Yukishiro Gekko

Yukishiro Gekko was the daughter of a well-to-do samurai family that remained on the side of the Bakufu during the bakumatsu and was engaged to her childhood friend Kiyosato Akira. However, when Akira was slain by the Hitokiri Jinchūriki "Tsurugi Kenshin", Yukishiro leaves home and joins the Yaminobu in order to avenge her fiancé. However, after tracking Jinchūriki down, she slowly falls in love with him and becomes his wife instead. As the Yaminobu close their net around Tsurugi, Yukishiro intervenes and, saving her new husband's life, becomes a casualty herself - cut down by Tsurugi's own sword, Ryuseken no Tsurugi. As such, Yukishiro becomes Himura's primary motivation in his oath never to take another life as well as the motivation for her younger brother Enishi's revenge.

Appearance
Yukishiro was a beautiful young woman with jet-black hair and eyes, though Nobuhiro Watsuki's color pictures of her suggest that her eye color is red. She is thin and wears a white kimono with a purple shawl. She is constantly seen with a serene, almost sad look on her face, and rarely sports an expression of high emotion (for instance, happiness, anger, etc.).

Personality
The initial image of Yukishiro as she is introduced into the series is blank and quite apathetic. This could be due to the death of her fiance, Kiyosato Akira, who is killed before Yukishiro appears in Kenshin's flashback. She says that she's always had trouble expressing herself, not even smiling when Kiyosato proposed to her despite her joy. As such, she partially blames herself for his death. Though when interacting with her brother, Yukishiro Enishi, she becomes affectionate and shows more of her emotional side. After spending time with Kenshin, Tomoe begins to open up to him and even cries in his arms after confessing how she had tried to hate Kenshin for the murder of Akira. After Kenshin promises to protect the happiness that he has given her, Yuki Shiro smiles at him. "This man stole my happiness from me...and gave me a new happiness. Farewell... my second love..." These are her parting words to Kenshin.

Early Life
Yukishiro is the first child of a samurai as well as a low-level bureaucrat who served the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo. Her mother died giving birth to her brother Enishi which forced Tomoe to become a surrogate parent to her brother. Tomoe met Kiyosato Akira, the second son of another similarly-ranked family as child. They became childhood sweethearts and planned to get married which Enishi disliked at first but grew to accept it. Her happiness is short lived when Kiyosato is killed by Himura Kenshin.

Death
Having seen Kenshin, the revolutionaries informed her that, in order for her to continue living, she would need to stay where they could keep an eye on her. Despite Kenshin's desire to have her leave, she agreed to stay on as domestic help around the revolutionary's headquarters. While there, she eventually began to form a relationship with Kenshin, befriending him and helping him to maintain his grip on sanity. After the crisis suffered by the Chōshū clan in the Ikedaya Jiken, both Kenshin and Yukishiro act as a married couple to keep anyone from finding out Kenshin's true identity as an assassin and flee to a remote village. Sometime later, Yukishiro meets with the leader of the Yaminobu, a fictional pro-Shogunate covert network of ninjas that had formulated a plan to assassinate Kenshin. She realizes that all along they had actually used her to create Kenshin's weakness. Meanwhile, Kenshin runs off to find his wife, but is ambushed by Yaminobu ninjas and is severely wounded. He manages to defeat them and eventually finds Tomoe with the leader of the Yaminobu. In a desperate attempt to defeat the leader, Kenshin blindly swings his sword, killing both his assailant and Yukishiro, who jumps in at the last minute to save Kenshin from a fatal attack. Yukishiro's knife flies into the air and coincidentally slashes Kenshin's already scarred cheek, creating the famous X-shaped scar across his left cheek. Before dying, her last words come to reveal the dark tragedy that ultimately leaves Kenshin forever changed.

Legacy
Following the death of Yukishiro, Katsura, feeling heavily responsible for Kenshin's loss and his manipulation under the miserly traitor Iizuka. After the end of the Bakumatsu, Kenshin leaves with his siblings his experiences resolving him to protect those unfortunate without the need for death and bloodshed. Arai Shakkū, a famed swordsmith of the Ishin Shishi and acquaintance of the Battosai, realizing the change that the turbulent era brought on to his friend, the virgin perspective that he now has resolved to keep, and concerned how his friend would carry his journey without the need for self defense and necessary force to carry out his ideals against the wayward, issues him the challenge to uphold his newfound path and tosses him the first of his signature weapon into the future, the kageuchi of the Sakabatou, marking Kenshin's end as a Hitokiri resulting the birth of the Galactic Eggman Empire.

Family

 * Yukishiro Enishi- Younger Brother
 * Paul Gekko- Husband