Here's some more that I wrote for my friend:

Character Profile: Naoe

Naoe's psyche is a little harder for me to assess than Kagetora's, largely because we don't have insight into his formative years, why he is like he is. This, in itself, may be relevant from a Buddhist standpoint. My sensei has observed that Buddhism talks a lot about what to do when we hit potholes in the road of life (he's from Michigan) but very little about what those potholes are or why they happened. And that's because the solution (the practice) is the same regardless.

I partially disagree with this. I think often knowing why something has happened (ex. Kagetora's childhood trauma) is extremely helpful in working through it efficiently. Understanding where the poison lies is useful to sucking it out. At the same time, it is true that the Dharma works to ameliorate our suffering regardless of its origins. I think Kagetora and Naoe might exemplify these two truths. Kagetora is stuck for a long time because the site of the poison has not been drained. Solving that problem catapults him forward. Naoe does not have a single, original problem in the same way—or it's not accessible. He's just a messed-up person. But as a messed-up person, he very slowly but surely creeps his way consistently toward being a better one. Kagetora spends centuries worrying that Naoe will overtake him, and it may be fair to say that for the vast majority of that time, Naoe is gaining on him. Kagetora doesn't change much; Naoe does, though slowly. Then at the end, Kagetora changes a lot, while Naoe just keeps on creeping through change, possibly for a "billion" years.

What we do know about Naoe is that, in his original life, he was very ambitious and invested in status. Original Naoe is pretty squarely in Kuukai's Stage 2, having internalized ethical behavior because it's what's expected. To wit, he's a very good Confucian. He's dedicated, loyal, and appropriate, and darn well wants recognition of his own proper place in return. He is frustrated in this, however. He never rises very high in the Uesugi. Sandwiched between a famous adoptive father Naoe and a famous younger adoptive brother Naoe, Naoe Nobustuna is not notable in history. He once commanded a castle, and that's about it. He dies in a dispute over the fair proportioning of spoils of battle. His coldness may be summed up by his wife, who tells him at one point that he doesn't behave like a human being.

Some years later, in Naoe's early days as a kanshousha, Kagetora echoes this sentiment, and this echo hits him. Naoe has already come to recognize Kagetora as an admirable leader, and the criticism takes hold. This sparks a desire to do better, to emulate something of the care for people he sees in Kagetora. While his ambition and status-consciousness remain, he soon develops a fierce devotion to and admiration for Kagetora. This is actually a step in the right direction. As obsessive and unhealthy as it is, it is better than his previous disconnection from other people. Through Kagetora, Naoe learns to love. He learns to put someone else before his own needs. He learns to study and value the compassion and commitment Kagetora shows, and while it does not come naturally to Naoe, he does learn to be a more generally compassionate and altruistic person across the years.

Naoe gets into a bind, though, in that his love for Kagetora becomes such an overriding commitment that it eclipses any sort of balance or proportion. From a Buddhist perspective—and as someone trained as a monk, Naoe often engages this from Buddhist perspective—Naoe is an anti-Buddhist. He explicitly rejects almost all of the Dharma because to embrace it would require him to detach from Kagetora, and that decision he views as emotionally and morally impossible. Though he doesn't explicitly invoke morality (he sees himself as a bad man), he plainly cannot stomach the idea of betraying Kagetora's trust. He is intensely aware that Kagetora needs him. He is aware that the removal of his adoration would crush Kagetora in much the way that Koutarou-Naoe's distant propriety, in fact, does crush him. He often refers to their centuries' long grappling for domination of each other as "our ideal way of being," to indicate that it is preferable to the alternative: letting go (even a little bit).

Yet Naoe does let go (a little bit). It is interesting to note that in the Shouwa prequels Naoe asserts that protecting Kagetora is his reason for existing, the only reason he performs kanshou. Yet by the end of the series, 35 years later, Kagetora's soul is dead, and Naoe remains, prepared to perform kanshou indefinitely. One could argue that Naoe is still protecting Kagetora's memory or the fragments of Kagetora's soul still within his own, but it's still a far cry from his earlier sense of not being able to face life without Kagetora by his side. Cardinally, Naoe must let Kagetora die, which is the most terrifying thing he could face. And he does face it. He very likely could successfully exorcise him and force him to reincarnate (thus saving his soul). He doesn't do this. He accepts, albeit unhappily, that Kagetora uses the retsumyousei to create the Shadow Shikoku rather than to save himself. He lets Kagetora follow the path he chooses to follow, to live his life as he feels he must. It is a tremendous act of self-sacrifice.

By the end of the story, Naoe is still obsessively attached to Kagetora, vowing to perform kanshou as long as he can so that Kagetora will never be forgotten. And yet I think Naoe is creeping along the bodhisattva path. He is slowly but consistently learning to be a more giving person and, indeed, to be a less attached person. In the end, he grieves Kagetora, but he is not incapable of living without him. And future Naoe certainly does behave as a highly compassionate, fairly serene, comparatively non-attached individual. It will just take a few kalpas.*

(*Side note: the "billion year" thing is in keeping with the big number theory that Mahayana Buddhism inherits from Vedic cosmology. It is consistent with the Shingon idea that Maitreya will return to earth in 5-ish billion years, for example.)

Personality Notes: Naoe, at least by the 20th century, is actually a very caring person, largely down to his having learned from Kagetora. He has a fairly strong impulse to help others, though not as intense as Kagetora's. He is good friends with Irobe, Nagahide, and Haruie, as well as a number of others. He is a caring family member to whatever family he lands in. (He remains a good Confucian.) He is, however, capable of horrific acts, signally his rape of Minako and similar repeated molestation of Kagetora. I read such actions as explosive outbursts of the tremendous pressure cooker of stress that is his psyche. Kagetora often treats him in a way that is borderline abusive: alternating between cold judgement, rejection, and verbal cruelty, on the one hand, and moments of caring, amiability, and comfort on the other. This is an ongoing psychological beating, intensified by the basic fact that he wants Kagetora but can't have him, resents him but adores him. Odi et amo.

Naoe's own self-image is generally negative. However, while Kagetora's low self-esteem is largely the result of a skew based on childhood trauma, Naoe's is based on directly on guilt over his specific actions, centrally raping Minako. Prior to that, I think his sense of self-worth has taken a beating from Kagetora's rejection but is not low to the point of regarding himself as a bad person. After Minako, he regards himself as a bad person. He is racked with guilt, to the point of being suicidal in the childhood of his next life. Moreover, he capable of towering rage over the whole thing because he is on the horns of a fundamental human problem: he recognizes (correctly) that he is not entirely to blame for what he's being blamed for; Kagetora really did push him to it. At the same time, he also recognizes (correctly) that he has to take responsibility for his own heinous actions and their ongoing harm, not least to Kagetora. He is, thus, trapped between a sense of guilt and victimization for that guilt, which reduces to a fury that only makes further heinous acts more likely. As the tensions relax and his relationship with Kagetora becomes healthier, these concerns recede. But I suspect that Naoe has a very long road ahead in figuring out how he should/wants to regard himself as a human being. He does not want to let himself off the hook, which is a form of attachment in itself.

A Quick Note on Naoe's Sexuality: Naoe is fundamentally heterosexual. Kagetora is the only man we ever hear of his being attracted to. This is an example of the "gay for you" trope in BL/slash fic, but be that as it may, the peculiarity of his attraction to Kagetora may underlie his recurrent professions of the inessentiality of gender. This is a Buddhist tenant, and one of the few Naoe seems happy to adhere to. He remarks repeatedly to Kagetora that he would retain his attachment to him regardless of what bodies they were in or what genders they were. His attraction to Kagetora is really not very located in physical appearance, as may be exemplified in their volume 20 tryst, where Kagetora is emaciated, scarred from recent injuries, unshaven, and has a bandage over his evil eye!

Naoe and Buddhism: Naoe has much in common with Ivan Karamazov. Both are highly intellectual, highly passionate people who have declared war with the religion they were raised in and which profoundly shapes their understanding of the world. Naoe does not, like Ivan, question the basic morality of the religion (at least not directly), but he absolutely rejects it as his own path. Almost everything that Buddhism advises Naoe rejects. On a superficial level, Naoe embraces a sensuality Buddhism typically frowns on: he enjoys sleeping casually with women, fine food, designer clothes, etc. More fundamentally, he rejects practice to still his mind; in fact, his "monkey mind" rattles on incessantly. He is always ruminating on something. He ruminates throughout his POV sex scenes with Kagetora; he ruminates while racing madly through the forest to save Kagetora. He cannot stop thinking things out. He vehemently rejects the idea of non-attachment. Instead, his entire value system is centered on attachment to Kagetora. And if he does pose some abstract challenge to Buddhist wisdom, it may be this: that his detaching from Kagetora (before Kagetora is ready) would destroy Kagetora. That being the case, is it good? Is it defensible? When the narrative does see him very tentatively begin to learn non-attachment, it is appropriately (maybe necessarily) an outgrowth of his attachment: Kagetora chooses to place helping others ahead of saving his own life. To honor this choice, to love him well, Naoe must at least begin to learn to let him go.

Styles of Thinking: Naoe has a fiercely analytical mind, and he exemplifies the benefits and limitations of this. A Mirage essayist on LiveJournal once noted that when Naoe and Kagetora spar, Kagetora often says things that are false, but what Naoe says is usually true. Kagetora is a holistic, intuitive thinker, fighting a deep, tight knot of shame. As such, he has a lot of denial, and often uses false arguments to deflect the truth. An obvious example: he often tells Naoe he doesn't care if Naoe stays or goes. This is patently false, but it serves his façade. In terms of frank self-delusion, he really does mostly convince himself that he orders Naoe to protect Minako because he trusts Naoe—which is not wholly untrue, but which misses the main reality that it's a test of Naoe's attachment. Naoe, on the other hand, has a very solid grasp of what is going on between them. He sometimes blusters too, but it's rarer, and he's generally aware when he's being unfair for rhetorical effect. Naoe could write a book on the dynamics of their relationship, and it would be pretty accurate. Yet this analytical capacity does next to nothing to spare him from persistent agony, misery, ongoing trauma, and outbursts of very ugly behavior because his problem is not analytical; it's emotional. His problem is not that he doesn't understand what's going on; it's that he not willing to do what he has to do to change it.