Yes, Betta Tryptophan I am aware of the historical inaccuracies in the story. After I wrote the story I did the research and realized the inaccuracies. I realize that is backwards; that I should have done the research first. But I couldn’t do research on the story until after it came through. I wouldn’t have known what to research.

I could have changed the story to rectify the inaccuracies but I chose not to. I decided to leave the story exactly as it first came through (over thirty years ago).

The house of prostitution and theatrical entertainment I called “Geisha” and “Kabuki” because I didn’t know what else to call it. When I found out that those terms were not used for hundreds of years later I figured what the monk had come upon was a much earlier incarnation of those professions. My research could not come up with any proper terminology, though.

Although hara-kiri was traditionally limited to samurai and noble classes, other classes were not unaware of it. (And samurai were also from a different historical period.) After I did my research I realized that the monk had performed the suicide ceremony incorrectly. But that is how he did it; placing the sword blade below the sternum rather than lower around the solar plexus. This was an important fact that I couldn’t change because the placement of the sword had karmic ramifications for him in later lives.

The imagery you picked up about the daughter being simultaneously stabbed is very interesting in light of the fact that the monk and his daughter had a past-life several hundred years earlier in the area that is now Iran in which they were murdered together by a band of thieves wielding swords. They also had a life together several hundred years later after the Japanese life on the plains of North America in which the daughter died in early childhood and the monk died later after being stabbed by a bayonet on a soldier’s rifle. Swords are a recurring karmic theme in the many lives they lived together and they have often had birth marks indicating where they had been stabbed in previous lives.

The two also had a past-life in France in the seventeen hundreds where the monk was the baby boy born to the daughter who was then his mother. They flipped roles and in that life the monk died in early childhood allowing the daughter, now as a mother, to also have the reciprocating experience of losing a child early in its life just as the monk had on the plains of North America. They also had a past-life in the Holy Land as brother in sister in which they both lived long lives and had no encounter with swords.

The woman who ran the house of prostitution and entertainment and the monk also had many lives together playing out their particular karma, which had a lot to do with sex, parenting, and the performing arts. I won’t get into that, though.

My story was just one tableau in a long series of karmic lives and the ties between these lives are not apparent simply through this one story. I could not change the story, though, without altering the ties binding the characters.

And yes, the monk has reincarnated many times since that life in Japan and eventually he will surely stop running and figure it all out.

Thanks for responding to my story.