai knew, this time, they would never part again.
- fin -