The Sword That Stays Sheathed: The Form of a Rest Week
Column 'The Sword That Stays Sheathed,' episode 4: on this biweekly slot's publishing week, sword bearer Chitose Kanome writes about the 'rest week' of training ahead of the November 8 rematch against Owari.
This column runs only twice a month. I wrote the last one before the match against Hokuto; this time I'm writing ahead of the fourth round against Owari on November 8. Each time there's a gap, I find myself unsure what to write about. Somewhere in that uncertainty, I realized this, too, is a kind of rest week.
Swordplay training has weeks of tight, continuous drilling and weeks where you deliberately ease off and let the body rest. In our school we call the rest weeks "the form of the rest." Calling it a form is probably too grand a word for what's really just a way of resting, but my teacher always held that there's a right way and a wrong way to rest, too.
This week I trained jointly with some of the younger students from the Minase school, repeating only footwork, with no strikes at all. When the days without drawing a blade stack up, people around you start to worry something's wrong. The truth is the opposite. The fewer chances you give yourself to draw, the clearer the judgment becomes in the instant you do. I imagine plenty of readers thought of the previously reported story of the rookie sword bearer from outside the old schools who never drew her blade on her first night guarding a window room. That story and this column just happen to resemble each other; I'm writing this as a separate matter. Hers was about duty. Mine is about training.
The November 8 match against Owari is a rematch against the opponent who beat us in the third round. It would be easy to blame the form for that loss, but I suspect that's only half right. The other half, I think now, was that we rested the wrong way. So this time I took a longer rest week than usual.
I once wrote that the more times you go without drawing, the more it counts in your favor — but that was never about avoiding the chance to draw in the first place. The same goes for the form of the rest. It isn't about avoiding rest; it's about choosing how to rest. On November 8, the result will tell us which form was the right one.