So what is blood-right, anyway? How is it measured? In liters? Pints? Metric or English? Conversion: how many quarts of one blood to one life? Two? Three, if the victim is innocent, intimate? The blood-risht of a criminal is not the same as that of a child; but how many ounces for the difference, exactly? Is the right to a life something that can be leveled, pitched and poured and smoothed out mathematically so that an eye really equals an eye? Is justice just if it's measured in red?

Aya seems to think so. The color suits him. Hair, attire, mood: the slow lethal spread of his smile is like blood pooling, his sudden incoherent rages so like the violent rupture of some throbbing artery. One might misconstrue him as the instinct-guided savage of a bygone era, but for his devotion...the ancient Greeks once believed that the seat of all emotions was the heart. With Aya it's true--and whatever elixer fuels his inhuman sense of purpose, I'm sure its source is there. He's a sanguine creature, in both senses of the word. I know. I glimpse it every time I meet his eyes now; that glazed, focused, obstinate drip, and the twin pools beneath, in which I know he allows me to catch my own reflection.

I don't know what he's waiting for. I don't even know if he is waiting. In the best of all worlds, the blood-soaked reflection I find in his eyes is but subconscious resentment, the manifestation of a frustrated, unfocused rage. Unfortunately, I know better. He's too philosophical for that. He reads too much--if a man goes through enough books, he's bound to find one that lets him read himself. Aya passed that pont long ago. He knows what he wants and where it is. No, I'm the one with the identity crisis. I doubt sincerelyhe's confused about anything anymore. Too focused; he's honestly honed his mind and body int a funnel for his purpose, and funnels function equally as well as blinders. Besides, men with goals can't afford the luxury of self-contemplation. Uncertainty slows reaction time. So, as always runs with mental matters, I shoulder the responsibility myself: dredge through the labyrinth of someone else's shelfed philosophies.

Aya's are particularly confusing. He's truly remarkable: a patchwork medieval nightmare. Familial loyalty, oaths of vengeance, brute individualism, torturous self-discipline; I'd date his mindset as somewhere in fifth century dynastic China. Late at night, when I've been slapped with a research assignment and have nothing better to do than pick through my compatriot' troubled psyches while numbers flash by on the screen, I try to navigate the paradox. The work is at best unpleasant, at worst terrifying. I think, though, after several nights of butting fruitlessly against a wall, I am finally beginning to understand.

According to Aya, guilt is hereditary. He hates me because I partake in a vast imagined conspiracy of blood-ties, every member of which is collaborating to murder his family. I am hated not for what I've done, but for who I am. He looks at me but with purpose now; that welling mirror behind his eyes is a burning conviction. Justice as an intangible doesn't exist in Aya's universe. Everything is terrifically personal, either stimulus or reaction. His family's murder was the stimulus, and his newfound loathing for me is the reaction. By Aya's logic, he has a God -given right to the blood of every member of my family. By Aya's logic, it is legitimate to wreak vengeance on an innocent, so long as that innocent is related in some way to the original criminal. By Aya's logic, conviction by genetics is legal.

By Aya's logic, almost every man, woman, and child in Tokyo has a right to his blood.

I don't yet know if he realizes this. As I've mentioned, Aya's is a funnel-mind. A brilliant funnel mind you, but a funnel nonetheless. So binocular! So one-dimensional! I wonder if he ever considers the repercussions of his own murders. To match thought with example: Aya has harassed his share of my kin; does that give me a right to his blood? I don't even jest that I'd ever make such a assertion, but the idea does intrigue me. Would he recognize my claim? I doubt Aya is so single-minded that he neglects to apply his own philosophies universally, but I question his own acceptance of his beliefs. Were I to try and take my own revenge, Aya-style, would he have objections? Perhaps he simply negates the possibility on the argument that my personality could never encompass such a deed. Aya knows as will as anyone: kind, sweet, forgiving Omi cannot murder his friends--even if he has to.

He's right, of course. I'm no Roman; my psyche is not that of a backstabber.

I always wonder, though, what he would do if it was.