Getsumei
The name of this Discipline comes from the Japanese phrase getsumei no michi, which translates roughly as “the moonlit path.” It comes from an apocryphal poetic exchange between two Tokugawa-era Burakumin who were master and student. Out of revenge for an undeserved slight, the bitter, ill-tempered student considered desecrating the body of a deceased son of an influential governor whose wealth had long supported a haughty Ventrue Prince. The Burakumin’s wise master replied only, “We can’t do as you say. The governor’s son is already picking plum blossoms along the moonlit path.” As the story goes, the shambling corpse of the son returned to the governor’s mansion late that evening to kill three of the governor’s concubines and four of his remaining children before being cut down by the mansion’s guards. As the exchange relates to the story, so does the name relate to the Discipline in the way its genteel seeming refers to something distasteful and ugly. This Discipline arises from the profession of handling and preparing the dead for burial, turning an already spiritually unclean undertaking into a perverse and ongoing desecration. With it, a Burakumin can learn secrets from the corpses of dead men, harvest parts of corpses as disgusting tools, and even imbue dead bodies with a false semblance of life.
Related Ethnicities