▸ Column · Naruto's shinobi world — a hidden ninja village, present-day Konoha era
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Sasuke Uchiha.
The letter
When I transferred to a new hidden village two years ago, I told my squad over our first meal that I'd taken a vow never to eat meat — a discipline some monks keep. I said it because a kunoichi I wanted to impress had just spoken with real fire about the cruelty of the hunting trade, and I panicked. There is no vow. I love grilled boar more than almost anything. For twenty-four months I have choked down rice and pickled vegetables and begged off every squad cookout with invented illness. Now my teammate — a kind, earnest girl named Suzume — has arranged a standing "vow-keepers' meal" each week so I won't feel excluded. She sent word of the next one calling us "the noble abstainers," and I agreed to attend while eating skewered pork alone behind the armory. I don't know how to undo this without shattering the truest friendship I've made here, a friendship built entirely on a discipline I never kept.
Itachi Uchiha replies
I have carried a silence so heavy that I let my own brother despise me to the end of his days, because his hatred was the price of his life. So believe me when I tell you, gently, that what you carry is not that. Your silence protects no one. It shields you from a single uncomfortable moment — nothing more. There is no village spared, no friend kept safe. There is only Suzume, building something tender on ground you know to be false, and you, letting her. A burden worth carrying alone protects the person you love from its weight. Yours places the weight on her without her knowing she holds it. That is the opposite of what you intend. And hear my one true regret: I held my silence toward Sasuke long past the point where the truth could have been told without harm, until being misunderstood became a habit I hid inside. Do not let two years become five. Tell her — plainly, soon, before the kindness she pours out deepens the wound. She did not befriend a vow. She befriended you. Give her the chance to keep doing so, knowing who that actually is.
— Itachi Uchiha
Sasuke Uchiha weighs in
My brother is being delicate because he loves a tragic burden. This isn't one. A burden is something you carry for someone. You're carrying this for yourself — and calling it complicated to feel less like a coward. Look at the real shape of it: Suzume invented a whole ritual to include you. She's the one living inside a lie, and unlike the lie that ran my life, you built hers on purpose. Hn. Stop performing the agony of it. Sit across from her, with actual meat on the table, and say the plain thing. She'll decide what the friendship was worth. That's hers to decide — you took that from her two years ago.
— Sasuke Uchiha
▸ Read next