She wore the prayer bead bracelet to remind herself to never marry a fool.Ĭhiharu often practiced in a bamboo forest near the village, cutting down the thick stalks with her katana. The humiliated man jumped on his mount and rode away from the village in shame and Chiharu continued her training with renewed vigor. The wealthy young man-the son of a vicious renegade shōgun-became angry and drew his sword, and so Chiharu knocked him off his horse with her bucket, and beat him soundly. Especially not for a prissy-looking oaf like him. She wanted to be a samurai, not somebody’s housekeeper. He tossed a beaded prayer bracelet on the ground and mockingly asked her to marry him, but Chiharu laughed in his face. He saw Chiharu fetching water from the river and instantly wanted her, teasing her about her mud-caked feet. When she was about to turn nineteen a young aristocrat passed by the village on horseback. For years afterward she had nightmares about it. The Ghost Wife’s puppet scared Chiharu with its pale skin and long wild black hair. One day a traveling theatrical group came to the village and performed a puppet show called The Story of the Ghost Wife-the tale of a woman who died and then came back from the dead only to murder her husband’s new bride by ripping off her head. The pulling of a weed mimicked a defensive naginata maneuver. The planting of a rice shoot was the same as the downward motion of a katana sword thrust. But every action she performed was done with the intention of practicing her military art. When Chiharu wasn’t training she worked diligently in the fields side by side with the men and women of the village. Chiharu was to use this if any man ever tried to abduct her. It was a gold blade that fit over her finger and could be laced with poison. But he gave her a Ninja’s weapon called the neko-te-the cat’s claw. Her father told her that she would inherit the naginata upon his death. It was the same weapon that her ancestor had used, and it was good for keeping the enemy at bay as well as unseating horsemen. Around his neck he always wore a strip of red cloth torn from his late shōgun’s battle banner in remembrance of him.Ĭhiharu became adept with sword and bow, but her weapon of choice was the naginata-a long pole with a blade on one end. The times were dangerous with many warring clans, renegade shōguns, and bandits on the roads and every member of the village needed to be capable of bearing arms in case of invasion. For her father’s shōgun had been assassinated by a rival, and Chiharu’s father had returned to the village of his birth to start a family and become a farmer.īeing descended from a famous onna-bugeisha (a female samurai), Chiharu’s father felt that it was his duty to train his eldest daughter in the arts of war. The year that Chiharu was born the peach tree blossoms clung to their trees longer than anyone could remember, and so her mother and father gave her a name that meant “One thousand springs.” She was the eldest daughter of a rōnin-a samurai without a leader.
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