Character · Rurouni Kenshin
Kaoru Kamiya
Nineteen years old, running a sword school with no students, and defending a style built on not killing anybody.
In Otakana the clue reads: Young woman running her father's sword school
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Rurouni Kenshin
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Kaoru inherited the Kamiya Kasshin dojo in Tokyo after her father died in the Seinan War. The style he taught treats a sword as a thing that protects rather than kills, which by 1878 was an unfashionable idea, and the school is close to empty when a swordsman with a cross-shaped scar wanders in and a killer starts using the dojo's name to murder people.
She takes the wanderer in, gains a former pickpocket as her first real student, and spends the series holding the household together while the men in it go and fight. Nobuhiro Watsuki does not write her as helpless. She teaches, she fights when she has to, and she is the one who insists on the principle every time Kenshin is tempted to break it.
Rurouni Kenshin ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1994 to 1999, sold well past seventy million copies, and its early chapters spend more time in Kaoru's dojo than anywhere else. The domestic scenes are the reason the later fights land, because the story keeps showing you exactly what is being defended.
Spelling KAORU
KAORU is five letters and three of them are vowels, which makes the row unusually open. It reads ka-o-ru, with the A and O side by side and neither of them blending into the other. There is no long vowel to trim and no consonant doubling. The game wants the given name; the family name Kamiya, in Japanese order, would come first.