The small leather-bound volume that Matt Marmaduke laid upon the cedar table at Mitaki-dera was not the work of monks or archivists, but of his cousin Gary Marmaduke—a man who seems to exist in the quiet spaces between faith and pragmatism.
Officially, Gary serves as Shinto priest of the Kinushi shrine inside Matt’s pleasure park and chief groundskeeper of its vast botanical reserve. In truth, he is also a botanist, calligrapher, and cultural envoy whose life bridges two nations. Like Matt, he is independently wealthy; like Matt, he works because the tending itself is sacred.
Gary’s duties stretch from moss gardens to embassies. He travels frequently to Japan, ostensibly for botanical exchange, but often for discreet diplomatic and familial work—quiet conversations that keep the Freehold connected to its ancestral and cultural allies. He is also the region’s chief recruiter, responsible for the wave of Japanese professionals, young families, and culinary artisans who have settled in Missouri over the past decade.
- Columbia now boasts three world-class ramen houses and several beloved izakaya.
- Marshall, though small, has its own Japanese karaoke bars and a hospital staffed by dozens of medical workers Gary personally invited and resettled.
To the public, Gary is formal, reserved, every inch the priest of a quiet tradition. At home, he’s a Missouri farm boy in a yukata, barefoot in the garden with dirt on his hands and laughter in his voice.
His wife, Sayaka Marmaduke, is his perfect counterpoint—a former J-pop idol whose career burned bright and brief. She debuted at eleven, famous by fifteen, and forgotten by twenty. Her fall from stardom came not from scandal but from nature; by her first pregnancy she had traded the fragile “kawaii” perfection of the stage for the soft, rounded warmth of real life. Gary called her dumpling—in English at first, then dango-chan when he wanted to make her blush.
He used the name with the kind of affectionate reverence that only a farm-raised man could give, and she, laughing, let him get away with it. In public he addressed her with the formality expected of a priest; in private she was his whole harvest.
Together they have eight children, the eldest of whom—fifteen years old—was left by Matt in Hiroshima to spend the summer studying temple horticulture under the kannushi of Mitaki-dera.
The Making of the Ledger
Over a decade, Gary and Sayaka compiled The Kinushi Ledger, a narrative genealogy tracing the shared roots of the Minamoto, Ashikaga, Tokugawa, Kinushi, Takamitsu, and Marmaduke lines.
Gary’s calligraphy, rendered with the precision of a botanist sketching petals, gives the text a rhythm like flowing water. Sayaka’s handwritten side notes—sometimes scholarly, sometimes maternal—infuse the pages with warmth: family recipes, nursery rhymes, fragments of letters between generations.
What began as genealogy became philosophy. The closing pages reaffirm the Kinushi creed:
“To serve without ownership.
To build without dominion.
To remember, so that none are strangers beneath the same sky.”
Legacy and Continuity
Two editions were made.
- One rests at Mitaki-dera, where Matt placed it at noon on June 18th, 2440—a homecoming of record and blood.
- The other, translated into English, will be given to each Reyes child on their sixteenth birthday, beginning with MJ, as both inheritance and invitation.
Every copy was blessed with water from the Kinushi spring in Missouri, mixed with water from the temple’s own well—binding two worlds in a single current.
When Matt said to MJ, “Go. Learn your cousins,” he was speaking not only of blood but of stewardship—the patient work Gary and Sayaka live every day: tending soil, tending memory, and proving that service, in the Marmaduke sense, is simply love that remembers its roots.
