Matsu

Voice

Speaks rarely enough that each word carries more weight than he intends, which is why the one time he says something unguarded costs him the most. Nobody expects the voice that comes out of him when he sings.

The arc

Matsu has spent the years since his father left holding down a village that every man of fighting age walked out of, practising with a sword he hasn't finished learning and acting the way he imagines a samurai should. When Kabu and Kabocha arrive in Shugoro fresh off their first win, he warns them that the village won't follow a couple of strangers just because they beat a demon somewhere else. They talk straight over him, and the village proves him right. It's only when the bamboo has nearly closed over the town that they find him with his father's old sword, cutting a single stalk clean and snapping the blade on a bundle, and finally listen to what he's been trying to say: one stalk breaks, bound together they hold. He sings it to the village instead of saying it, the first time anyone has heard his voice in years, and Shugoro rallies around him. When the grove loosens and the lost men stumble home, he scans every face. His father isn't there. He asks to come with the team, and the village elder sends him off with a bamboo flute said to call on the protection of the trees.

What he brings across the season is practical and often unannounced: he reads situations by watching until the shape becomes clear, like the guard rotation that gets the team into Chaobe's drying houses, and he is the person who names the thing everyone else has walked past. When the heist in episode four ends with Kabocha arguing the ends justified the means, it's Matsu who asks whether they did the right thing. Neither of them answers. Speaking up to strangers turns out to be easier than speaking up to his friends, and the samurai code he's built himself out of keeps him out of fights the others would throw themselves into.

He comes into episode eight siding with tradition and discipline, which is the side that feels most like his father and least like grief. Watching Hiroaki pay the full cost of keeping himself split in two shifts something in him: freedom and self-expression can do things that silence can't. He arrives at episode nine with that understanding still new enough to misfire. At a Tanabata festival where every action is either lucky or unlucky, he gets cornered into a ceremonial moment the room reads as a lucky omen, and the careful guard he keeps around his own words slips: he stammers that if he were ever to marry it would be with someone like Kabocha. She quietly leaves the room. Later in the same episode, the demon fight tips into a real eruption between Kabocha and Kabu, and Matsu steps forward and tells her how much she matters to all of them. It's the right thing. It doesn't reach her yet, and she storms out.

It costs him. In the quiet moments after, he's further back inside himself than he's been all season, asking less and naming less, apart from a song he sings to Ume in episode ten, a patient argument that you can't force truth into someone who isn't ready, which is about her situation and also, unmistakably, about his own. But he keeps going, and when Kabocha turns on the team in Furumi, he's beside Kabu saying it again, and this time it helps bring her back. The season ends with the team together and his father still missing, and what he said by accident in episode nine still sitting unacknowledged between him and Kabocha. The armour still doesn't quite fit.

Relationships