Thoughts on Shunsui and Nanao in Bleach 651
The usual disclaimer: Shunsui and Nanao are not related by blood. Shunsui was a child 2,000+ years ago, and he’s shown as a young boy in the flashback in this chapter. He says his brother died early in the marriage to Nanao’s mother, which means Nanao can’t be his brother’s child. She’s simply too young–only 100-200 years old, as we know from her appearance in TBTP. Her mother remarried or had another relationship that produced Nanao.
The first thing we get in this chapter is that Shunsui was remembering someone calling him Shunsui-san when he was a child:
Now we can confirm it wasn’t Nanao calling him that in the beginning of Bleach 650. Instead, it was this very familiar looking woman:
Notice the hairpin in her hair on the right? It bears a strong resemblance to the ones Shunsui wears in the present day; they’re probably the same hairpins. He calls her “Sis,” (big sister).
We return from Shunsui’s memories to him explaining how Kyoukotsu is Nanao’s zanpakuto. Remember, Nanao isn’t completely in the dark about her history—she knew enough in chapter 650 to know that Shunsui had her zanpakuto and that it could help in this situation. (More on that later.) But the idea that Kyoukotsu is her zanpakuto throws her for a loop, because it doesn’t match what she knows already about the sword.
Shunsui explains further. I’d just like to point out how sweet it is that Ohana is supporting him here, with a hand on his shoulder, as he makes this difficult explanation. And she was very generous to go so far as to create a separate being, Okyou, to hide Nanao’s sword for him:
Shunsui explains about the Ise curse, and this is quite interesting:
So the first part of the Ise clan’s unique situation is that all of their children are always female. Thus there are no men in the clan for them to select husbands from, and they must always marry an outsider. But those men that marry into the clan die early deaths.
I think we need to consider the possibility that “marriage” is actually standing in as a euphemism for “sex.” If the solution to the Ise curse was as simple as not marrying, I think it’s safe to say that some of the Ise daughters would have been born out of wedlock, as their mothers tried to spare their lovers the curse. Nanao’s mother was desperate to avoid the curse, so if simply not marrying Kyouraku’s older brother was enough to save his life, I think we can assume she would have done that.
Nobility aside, if the solution was so simple, it would have already been implemented by some members of the Ise clan. Their bloodline needs to be continued, so they need to keep having children, but if not marrying stopped the deaths, that’s a solution they could use.
I don’t think “marriage” is standing in for “love” here, because if it was, it wouldn’t matter what relationship the women had with a man—if an Ise loved a man, that man would die. Given what Nanao confesses later, Shunsui would already be a dead man walking to the Ise curse if this was the case.
It’s interesting to consider the possible nature of the Ise curse. We’ve never seen a straight-up curse like this in Bleach, have we? Kidō spells, Twelfth Division science, powerful artifacts, but never anything like a curse. What are the possibilities for a curse?
1. It’s actually a curse. This is hard to prove or disprove.
2. Some bad luck has led to a legend about a curse, and every bad event that happens to a man marrying an Ise woman feeds into the legend.
3. Elders of the Ise clan actually kill the husbands of the Ise women to make sure they return to the Ise clan instead of remaining outside and diluting the power of the Ise clan.
It’s interesting to think about, but we’d need more information to be sure of what’s at work here.
Shunsui continues to give us a window into the life he’d had with his brother and sister-in-law:
He remembers Nanao’s mother very warmly. The serenity and comfort she brought into their lives has stayed with him for all these years. I think it’s very likely he idolized her a bit, and that she became his ideal of what a woman should be.
I don’t believe he ever had romantic feelings for her or had any kind of romantic involvement with her later in life—the way he remembers her and thinks of her as his big sister? That would be a very strange way to remember a woman he’d been involved with romantically or sexually. No—he loved Nanao’s mother, but as his sister-in-law.
After his brother died, Nanao’s mother decided that the curse could not be escaped. Notice her familiar hairpins and kimono here:
But she still looks for a solution, some way to escape the curse. If she can’t escape the curse, then maybe she can find a way for her daughter to escape it. The daughter she must have had later in life is Nanao. (Nanao is a child during TBTP ~100 years ago, and Nanao’s marriage to Shunsui’s brother was a brief one 2,000 years ago.)
Shunsui is despairing here—it’s in his posture, his downturned eye. He thinks he’s failed Nanao’s mother. He believes if Nanao wields the sword, she’ll trigger the Ise curse.
But this is very interesting—once Okyou has pulled out the sword, the distance between Nanao and Shunsui closes, because they both have their hands on the sword even though they were previously sitting apart. He doesn’t want to let go and let Nanao wield it:
But Nanao reminds him that she has her own will, and must make her own choices. She won’t be ruled by the decisions her mother has made to protect her:
He doesn’t say anything or let go of the sword. But then Nanao goes one step farther, taking a different line entirely.
Her beginning is a little timid: she starts with, “It’s possible,” but then clenches her fist, because what she’s doing now is more difficult, but she wants to say these words clearly to him:
She’s confessing her adoration/love/yearning for Shunsui here. She says that he’s a man that would call curses silly superstition anyway, and laugh at them. And he smiles; very small, but it’s definitely a change from his despairing demeanor a few panels earlier.
It’s this confession that finally causes him to let go of the sword. He’ll trust Nanao to make her own decisions about the Ise curse, and he’ll go along with what she’s decided.
Lille will be no match for the holy sword. I know that some people are bothered that Shunsui’s bankai wasn’t enough to kill Lille, but this setup was necessary for Nanao to need to use her zanpakuto. If Lille was an ordinary enemy, Shunsui’s bankai would have been a devastating overkill, but because he’s an odd chicken-gazelle-god-thing, it wasn’t enough.
Nanao asked for her sword because she knew it would work against Lille. That’s because she knows about her sword, has known “all this time,” as we learned in the previous chapter. The information on this page about the Ise clan is Nanao’s knowledge she says, “we” here when talking about the Ise clan.
She knew that about the holy sword, and she knew Shunsui was hiding it for her mother, that he’d promised her mother to keep it safe. How does she know? Either her mother or another member of the Ise clan must have told her this, a long time ago. Perhaps her mother wanted her to be able to make her own choices as an adult.
The details of how Shunsui hid the sword with Kyoukotsu are a surprise to her, but she wasn’t surprised that the sword existed. So she also probably knows something about wielding the sword, too. She emerges from the shadows (I love that she can use the shadows of Katen Kyoukotsu. Shunsui’s sword is helping her fight for them!):
And she tied her sleeves up, because she’s going to work. Of course Nanao would tie her sleeves up. XD
I think we’ll probably get one more flashback here—maybe one where Shunsui gets the hairpins and kimono from Nanao’s mother. I think that would probably be a death scene, because I think she’s probably dead, and has been since sometime around TBTP. In that flashback, we saw Shunsui wearing a different kimono and no hairpins.
Hopefully we’ll get some further clarification on the timeline or Nanao’s father so that it’s clearer for people that Shunsui and Nanao aren’t related. I can understand where this can get confusing, so I’d be happy if it was simpler to follow.
I would love to get a reciprocating confession from Shunsui to Nanao, but I think his feelings have always been clearer than hers in the past, so having her confess to him is just lovely. I’m looking forward to the next chapter!
