Matsu'o Tsurayaba

Matsu'o Tsurayaba
Matsu'o Tsurayaba from Uncanny X-Men #256. Art by Jim Lee.
Publication information
Publisher	Marvel Comics
First appearance	Uncanny X-Men #255 (Mid-December 1989)
In-story information
Alter ego	Matsu'o Tsurayaba
Team affiliations	The Hand
Abilities	martial artist.

Matsu'o Tsurayaba is a fictional character associated with the Hand, and part of the Marvel Comics universe. A member of the Hand, Tsurayaba's first appearance came in Uncanny X-Men #255 and was directly involved with the "body swap incident" between Betsy Braddock and Kwannon just after Betsy's emergence from the Siege Perilous.

Matsu'o Tsurayaba was a Hand assassin working in Japan. His love, another assassin by the name of Kwannon, worked for an opposing crime boss named Nyorin. Though they knew their respective employers would eventually clash, the two remained lovers, and vowed to fight honorably to the death should they have to. Fatefully, they did. Matsu'o was ordered by the Hand to kill Nyorin, and during his fight with Kwannon, she slipped, and fell from the cliffs they were on to the ocean below. Matsu'o brought her broken body to the labs of the Hand. They were able to keep her body alive, but her mind was shattered beyond repair.

Soon after, the X-Man Psylocke emerged from the Siege Perilous. Betsy Braddock washed up, naked and amnesiac, on a beach of an island belonging to the Hand. Matsu'o recognized the woman as Psylocke and devised a plan to use her telepathic abilities to restore his lover's mind. His idea was to transplant the mind of Kwannon into the body of Psylocke. Kwannon possessed a natural empathic ability that would ensure her mind would survive contact with a high-level telepath's like Psylocke, but her body was still too weak for such a transfer. Matsu'o contacted the villain Spiral, who agreed to help.

Spiral, true to her penchant for deception and treachery, did more than just switch the two minds. She twisted the DNA of both women so that both bodies were genetically the same, each bearing characteristics of the other. She also spliced the minds of both women, planting pieces of each in both bodies. After the transfer was complete, both the Asian body of Kwannon and the European body of Psylocke possessed parts of the psyches of both women, though it was later revealed that more of Betsy's mind existed within Kwannon's body and more of Kwannon's resided within Psylocke's. The process also halved Psylocke's telepathy between them.