Silapa Jarun

View All Titles by Silapa Jarun

REVIEWS for Samurai's Forbidden Love [Katana Duet]

5 Angels: "Ms. Jarun has created a unique story by mixing characters from Feudal Japan into an early American culture to fashion a story that is fast paced and unpredictable for the reader. I loved the scenes from Japan and how Aki and Akeno adapted to America, sometimes with more success than others. It was interesting to see how individuals from both cultures responded differently to the same situations. The scenes where Aki and Akeno finally expressed their true feelings for each other were moving and very erotic. It was interesting to see how both sets of siblings found themselves in similar situations, but looked upon it differently, maybe due to the different cultures. It was fascinating to watch the action unfold and not be able to figure what was really going on until the very end. I will definitely look for more books by Ms. Jarun." —Teresa, Fallen Angel Reviews

4 Pixies: "The continuing revelations in this novel are truly amazing. Author Silapa Jarun weaves an extraordinarily involved tapestry with the foil of the defeated Samurai twins contrasting the elusive ethereally ill Klara and her relative Konrad. A man who seems so open and aboveboard, Konrad harbors his own mysterious drives and secrets. Silapa Jarun has a taut grasp of background historical detail and the period comes alive with sensory perceptions, both in the Japanese setting and in Wisconsin, where the reader can almost feel the snap of cold and the bite of the wind. Emotional and sensual tensions between various combinations of the four characters tighten minutely and almost imperceptibly, but inescapably. A multilayered and complex story, Katana Duet is memorable and thought-provoking." —Frost, Dark Angel Reviews

STORY EXCERPT

My body hurts. If I can just destroy this shell, then I’ll be free. If I die, I won’t have to think about it anymore. Akeno clutched the side of his head, as if doing so would keep his skull intact, and exhaled. “I don't want to think about it!” The samurai, wearing just a thin kimono, the last layer of his fine clothing, wrapped his arms around his center like covering a gaping wound and shivered as he kept his pace towards the depths that lay ahead. He stood in the waist high water like a statue, not hearing the shouting and splashing behind him.

Strong arms seized the dazed man and tried to pull him back to land.

Akeno yelped in pain. “My ribs hurt. Don’t touch me!” he gasped. “They did this to me! Let me go! I must destroy this body.” Incomprehensible sentences continued to pour from Akeno’s cold lips even as he began to realize someone was calling his name.

“Akeno! Wake up!”

A strike across the face brought Akeno back to his senses, and his eyes found an identical figure before him.

“Aki?” he breathed. “I hate myself.”

“How can you say you hate yourself when we are the same? Do you hate me, Akeno? Do you?”

“No, no.” Akeno was shaking his head, his face a contorted sculpture of pain and confusion. “N-Not you.” He pointed at his chest. “Me, I hate myself. Me.”

“Brother, you don’t exist. Only we exist. You cannot hate yourself.” Aki slowly reached out to hold his brother’s trembling shoulders and whispered, “Tell me everything.” They stood still in the water, one listening, one whispering.

Akeno was shaking. “I can’t live with this dishonor.”

“Then I’ll destroy the ones who hurt you. Once I have punished them, you will not have to think of this again.” Aki placed his palms on either side of his brother’s face and watched as the faint moonlight illuminated the pale, smooth skin.

“A-Aki, there was only one that night.” Akeno chewed his lower lip and wiped away the tears with the back of his hand. I can’t remember all their names or hideous faces. “Hamada is the one who should die.” The samurai winced when he rubbed the back of his hand across the tender corner of his bruised and swollen lip.

Aki nodded. “I will dispatch Hamada with my own hands. Listen carefully. The peasant riot is moving closer to the camp tonight. When it does, you have to escape and meet with the others heading to Edo.” Once Hamada’s blood is spilled, I will have atoned for abandoning you, Akeno. We were in that room together.

“I won’t leave without you.” Akeno could not stop crying. “We came together and we should go together.”

“We will not be separated for long,” Aki said, trying to soothe his sibling’s emotions. “I promise it will be only temporary.” He clenched his teeth. “Akeno, I will not allow them that one to touch you again. I’ll take care of you from now on.”

Akeno, the gentle sibling, sobbed into his brother’s chest. “I—I am ashamed.” Disbelief strangled Akeno’s voice as he looked away and squeezed his fists. “It’s not supposed to happen to men.”

“I’ll restore your honor. But first, you have to give me your clothing before leaving. They have not seen me, so it will be easy.” Aki tried to absorb the waves of grief from Akeno, but his own growing anger easily overshadowed the attempt. “Take off the wet clothing.”

Aki dragged his twin to the water’s edge slowly, never letting his hands leave his brother’s body. He watched him strip away the soaked cloth. Seeing Akeno’s toned and lithe body was like experiencing a strange dream. It was as if his brother was an external reflection of his soul. He tried not to look at all the bruises, but it was hard to tear his eyes away from the corner of Akeno’s damaged lip.

“Now you take my clothes, Akeno. They’re dirty and wet too, but at least you will not look like our Lord’s page anymore.”

Aki pointed to the corner of his own mouth. “You have to  ”

Akeno punched his brother.

The older brother staggered backwards and cradled his chin. “Good.” Aki could feel the blood crawling down his chin. “Perfect. Now we match!” As usual, brother can guess what is on my mind.

Torches carried by the mob soon blazed across the horizon, and the chants of the farmers rumbled across the plain. They would not stand a chance against the Imperial army that rushed forth to put down the insurrection. Everyone was starving. The domain’s farmers who fed the samurai were left with nothing when the siege began. Even breast milk stopped flowing, and many babies withered away as the war climaxed. Akeno reluctantly made his escape amidst the chaos but constantly looked behind him, hoping that perhaps Aki would follow.

Aki ran a broken wooden comb through his hair as he watched Akeno slip into the night with both their katana, swords, tied to his back. All weapons were turned over to the enemy officers. All except the two Matsumoto family heirlooms Aki had buried under a tree earlier that day. He smoothed his raven black locks to make them proper, as those of his brother, and returned to the storeroom where the prisoners crouched around a weakening fire.

A teenager who was a subordinate page looked up. “Hey, Akeno?” Kajinosuke eyed the handsome older samurai suspiciously.

Tadayoshi, another attendant, tilted his head to the side. “Aki, what are you trying to do? Look, some people can’t tell the difference, but I know both you brothers too well. Why are you dressed like Akeno? Where did he go?”

Aki sat down slowly and smiled. “Kajinosuke, Tadayoshi, tomorrow we are going to take care of some scoundrels, and you two will help me.” He stretched out on the straw-covered floor as the two youths looked at each other. The older twin looked at a spider in the upper corner of the wooden structure. Its long legs moved slightly on the web, stretching out the silk. Aki closed his eyes and committed the name Hamada, which Akeno had whispered, to memory. Akeno did not need to tell me who those animals were. I was there. I saw everything. I’ll never forget. Why did he just give me one name?

Aki smiled to himself. “While many people in our Ise-han have seen us ‘mirror samurai’, few can tell us apart. I’m counting on the enemy to be just as confused.”

ADULT EXCERPT

WARNING!

EXPLICIT TWINCEST SCENE

Sharing the room with Akeno presented a problem he had not considered earlier. Aki let his hand wander down his chest and towards his cock. How many weeks has it been? The samurai’s mounting need to touch himself was unbearable. Aki gently massaged his cock through the fabric and tried to imagine the face and body of an elusive courtesan with heavy breasts and wide hips. He wanted to be the man in those vividly colored shunga, erotic prints, entering a geisha with disheveled hair. At least Akeno had O-Hana. Aki furrowed his brows from the spark of jealousy at his brother’s experience and tried to recall all the naked women he had seen as a young boy at bath houses or the washer women who hiked up the bottom of their kimono exposing their smooth, plump thighs. Not enough. His dry hand was going to rub his sensitive organ raw if he kept this up. He pushed aside the covers which began to cling to his hot body. Aki kept his eyes closed and recalled a moment from his youth.

Two years before the war, he trained the new junior pages in the castle. “We’ve already planned our lord’s wardrobe for the upcoming week,” Tadayoshi reported.

“And we carefully arranged his writing implements as well,” Kajinosuke eagerly added. “The pillows in the meeting room have been properly arranged too. So can we go?”

“What’s the hurry?” Aki looked up from an essay expounding Confucian virtues.

“Don’t you know?” Tadayoshi said. “Yaeko is going to be bathing, and we’re going to miss the show if you don’t let us go.”

“Ah, so you guys have been sneaking a peek, have you? Careful, she helps her father teach martial arts. Yaeko is a true samurai woman.”

Tadayoshi pointed to his head and showed a bruise at his temple. “She threw a wood bucket at me.”

Kajinosuke pulled up his sleeve, proudly exposing a red mark as if it was an injury sustained on a battlefield. “Yaeko whacked me with a broom, but it was so worth it! Come with us. You don’t know what you’re missing!”

The other young page excitedly added, “If Yaeko really didn’t want us to keep watching, she should have killed us by now.”

Aki dismissed them with a wave of his hand and decided that he was going spend some time by the river, watching the samurai train their steeds to cross the rushing water. In such hot weather, they often stripped themselves and guided the animals into the deep, cool waves.

Aki took in deep breaths and squeezed his sac until it tightened against his body. He remembered how the glistening, statuesque bodies alongside the large beasts only heightened the scene of masculine beauty.

The samurai were of various ages, some just slightly older than himself, a few in their late twenties or even thirties, confident of their prowess and in control as they coaxed the whinnying horses. Clear liquid crashed around their bare, tan thighs and chests. Their muscles flexed as they pulled the stubborn animals through the current, and their voices seemed to be in harmony with the sounds of nature embracing them all around.

Such an image was seared into Aki’s memory as an intense thirst arose deep within his psyche. He moved his thumb in a slow circular motion at the crown of his cock, coaxing out a few drops of precum. I want all those men around me, on top of me, controlling what I’m to enjoy. The warrior pushed his head back into the pillow when he felt a hand squeeze his bare thigh.

“You need me.”

“Akeno!” Aki tried to draw the sheets over his middle even though the darkness offered enough protection. He could imagine his sibling smiling at his pathetic attempt at pleasuring himself.

“Let me help you.” Akeno spread open and held down Aki’s legs. To prevent his sibling from resisting, he held Aki’s arms. “I want to do this, Aki, because you should not suffer.”

“I’m not,”—Aki exhaled—“suffering. It’s just that I’m—”

“Why do this alone when I’m here for you always?” Akeno’s hot breath on his weeping cock broke down his resistance. Aki became silent, allowing his brother to interpret it as a complete surrender to his undeniable need.

Akeno first licked his brother’s inner thigh slowly like a tiger savoring the blood of newly killed prey. He suckled his lover’s scrotum gently, allowing his soft lips to caress the contour of the virility encased inside the thin flesh. Encouraged by the low moan coming from Aki, he slowly sheathed the long and thick cock with his mouth and stroked it skillfully with his tongue just as O-Hana had taught him.

As Akeno moved his head upward, sucking and squeezing hungrily, Aki tried to follow by raising his hips, afraid that the moist lips would abandon his erection. Just hearing the sound of his brother sucking on his flesh made him shudder. He was at the mercy of the man restraining his wrists. The domination only heightened Aki’s enjoyment, and he found himself straining for more air as his excitement began to reach a crescendo. Akeno released Aki’s wrists and inserted one finger into his tight hole. Aki pressed his brother’s head down on his member with his now freed hand when he felt the sensation of a finger probing his inner muscles. “Akeno, you have to stop now. Now.” Aki threw his head to the side, embarrassed at how fast his body needed release. “I’m coming.”

The young samurai continued his ministrations, moving his head up and down as if to mold the shaft with his mouth, anticipating the chance to taste his brother. As he seduced his sibling to the edge of self-control, Akeno’s memory conjured the time they both underwent a complex purification ceremony just to see a master sword smith, dressed in Shinto priest attire, pouring the transformed heated steel to create cherished blades. He seemed to consume that incredible molten liquid now, tilting his head back to swallow as he used two fingers to move the foreskin up and down the sensitive glands.

“Taste,” Akeno said, kissing his drained brother, falling forward, and clutching his firm body.