Character · Rurouni Kenshin
Yahiko Myojin
Ten years old, picking pockets to pay off a debt he did not incur, and offended by every offer of help.
In Otakana the clue reads: Pickpocket boy who takes up the sword school
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Rurouni Kenshin
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Yahiko is the son of a samurai family that lost everything, working for a Tokyo gang who tell him he is repaying his dead mother's medical bills. He is not, and everyone but him knows it. When Kenshin gets him out, he demands to be taught a sword style rather than thanked, and ends up as the Kamiya dojo's first student under an instructor barely older than he is.
The friction with Kaoru is the point. He calls her ugly, she calls him a brat, and the fights are how two people with no family left agree to be one. His real objection to everything is that he is small, so being carried, protected or excused sends him straight into a rage. He would rather lose standing up.
Watsuki gives him a proper arc rather than mascot duty. He trains, he takes serious injuries, he wins fights that matter to the plot, and by the later chapters he is fighting adults on his own terms with a shinai. The name is written 明神弥彦, and Myojin is the family name.
Spelling YAHIKO
YAHIKO is six letters in three beats, ya-hi-ko, and the Y at the front is a consonant rather than the vowel English sometimes makes of it. Three of the six tiles are vowels, alternating with the consonants the whole way, which makes the row easy to fill once one is green. Given name; Myojin, the family name, hides a long O that English would drop.