I know him immediately when I see him. Downright unnatural, it is. Hair as red as the blood he has splashed across the shadowed streets of Kyoto with his merciless sword. But the old man was wrong. His hair is not like blood at all.
Blood is a heavy, cold, shining color.
He is nothing like I imagined. I pictured a huge man, older, with a body thick with muscle and lined with scars of battle. He sits quietly at the table, staring sightlessly into a cup of sake. And, unlike the other men in the dining house, he doesn't even look up as I enter. I pause only for a moment, then sit at the table next to him, with my back to him.