"O kuni, this is more or less how you play the shamisen."
In a room set aside for the performance beside the village square, a frivolous-looking red-haired young man was teaching the invited kabuki performer, Izumo no Okuni, how to play the shamisen.
"Why do I have to play this in the first place?!"
Izumo no Okuni looked extremely unwilling.
"My real job is performing the Dance of Repose! I'm not a shamisen player!"
The Kirin Child of Choshu looked slick and glib as he let out a chuckle.
"Even a Dance of Repose needs excellent accompaniment, right? And if it's a kabuki performance, then it definitely needs accompaniment, right?"
"If I'm playing the shamisen, then who's going to perform the Dance of Repose?!"
Izumo no Okuni looked thoroughly troubled by the man's persistence and helplessly tapped her shamisen.
After several days of Takasugi's instruction, Izumo no Okuni had easily grasped how the shamisen was meant to be played. But the problem was—
There was no need for it!
"Mr. Sakumura."
Fujimaru Ritsuka naturally greeted Sakumura, who had brought along his wife and daughter.
"Miss Fujimaru, we were just heading to the western side of the village. Would you like to come with us?"
Fujimaru Ritsuka gave Sakumura a careful once-over.
He was somewhat different from how he had been in Chaldea.
In Fujimaru Ritsuka's impression, Sakumura had been quite young in both appearance and mindset. His thinking had been so open-minded that it bordered on eccentric, and he had played a somewhat elusive role in Chaldea. That had been Fujimaru Ritsuka's basic impression of him.
But this Sakumura before her...
At the very least, he no longer gave off the feeling of a young man.
He was not quite at the level of a middle-aged uncle, but...
In short,