The episode opens with a puppet stage performance (in what appears to be a variation of Bunraku
puppet theater), before what seems to be a high ranking and important audience. The narrator of the show says that no one man can defeat an army, but a creature can, and proposes to tell the audience how such a creature can come to be. The narrator then begins a story where in ancient times the master of a Rōnin was slaughtered by a rival clan whose crest was the phoenix, and how it caused "a storm to rise in his soul" as he swore vengeance. As the narrator says this, we get quick flash cuts between the ronin in the show and Mizu, who is facing down the Thousand Claws. As she looks at the Claws and Madam Kaji's murdered assistant, a hateful glare comes to Mizu's face.
Mizu cuts down the first few members of the Claws, causing some of the others to give each other nervous looks. That buys Mizu and the others time to retreat into the brothel and barricade the formidable door. Madam Kaji, Akemi, and the other girls retreat to a basement, Mizu sends Ringo to look after them and gives him a knife to use to defend himself and protect them. The girls shut themselves inside a room, with Ringo standing outside as a last line of defense. After a few moments, Akemi joins him, holding a tiny dagger, and declares the Claws will have to get through them both.
Upstairs, Mizu thinks about her childhood, remembering some tender moments with her mother, her mother's increasingly harsh admonishments against being seen, and forcefully shaving Mizu's head and telling her that she must always appear to be a boy, since the "bad men" are looking for a blue eyed girl. She then remembers her home burning down, the apparent death of her mother in the fire, and swearing to get revenge by killing the white men.
Her reverie is broken when the Claws finally manage to break down the door and enter the room. With most of the interior in darkness, they go to one of the few places with any light, and Mizu promptly ambushes them from the darkness, easily cutting them down without them even seeing her. After some time passes, a second small group comes inside, and Mizu manages to kill several more with the same tactic, but the leader of this bunch manages to fight back effectively, parrying her blade, grabbing ahold of Mizu, pinning her against the wall, and then stabbing her in the side with his claws.
The narrator from the puppet show tells of the ronin's vow to kill everyone who wears the phoenix crest and destroy their entire clan forever, but notes that the ronin would find the demon's path of revenge to be a difficult one. Mizu's flashbacks show her own difficulties in her early attempts to try to find the white men, as she is stabbed in the side by a group of opium dealers she tried to question. Badly wounded, Mizu staggered away from their hideout, weakly searching for help. Meanwhile in the performance, the ronin's violent quest for revenge has early success, but takes a toll on both the ronin's health and mind. The ronin becomes sick, and it seems likely he will die of disease without fulfilling his vow. Both the ronin and Mizu find unexpected salvation; Mizu comes across a group of prostitutes on a bridge and realizes one of them is her mother, who is surprised to see Mizu. After Mizu collapses, she takes Mizu to her home and treats her there. Meanwhile, the ailing ronin crosses paths with a woman who takes pity on him and brings him to her home and tends to him, allowing him to rest and recover.
Mizu breaks free of the Claw who wounded her and overcomes him, then staggers deeper into the brothel, alternating between fighting the Claws and retreating long enough to grab a quick rest. A pair of the Claws find the basement, and boast to Akemi and Ringo that the samurai is cornered upstairs. Ringo and Akemi manage to defend themselves and Akemi, fearing that Mizu cannot defeat the Claws alone, goes upstairs to see if she can help. Mizu continues racking up a formidable body count with the Claws, but the same one who wounded Mizu earlier manages to catch her by surprise, starts strangling her, and seems to be on the edge of killing Mizu when Akemi stabs him in the back. Hearing the sound of more Claws approaching, Akemi desperately tries to wake an unconscious Mizu.
In Mizu's past, she recovers from her wound but the money she had is soon taken by her mother to feed the older woman's opium addiction. Her mother claims to have a solution to their problems; a marriage to a disgraced samurai and horse tamer/trainer living in the mountains, who needs a wife to aid him around his house. Mizu is very opposed to the idea, but is emotionally blackmailed into accepting. Mizu meets and marries Mikio, and as time passes, the two slowly begin warming to each other, and despite some rough spots, it turns into genuine affection and eventually love.
In the performance the ronin initially intends to leave the woman after recovering his health, but the woman tries to convince him to stay, and the two fall in love, causing the ronin to set his vow of vengeance aside.
Mizu wakes up just in time to save Akemi from several of the Claws, then distracts the rest into chasing after her while Akemi flees back into the basement. Mizu draws them outside, but there are still more members of the Claws there, and they gang up on her. Unless she can find a way to change the tide of the fight (and quickly), things are looking grim for Mizu as the Claws attempt to finish her off.
In her past, Mizu opens up to Mikio. He seems intrigued when she says that the main thing she did during her childhood and adolescence was study swordsmanship as part of her quest for revenge, and asks her to have a sparring bout with him. Mizu becomes very... enthusiastic during the fight and insists on escalating things, unsheathing her sword, then mocking Mikio when he shows reluctance to do the same. Eventually she begins to trounce him, and the fight ends when (after a period of dodging all his strikes) she throws him to the ground, shoves a blade against his neck, and then forcefully kisses him. Mikio, however, does not react to this well, pushing her away and saying that Mizu really is a monster.
In the puppet theater, the ronin has been living happily with the woman and their child, but he learns a startling fact about his bride; that she is a member of the same clan with the phoenix crest that he swore to destroy. The bride pleads with him, saying that she exiled herself from her father's evil clan, and tries to win over the ronin, but a fit of rage comes over the samurai. Before the eyes of his horrified wife, he draws his sword and kills their child, then kills her as well. Rage and hatred takes over the wife's spirit, causing her to rise from death as an onryō, and she promptly slaughters him, before causing natural disasters to ravage the world around them due to her fury not being satisfied by just the ronin's death.
Mizu plans to make amends with Mikio, but learns from her mother (who is smoking opium again), that Mikio has left to deliver the horses he has tamed to his lord... including a particularly impressive specimen named Kai that Mizu helped Mikio tame and which Mikio had said would be Mizu's horse, rather than giving her to the lord. While Mikio is away, a group of armed men ride up, looking for Mizu, and reference the bounty on her. Mikio comes riding by on his horse, raising Mizu's hopes that he will aid her in fight off the attackers, but instead he rides away, leaving her to her fate. Heartbroken and enraged, Mizu lashes out at the men who came to kill her with all of her characteristic fury and skill, tearing them with apart with Mikio's naginata.
Shortly after Mizu finishes off her attackers, Mikio comes back, claiming that he had a moment of cowardice but decided to return and help Mizu. Mizu doesn't believe him, accusing him of having told the men where to find her. Mikio instead tries to put the blame on Mizu's mother, pointing out how she's been smoking opium again lately, and says that she got the money from informing on Mizu. The older woman claims that she had simply been prostituting herself again on the bridge. Mikio and Mizu's mother fight until he stabs her with a knife in his anger. He tries approaching Mizu again, but she cuts him short by killing him with a throwing dagger. With her heart poisoned by the terrible pain of betrayal and heartbreak, Mizu decides to resume her quest for vengeance against the white men.
In the present, Mizu breaks free of the Claws, then in between fighting them off, she takes off the weights on her arms and legs, connecting them to each other and her sword to turn it into a makeshift naginata. The Claws, who were already at a disadvantage thanks to the longer reach of Mizu's sword, have absolutely no chance to touch her now thanks to the added reach of her blade. She kills the remaining Claws until they're down to a few survivors who flee in terror. She then grabs boss Hamata and brings him to Madam Kaji so Kaji and her girls can get their own revenge on him.
An exhausted Mizu can barely keep from collapsing when the sound of approaching horses can be heard. It turns out that the horsemen are samurai in service to Akemi's father have arrived to collect her. Akemi tries to defy them, asking Mizu to fight on her behalf, but Mizu refuses and allows the samurai to take Akemi. Ringo is aghast at Mizu for not helping Akemi and tells her off, complete with taking off the bell Mizu tied around him when he began following her and thrusting it at her. Mizu, for her part, simply begins to slowly limp away, moving on to the next stage of her attempt to reach Fowler.
At the puppet performance, the narrator concludes the show, and it is revealed that the performance was done for the shogun and his guests. The shogun then asks Akemi what she thinks of the entertainment in Edo. Akemi replies that there is one thing she believes in the show was inaccurate: She says she met an onryō once, and searched the creature's eyes for any sign of love, mercy, or goodness, and found none. As Akemi speaks, we get a close up of her face, showing her teeth have been blackened, indicating that her engagement to the shogun's younger son has gone forward.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Action Dress Rip: Mizu tells her husband how she learnt to use the sword, so he invites her to spar with him. Things start heating up when you hear Mizu's kimono tear and then she really starts to cut loose.
- Actually Pretty Funny:
- One of the earliest signs of Mizu and Mikio warming to each other is when Mikio can't help but laugh at Mizu's terrible cooking. After a little bit Mizu starts chuckling as well, and it's the start of a thaw between the two.
- When Mizu laughs at Mikio when some apples fall on his head, he joins in after a moment.
- Ambiguous Situation: It's never said if Mikio or Mizu's mother was the one who betrayed her, and there are things which point to either one. note
- Apathetic Citizens: When Mizu is wounded and staggering down the road, most people ignore her staggering forward and asking for help. The most she gets for a response is a woman stopping her child from getting close to Mizu. The prostitutes on the bridge don't notice Mizu's condition at first, and so they approach her like she's just another customer, but when Mizu is close enough they realize that she's badly wounded and are appalled at the sight.
- Asshole Victim: Nobody, in universe or out, is going to be crying for boss Hamata after he's killed by Madam Kaji.
- Bait the Dog: Mikio's entire character is essentially this. While he and Mizu start off tense, he also often shows a kindness and decency that has been absent from much of Mizu's life (he never says anything bigoted about Mizu being mixed race or having blue eyes, he's obviously impressed with her strength when she does chores that require heavy lifting, respects the work Mizu does with helping him tame horses, and acts gentle and kind to her no matter what happens), until Mizu reveals how bloodthirsty she can be in battle. Then he may have betrayed her, and even if he didn't, he abandoned her to die and killed her mother over an argument.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Mikio says he wants to see Mizu's true character, not just a facade or the act that Mizu's mother wants her to put on. When he sees what Mizu is like when it comes to combat, he's disturbed and doesn't like it much. (To the least.)
- Berserk Button: If Mikio wasn't the traitor (in which case he'd just be desperate to cover his tracks after being accused), he flies off the handle more than he'd ever been seen to when Mizu's mother calls him dishonorable and weak. (Then again, those words would be a massive provocation for a samurai from that era.)
- Betrayal by Inaction: When Akemi asks Miku to back her up against her father's samurai, Mizu merely sits down and allows them to carry Akemi off.
- Broken Pedestal: After seeing Mizu hand over Akemi without a fight, Ringo gives her a What the Hell, Hero? speech and hands back the bell she attached to his leg, which she warned him never to remove unless he wanted to end his apprenticeship.
- The Cavalry Arrives Late: Several samurai serving Akemi's father arrive not long after Mizu has finished fighting the Claws. If they'd arrived sooner they could have been useful against the Claws and made the whole thing much easier on Mizu. If it had been anyone but Mizu fighting against the Claws, they probably would have found nothing but Akemi's corpse, just from getting there a few minutes too late.
- Cavalry Betrayal:
- Mikio could have acted as the cavalry for Mizu against the men who came to take take but whether out of a Moment of Weakness (if he was telling the truth), or because he was the one to sell her out, he rides away instead, leaving her to live or die by herself.
- Akemi sees Mizu's refusal to help her against her father's samurai as this.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Flashbacks to Mizu's early childhood show Mizu's mother had an opium addiction even then, as she is shown with an opium pipe. This plays a role later in Mizu's life, as her mother later takes Mizu's money to buy more opium, and arranges the marriage between Mizu and Mikio to resolve their issues with their finances and living arrangements.
- Mikio claims that the naginata is the best weapon to use when one is outnumbered. Mizu is shown putting one to good use twice in the episode, using Mikio's naginata against the men who come to collect the bounty on her, and against the Claws once the fight moves outdoors.
- Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Mizu's mother tries to claim this, saying that Mizu was better off alone after the fire. It's not particularly convincing.
- Dirty Coward: Boss Hamata takes no part in the fighting and can only cower and half beg for mercy when Mizu delivers him to Madam Kaji and company for justice.
- Dramatic Irony: A sincerely impressed Madam Kaji tells Mizu that she is more of a man than any that has ever walked through her door, which is pretty ironic since Mizu is a woman passing as a man.
Unless the shrewd and perceptive Madam Kaji has realized that Mizu is a woman and recognized the irony in her statement. - The Door Slams You: Mizu runs out the door of the brothel chased by the Claws and slams it behind her. As she's holding the door shut with her pursuers pushing on the other side, she looks over her shoulder and sees the rest of the Claws waiting on the street behind her. The door is then forced down on top of her, and she ends the scene pinned helplessly under the door while the Claws Dogpile Of Doom on it.
- Double Entendre: Mizu starts laying on the sexual innuendo as she warms up sparring with her husband.
- Dying for Symbolism: Mikio has trick of using a throwing dagger to cut down ripe apples from the tree for himself and Mizu. When he encourages Mizu to try it herself, she seems to deliberately underperform, resulting in a wimpy throw, perhaps to play the part of a submissive Japanese wife. Mizu later kills Mikio by throwing a dagger at him, doing so with terrifying strength and quickness. Implicitly, Mizu is rejecting everything about her time with Mikio and having been married when she stops pretending to be less capable than she truly is.
- Fingore: Ringo's first strike against one of the Claws severs the tips of two of the man's fingers when he attempts to menace Akemi.
- Funny Background Event: Akemi slashes one of her father's samurai with her tiny knife, cutting him on the hand. He can be seen checking on it and shaking his hand in the background, although it must not be much of a cut because it doesn't seem to bother him much.
- Heroic BSoD: Mizu clearly mentally shuts down in the aftermath of fighting the bounty hunters, when Mikio and her mother get into an argument about who's to blame. She turns away from both of them and starts walking away, her eyes even going into an unfocused Thousand-Yard Stare. She doesn't snap back into focus until she hears her mother screaming in pain from Mikio stabbing her.
- How We Got Here: The play which is a Framing Device is revealed have been performed after Akemi has been captured and brought to the shogun.
- Inertial Impalement: The Claw that Ringo kills dies this way, as he leaps at Ringo, and right onto his knife.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: It's clear from the sparring match she has with Mikio that Mizu gets a thrill from combat that is more than just adrenaline. It's possible that this, along with her relative carelessness with his life (since the sparring match ends with Mizu pushing a blade against Mikio's neck after he tried to stop Mizu from escalating things and then tried to call off the fight entirely on several occasions), is why Mikio sold her out if he was the traitor.
- In the Back: Both of the Claws that Akemi dispatches are taken care of in this manner, with her using her small dagger to stab them in the back while they're distracted.
- Kicking Ass in All Her Finery:
- Downplayed, but as part of her attempt to make amends with Mikio, Mizu had put on a nice white outfit (perhaps the same one she was married in), and makeup to look pretty for Mikio's return. She's still in that attire when the men come to try to claim the bounty on her.
- Downplayed again, but Akemi manages to kill two men while dressed up as the closest thing the brothel can manage to an authentic princess's outfit.
- "Leave Your Quest" Test: Both the Ronin and Mizu are given the chance to put aside their Roaring Rampage of Revenge and start a new life with a loving partner. Goes further in the ronin's case, since he stays with his wife for years, even having and then raising a child with her.
- Logical Weakness: Even setting aside other issues with Wolverine Claws, a major weakness they have compared to someone who is using a sword is their reach, as the swordsman has a weapon that can be dangerous from much further away, allowing him to kill someone armed with the claws while the swordsman is safely out of range. When Mizu converts her sword into a makeshift naginata, this is even more pronounced, as the now much longer reach that Mizu has on her weapon makes it nearly suicidal for the Claws to fight her.
- Love Makes You Evil: When she first set out to the find the "white devils", Mizu lacked the ruthless attitude needed for her Roaring Rampage of Revenge, and was nearly killed by some petty opium traders while trying to talk them down and assuring them she meant no harm. In the show's present day, she'd have carved through without breaking a sweat. It's being rejected and betrayed by Mikio after falling in love with him in their brief marriage that makes Mizu become the "demon" she is now.
- Made of Iron: Both in the flashback and in the present Mizu survives wounds which by all rights should have been lethal and recovers from them quickly, much as she did with the wounds suffered at the hands of Chiaki and the rest of the Four Fangs.
- Manipulative Bitch: Mizu's mother definitely uses her words and their bond to use and manipulate Mizu, complete with guilt tripping, emotional blackmail, and verbal abuse.
- Marital Rape License: Averted. Mizu clearly anticipates that Mikio might try to invoke this license, and her first night after their marriage she goes to bed with her sword concealed under the blanket, ready to strike if Mikio tries to touch her. Mikio, however, anticipates her line of thought and just gently tells her he will never do such a thing. When they finally do make love for the first time, it's because Mizu initiates it.
- Mook Chivalry: Justified; after Mizu slaughters the first Claws to take her on, the rest are reluctant to tangle with her without a major numbers advantage or there's another factor in their favor, such as when she is pinned and seemingly helpless under the door. She also retreats into the brothel to restrict the number of opponents who can attack at the same time.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Mizu apparently spared the Claw who wounded her or allowed him to run away offscreen. He later comes back and nearly kills her. (Besides the very similar appearance of the Claw that stabbed her and the one that strangles her, a quick closeup shows that the Claw who tries to strangle Mizu has claws which are broken, the way Mizu broke the weapon of the man who wounded her.)
- Noodle Incident: Mizu obviously wants to know more when her mother mentions that Mikio is in disgrace with his lord, but her mother simply waves it off, saying that lords put samurai into disgrace over the most minor of things. We never find out what happened to get Mikio disgraced and sent away to the mountains.
- One-Woman Army: Lampshaded and deconstructed; in becoming the warrior who can defeat the Thousand Claw Army, Mizu has lost some of her humanity in the process.
- Plot Parallel: Mizu's life and the performance about the ronin share many plot points, with the one key difference being that Mizu's story doesn't directly parallel the ronin's, instead sharing elements with the ronin's character and also some with the ronin's wife, who later becomes an onryō after her death, a type of spirit that Mizu has been compared to multiple times throughout the series due to her blue eyes.
- Post-Victory Collapse: After defeating the Claws and dragging boss Hamata out of his building, Mizu walks away into an alleyway and collapses from exhaustion offscreen. Ringo later finds her passed out on the ground.
- Redemption Quest: Mikio holds onto a hope, one that he admits is probably not realistic, that if he raises and tames just the right horse maybe his lord will take him back. When later on Mizu says Kai (who Mizu helped Mikio tame and who clearly has a bond with Mizu), might just be the perfect horse that Mikio has been hoping for, Mikio responds that Kai is too good for a lord, she is meant to be Mizu's horse.
- Regretful Traitor: Even if he didn't sell Mizu out to the men who come to claim her bounty, Mikio is still this, since he sees that Mizu in trouble, and while he obviously looks sad and full of regret to abandon her, he still does so.
- The Reveal: There's two at the end of the puppet show. First, that the puppet show was being performed for none other than the shogun himself (along with his family and some attendants), and then there's the fact that Akemi is there, especially the Wham Shot of Akemi's blackened teeth.
- Revenge Before Reason: Even after killing the clan leaders who murdered his lord, the Ronin swears to kill every member of their bloodline. This includes his own wife—even though she has fled her clan—and his own son.
- Rule of Symbolism:
- The ronin's bride is from the clan with the phoenix crest. The phoenix is known for springing back to life after it dies. After her death the ronin's wife is reborn, but as a terrifying, monstrous spirit that kills him in revenge for how he murdered her and their child. Mizu, whose plot in the flashbacks borrows elements from both the ronin and the bride, is also symbolically reborn from the ashes after her life with Mikio is forever destroyed.
- Mizu shouldn't be wearing a white kimono given its symbolic association with death. Of course, it soon becomes both a White Shirt of Death and Ethereal White Dress as she becomes the 'demon' she's regarded as now.
- Scenery Porn: The area where Mikio lives is gorgeous, and Mizu obviously appreciates the natural beauty of the scene just as much as viewers appreciate the lovely artwork.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The last few members of the Claws left alive and unwounded run for it after seeing the way Mizu devastates the other members of the gang.
- Shout-Out: The scrawny teenage mook that Mizu spares (the first time she encounters him) is likely a shout out to Yojimbo, where Sanjuro encounters a teenage farm boy leaving his family's poor farm and joining one of the Yakuza gangs early in the movie because the boy refuses to live his entire life as a penniless farmer. When the boy is the last survivor of Sanjuro's rampage at the end of the film, Sanjuro tells the terrified boy who's screaming for his mother to go back home and live a farmer's life, and the boy gratefully accepts Sanjuro's mercy. This teenager isn't quite so lucky...
- Silver Fox: Mikio is a tall, strongly built, older man with gray streaks in his hair and beard who is still quite handsome.
- Sparing the Final Mook: At one point during the fight in the brothel, Mizu comes across a very young member of the Claws, who is hiding out in a room, trembling with fear, and puts his hands up to show he means no harm. She moves on wordlessly, sparing him. However, later on Mizu comes across the same Claw outside the brothel, after she's defeated the rest of the Claws, and by this point she's no longer feeling merciful (perhaps she is influenced by the trauma of the flashbacks she's been having throughout the fight, perhaps because she was going to spare another Claw earlier only for him to nearly kill her), and kills him without hesitation.
- Stock Scream: The famous Wilhelm Scream can be heard as Mizu kills one of the Claws in particularly impressive fashion.
- A Storm Is Coming:
- The Ronin's desire for revenge is compared to a storm, one that begins as a gentle breeze.
- The flashback to Mizu's past ends with her walking away from her home forever under stormy skies. A flash of lightning makes a cloud above her look like a demonic face.
- Tears of Blood: The red makeup gives Mizu this appearance. She soon adds actual blood.
- Time-Passes Montage: A montage set by the apple tree that is Mizu's and Mikio's "spot" seems to indicate that at least a year to a year and change goes by with the two living together.
- Two-Faced: Mizu's mother suffered burns to one side of her face during the fire that burned down their house and separated them.
- Unusual Euphemism: Mizu's mother insists on referring to the opium she smokes as "my medicine".
- Weapons of Their Trade: Justified; Mizu tells Ringo to use a kitchen knife to defend himself because it's what he's most familiar with.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Ringo is deeply disappointed when Mizu refuses to help Akemi, calling it a dishonorable choice and not worthy of a samurai. Mizu snarls back that she has never claimed to be a samurai, that Akemi is going to be better off returning home instead of continuing to be a runaway, and that her path of revenge doesn't leave room for sentiment.
- Wolverine Claws: This is shown to be apparently the only weapon that Hamata's men use (perhaps the show's version of Japan also had an equivalent to Toyotomi's sword hunt), and some of the weaknesses of this as a weapon are deconstructed, especially in terms of range. The claws are at a disadvantage against Mizu's sword because of the difference in reach, and once she goes outside, allowing her convert her sword into a naginata and giving her the space to use and swing it freely, attempting to reach her with the claws becomes a nigh impossible task.
- Wrecked Weapon: After wrestling her way free of the Claw who wounded her, Mizu cuts through both sets of his Wolverine Claws with her sword. She must have either spared him or he ran away at that point, because the scene shifts without us seeing what happens next, but it's the same man who later grabs her from behind and nearly strangles her to death.
- You All Look Alike: Only the Claws who have some sort of unique interaction with the main characters (the two that Ringo and Akemi encounter in the basement, the one who wounds and later nearly strangles Mizu, the teenager that Mizu spares... at first) actually get a unique appearance. All the rest are pretty obviously a copy and paste of the same model of a young man with a shaved head and a cloth mask covering his face.
- Your Makeup Is Running: Mizu put on makeup in an attempt to look pretty for Mikio and reconcile with him after their fight. Between her tears of grief and rage when Mikio abandons her, the blood that has splashed on her face during the fight, and sweat from exertion, it's a mess by the time Mikio returns.
