Fortunately for him, his wife had already shown her the best card in her hand: she wasn’t going to kill him, and the fact that Genma wouldn’t have to be concerned about his own head meant that a great deal of other approaches were open. He eventually settled on a particularly ingenious strategy: he would admit to a certain level of wrongdoing in this case, but he would claim that it was well-intentioned wrongdoing, actions taken hastily because he was so overcome with emotion that he couldn’t think straight. Once he got his wife to agree with him, it was merely a matter of applying the Crouch of the Wild Tiger a few times, and he’d be back in her good graces—and thus, he could focus on getting her on his side as far as Ranma’s marriage went.
It was perfect—nothing could go wrong, provided there were no more surprises (and, really, how many more could Nodoka have?).
“Welcome back, Genma,” said a very nonplussed Nodoka Saotome. “Perhaps you would like to continue your explanation?”
“Yes. I won’t lie to you, Nodoka. I’ve been a fool.” This statement stunned everyone present, as anyone who spent more than five minutes with Genma knew he was not one to admit that he had any negative qualities. “When Ranma got his curse, I thought that you would have us commit seppuku for certain—so I agreed to stay with the Amazons at Joketsuzoku, not for my own sake, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of my only son having to take his own life because of an honest mistake that anyone could have made. But when I realized that this girl thought we were married, because I’d defeated her in combat (which I never would have undertaken had I known this was the result), I had to return to you—I would rather be remembered as a poor father and husband than a bigamist.”
Nodoka’s expression didn’t change. “According to what Tissue has told me, the issue would have never come up if you had you just informed the Amazons you were already married.”
Internally, Genma panicked. That wasn’t how she was supposed to react! She was supposed to get all sentimental and forgiving, like a woman! He tried to regain some ground. “But that hasn’t changed! I am married to you, so I can’t be married to her, thus this is a moot point, and this young lady can head back to China without ever bothering anyone here ever again.”
“Wrong,” the Amazon replied bluntly. “Amazon law allow for group marriage. What Nodoka mean is, since you was already married, you have option of not marrying Ti Xiu.”
“Then I choose not to marry you!”
“Too late. Only have one week to make up mind.”
“What?! Nobody told me that!”
“That because you never say you married—and you leave before we have chance to tell you.”
“Which brings me back to my point: why did you not tell them you were married?”
“Well, I… I hadn’t seen you in such a long time… I didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”
“Is that why you never told Ranma about me?” asked Nodoka.
“Exactly—I wouldn’t want him to be despondent over the loss of his mother if you were really alive. A real man has no time for such sentiment.”
“In other words, you thought that if he knew that he had a mother, he’d express some sort of emotion—and any emotion that can’t be harnessed to beat your enemies to a pulp is unmanly,” offered Nabiki, whose look of disdain was growing with every one of Genma’s statements.
“Exactly!” Genma was pleased—his strategy was finally working!
Nodoka let this rather obvious difference between her definition of manliness and her husband’s slide for the time being. “And why is it that you never contacted me?”
“Well… I… uh… it’s just that we were being… um… frugal! Yes, I was trying to teach the boy to pinch every penny, and I didn’t want him asking why I could spend money but not him—”
“Because then you might end up talking about his mother, and that would make him less of a man for the reasons Nabiki pointed out,” Akane finished for him as a sneer started to form on her face. After she’d met Ranma, she’d often wondered whether it was better to know that your mother was dead so you could go through the grieving process (as she had), or to not know if your mother was dead or alive (as in Ranma’s case). She still didn’t have an answer, but learning that Ranma’s lack of knowledge concerning his mother was simply due to his father not wanting to tell him—well, the fact that she hadn’t pulled the Sledgehammer Trick (a variation of the Mallet Trick that was used when you really did want to injure your opponent) was testament to how far she had progressed in developing her self-control.
“Besides, I didn’t want to contact you after the curse, because I didn’t want the Amazons to find you,” Genma continued.
“A little late for that,” replied Nodoka.
“Yes, well, at least we can be thankful that she didn’t try to hurt you.”
“Thankful?! I had to marry her in order to get her to see me as an equal!”
Clearly, this was not the response Genma was expecting. “What? I— I thought you were into ‘traditional’ lifestyles!”
“Why you so mad?” asked a clearly irritated Tissue. “You one who not tell Amazons already married. You one who never bother to check on wife. You one who not tell Ranma anything about birth mother! Yes, Nodoka choose to marry Tissue of own will, but you one who force her to make choice!” she shouted, angrily jabbing her finger at her husband’s abdomen with each “you.”
Tissue’s words were obviously effective, given the way that Genma reacted, but Nabiki couldn’t help but puzzle over the Amazon’s line of reasoning. Sure, the fact that Genma had ignored Nodoka for ten years was bad, as was his refusal to tell Ranma about his mother, but what did they have to do with Nodoka’s decision to become her sister-wife? In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say she was just looking for an excuse to repeatedly poke Genma in the stomach—but why would she want to do that?
Nodoka, meanwhile, answered her husband. “When Tissue first arrived at our home looking for you, she explained the Amazon traditions regarding marriage. Since your inaction meant your marriage to her couldn’t be canceled, my only options were to enter the Amazon marriage the two of you shared, or be viewed as a concubine.”
“But… it’s illegal…”
“As Tissue explained to me, the Amazons don’t care about the laws of outsiders on matters of this sort. She said she was perfectly content to be seen as your mistress as far as Japanese law was concerned.”
“Huh?!”
“Is true,” the Amazon confirmed. “Besides,” she added, “Amazons marry for life, and Tissue married to Nodoka as well as Genma. The three of us together for rest of lives, and nothing change that.”
Nodoka was stunned—she hadn’t known that her “marriage” with this woman would be viewed as permanent! But then again, considering Tissue’s obvious disdain for Genma’s character, if the Amazons did have some concept of divorce, she’d have no doubt used it instead of coming all the way out to Japan.
“With all due respect, my dear,” said Genma in a tone that made it clear that he didn’t believe he owed Tissue any respect whatsoever, “your Amazon traditions are positively insane.”
“Genma!” exclaimed Nodoka, who could barely believe her ears—she was certain Genma hadn’t been this insensitive when he and Ranma left.
“I’m serious, Nodoka—you have no idea what they wanted Ranma and me to go through.”
“Actually, I do. Tissue told me how her tribe uses Jusenkyo curses to make sure that even the males of their tribe qualify as ‘women.’”
“Huh?” responded Akane in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
Tissue fielded the response to this query. “Amazon tradition say woman is one who has month.”
“Month?”
With a mildly sheepish look on her face, the Amazon clarified her statement. “Sorry, forgot to avoid Amazon idiom. Meant to say… period?” She looked over to her sister-wife for confirmation, which she received in the form of a nod.
“I see,” said Kasumi. “You curse the boys with the girl curse for a month, and when they have their period, you consider them women, even if they stay male for the rest of their lives.”
“That exactly right.”
“Yes, well,” Genma interrupted, “when Ranma said he was willing to go through with this ceremony, I assumed that would break the contract, if his curse hadn’t already broken it, so we left.”
“That does sound like something you’d do…”
“Hmph,” Tissue snorted. “He not telling whole story.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, they leave after Ranma agree—five days after.”
“That’s how long it took me to make up my mind!”
“Then why you tell Ranma to go ahead and say that you two not going to be leaving anytime soon?”
“Um…”
“If ask Tissue, Genma not plan on ever going back to Japan.”
“But he did come back,” Soun pointed out.
“He not leave until two days after marriage to Tissue—and six hours after he learn what outsider men must do when come into tribe.”
“What?”
“Is simple. When married to Amazon, you become Amazon. But there not been Amazon man for 500 years.”
“I get it,” said Nabiki. “The only reason he came back was so that he wouldn’t have to get cursed for a month—it didn’t have anything to do with fulfilling his agreement with our father, he just wanted to avoid the damage to his male ego. In other words, pretty much every single one of his actions was done solely with his self-interest in mind.”
Soun was shocked that one of his daughters would suggest that his best friend was capable of simply ignoring their arrangement. “Nabiki! How can you say that?”
“Think about it, Daddy. He admitted that he had originally intended to stay with the Amazons.”
“But he changed his mind!”
“Only after he had a reason to. Think about it, Daddy; you spent years training with him, so you ought to know. Genma thought that Nodoka was going to kill him, so he didn’t want to return to Japan. Now, which is more likely: Genma risking what he believes will be certain death because of a pang of conscience, or Genma risking certain death because he thinks it’s preferable to being a woman?”
Soun was silent for a several seconds, and then he turned to his friend. “Genma! How could you just treat our agreement so callously? It was a matter of honor!”
Genma didn’t know how he’d lost control of the conversation, but it was clearly time to take it back. “Now see here! There is nothing wrong with a man wanting to avoid becoming a woman! To even suggests that I might possibly accept something that… that… insane is preposterous! I don’t have to do it, and you can’t make me. It’s downright unnatural! The only reason I let Ranma do it was because he was so keen on learning their martial arts styles. The fact that he already had his curse, and it couldn’t be cured made him a special case. I, on the other hand, am a man and I will always be a man, and I refuse to allow myself to be degraded this way just so a bunch of uncultured yahoos from the middle of nowhere can think of me as nothing more than a mere woman!” By the end of his tirade, every female in the room looked ready to string Genma up by his intestines (and Soun was, at the very least, questioning his judgment).
But it was Tissue who responded first, and in the most appropriate way possible: the Amazon simply said, “Too late,” and then proceeded to dump a glass of Nyannichuan water over her husband’s head.
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(Posted Mon, 10 Apr 2006 08:10)
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