I've never liked museums.

	Actually, I've never liked anything that had a lot to do with
thinking, reflection, that sort of crap.  They all smell of dust and hopes
that died.  Give me the open sky and fresh air anyday.

	Was that the way that it was like for you?  Before industry moved
into Japan, I think it must have been like some kind of paradise.  Hell,
I've lived most of my life on the road, and I still can't get used to the
crap people downtown are expected to breathe.

	The books always put it in such damn flowery language, you'd never
think that anyone was actually *killing* anyone.  Two men meet beneath the
star-lit sky, they dash at each other, they leap to silhouette the moon,
the swords flash, they land, and blood stains the grass.  Never any
mention of intestines, oddly enough.

	I learned to read on that kind of thing.  I think my pop would
have been just as happy if I hadn't.  And now a half-remembered word in a
newspaper draws me down out of the suburbs and into the heart of Tokyo to
attend an exhibition of swords at a museum.

	Including a sakaba.

	Your sakaba, maybe.

	When I first read about that kind of thing in the books, I said to
myself, "That is *so* dumb!"  I mean, think about it.  You take all that
trouble to forge a sword *ass-backwards*.  You put the cutting edge on the
side of the blade that curves up, and the blunt side on the side that
curves down.  Dumb.  If you hit someone with the blunt side of a stick of
iron, you're still gonna wind up doing some heavy damage.  So you won't be
shedding blood.  So what?  What kind of idiot handicaps himself like that?

	I was pretty young when I thought that.  Maybe I've grown up a
little.  Maybe I've had to.  I think that now ... I understand what kind
of an idiot handicaps himself like that.

	An idiot who's too damn good at his trade.

	The question isn't, "How much damage can you do?", it's "How much
control do you have over the damage that you can do?"  How much more
skillful do you have to be to strike someone with the blunt side of a
sword and leave them out like a light but alive ... than to strike them
with the sharp side of the same sword, and cut all the way through them.

	How much more skill does it take to not kill, than it does to
kill?

	I think I've learned that.

	And that is why I've come here to this museum that stinks of the
past like every classroom where I've ever killed time.  To pay homage.

	I don't have practically anything to tie me to you, y'know?  All I
really have is Mom's one photo of you.  It's monochrome, fading ... you,
with your sword held in the folds of your crossed arms, leaning against
the side of a building, looking off and away from the camera, just enough
to give a bit of profile.  We're supposed to think it's a candid shot.
But come on ... nobody sneaks up on one of us unless we let them.

	I don't have anything to tie me to you ... but all I have to do is
look at that picture and then look in the mirror.  And I know.

	I'm not you.  According to the stories I don't wanna *be* you.
To me a sword is always gonna be something that the other guy can take
away from me and use against me.

	But I know just how hard it is to not kill with these fists, too.
I learn it again every day that I have to beat the crap out of some guy
who's after her.  And I think it must have been just a little bit harder
for you than it is for me.

	And I honor you for that, revered ancestor.

	I slowly reach out to touch the sword ...

	And my fingers smuck into glass.  Not hard enough to break the
stuff, but hard enough to set off some kind of alarm.  Of course.

	Time to go ...

Author's Notes

	Connections.  I'm obsessed with them, frankly.  I actually *like*
the fact that a certain character in a rather controversial story is the
child of two remarkably popular non-anime characters.  Blame too many
"Separated at birth" cartoons, blame too much Phillip Jose Farmer.  Blame
my parents for never giving me an adequate answer when I asked if I was
related to author Robertson Davies or not.  And so on.

	"Ranma 1/2" was created by Rumiko Takahashi and brought to North
America by Viz Communications.  "Rurouni Kenshin" was created by Watsuki
Nobuhiro and not yet brought to North America commercially, dammit.  This
story, while incorporating characters held under copyright by others, is
copyright 1998 by Chris Davies.

	Nobody Sue Me Okay?

Chris Davies, Advocate for Darkness, Part-Time Champion of Light.
"WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?" 
-- Death, in "Reaper Man", by Terry Pratchett.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~cdavies/hmpage.html