Austen Henry Healey Goldsmith

Her name was Anja Bauer and she was so shockingly beautiful, that she had no business dating men in the first place. That had always been Kaito’s firm opinion. Men were scum. They cheated, they were childish, they were ruled by the versions of themselves stuck between their legs. Anja deserved something exalted. Something more than just a man. It was for that reason, that when their unlikely friendship blossomed into an even unlikelier romance, Kaito took every measure to ensure the relationship that followed more or less resembled the fire of teenage courtship. That was 1969. In the years that followed, he tended to their love the way a Samaria might tend a Bonsai tree. This analogy suited him. While Kaito could not trace his Japanese lineage past his maternal grandfather, Haru Tanaka, he knew his veins carried warrior’s blood. His mother’s father had flown his country’s colors directly into the side of an American battleship in the battle for Okinawa. That was enough for him. He came from a line of Divine Wind. A line of Kamikazes. A line of men who looked like grains of rice hiding behind the sun, but could send a fleet of destroyers to the bottom of the Pacific. That’s what Kaito was made of. That Anja loved him made sense. She was infinitely more beautiful than any man deserved, but his ancestors had been touched by God – and that was a kind of beauty distinct in its own right. Kaito was her Samaria, and Anja loved how he moved his sword across the neck of life. They were together for fifteen years before all went wrong in what Kaito could only describe as an accident. Kaito was in Japan on business where he was executing contracts for the film magnate Henry Aussenburg. It was his first and only visit to the Land of the Rising Sun, which was also his first time meeting the movie man from the Black Forest, Heir Aussenburg.