I’ve come to Sensei Takahashi to learn the way of the yari, but we are sitting on the edge of a cliff facing the ocean, painting sumi-e. Ghost of Yotei gives you plenty of opportunities to take a break from slaying ronin to partake in the East Asian painting style, but this is the first time it’s been part of protagonist Atsu’s training.
It makes sense, though. Sucker Punch’s highly anticipated sequel to 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima tells the story of a woman warrior on a quest for revenge, and in between bouts of brutal killings, Atsu follows many of the same practices as the original game’s protagonist, Jin Sakai. She meditates at hot springs, honors deities at shrines, follows animals to points of interest, and releases captive creatures.
But Atsu is even more connected to nature than Jin, and her affinity for the arts, coupled with her dogged, deadly determination, makes Ghost of Yotei a divine take on the power of femininity.
The warrior woman
Astu, portrayed with impressive depth by actor Erika Ishii, is a complicated young woman. Though she is stubborn and rigid in her belief system (that the people who killed her family all those years ago must die by her hand, no matter what), there is a softness about her that she seems determined to hide from other people. When travelers come to sit by her campfire, she reflexively reaches for her katana–only when it’s clear that they’re someone in need, or a lover of the shamisen (Japanese string instrument), or a member of the Ainu (the indigenous people of Hokkaido), does she soften.
That barrier is for her own protection, of course. Being a woman in 1600s Japan meant being obedient to your husband and other men. Women weren’t permitted to travel alone, though working-class women were expected to work, either alongside their husbands or, if in urban areas, as hostesses at sake shops or as maids. Atsu has no husband, and she spent the majority of her life learning how to fight and roaming to earn money doing it, so any encounter with a stranger brings questions and incredulity.
“Like hell we will; she’s a woman,” a settler spits when his friend offers to pay Atsu to ride along with them for protection.
Beyond incredulity, there’s the ever-present threat of violence. A woman you meet along the way tells a story of how, for years, she hid amongst men, at one point silently sustaining a brutal branding for fear of revealing her identity. Another moment sees Atsu enter the private quarters of a samurai leader, just to find him undressed and expecting a sex worker. Later, she moves virtually unseen through a sake house because she has (reluctantly) worn a kimono. While playing a game of zeni hajiki (inspired by the Japanese children’s game ohajiki), her opponent regales Atsu with a story of how a meek, demure woman came into his gambling den years ago and fleeced all the men who underestimated her. We later learn that it was Atsu’s mother.
Even when it’s not the center of the story or the cause of conflict, Atsu’s womanhood is ever-present, like a paper-thin veil draped over the world. Will those men up the road try to attack, or offer to sell her their wares? Will this bloodthirsty despot accept the bounty she has brought him, or throw her in jail and subject her to horrors only women know?
Ecofeminists point to the problems that arise when we connect women to nature, just to subjugate both. At the behest of a mad leader known only as the Oni, fire-wielding Oni Raiders stalk a corner of Yotei, setting farms ablaze and destroying the landscape, black scars cutting through large swaths of the land. When a woman tries to escape their prison, those same men kill her and hang her body in front of the jail cells, a warning to any who dare resist.
Atsu sees these people for what they are: a danger not only to her, but to any vulnerable creature or blade of grass in Yotei.
A force of nature
Atsu is most vulnerable around the creatures of Yotei and when she’s exploring its forests, plains, and mountaintops, because she’s at home there. She’s safe there. It’s there that she frequently stops to pull out her sumi-e tools and paint waves crashing against the bluffs, or bows in front of a small wooden sign just to be enveloped in Japanese fireflies, or plucks her shamisen while astride Shimaki, her horse.
She possesses a seemingly supernatural ability to connect with nature–whether it’s finding and soothing runaway horses to lead them back to their owner, playfully wondering where a fox is leading her just to discover something spectacular, or summoning a wolf to her side with the strum of her shamisen. Atsu is a literal force of nature: a woman with the wind always at her back and wolves ready to be called, fangs bared, to dig into some man’s flesh.
When Atsu relaxes at a hot spring, she’ll often be joined by an animal friend or two: a massive snowy buck or a few chittering foxes. She prefers these friends to the ones who look like her. “Sometimes I wish I had people to talk to, but then people open their mouths and talk and talk and talk–and then I remember why I’m alone,” Atsu says, neck deep in milky-blue water.
Talking to people, for Atsu, often ends with them at the end of her katana. “I don’t hurt kids or animals,” Atsu says. Instead, she hurts the men hurting animals, sometimes with those very same animals by her side. She is the personification of nature’s rage, her sword piercing through armor like the icy wind atop Mount Yotei.
Though you could argue that Yotei is an extension of Tsushima’s Shinto themes (an indigenous Japanese religion that believes gods are found in nature), Atsu’s connection to the natural world is much deeper than Jin’s. And when interwoven with the rumors swirling around Yotei that she is an onryō (a vengeful spirit refusing the afterlife until their revenge is doled out), Atsu’s ties with nature grow even stronger.
She can summon this feminine, supernatural power to let loose an Onryō Shout, terrifying the men in front of her into submission–she pulls her arms inward, seemingly drawing in power from the air around her, before letting loose a blood-curdling scream that shakes the earth, flattens grass, and drops men to their knees.
Atsu is a force of nature, and a soldier in the protection of it. Throughout Ghost of Yotei, we see her summon its power to mete out justice for men, women, children, and animals who have been mistreated by the men in power, by the people who would rather burn the land than watch it flourish. It’s easy to root for her, to get sucked into playing just one more side mission where you slaughter wolf trappers or climb just one more rock face to bow at an altar resting at the mouth of the sky. She is nature’s protector–a divinely dangerous woman–and we’re just helping her along.
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