MYTHCOMICS: "REMEMBRANCE" (RUROUNI KENSHIN, WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP, 1994)

In this essay I provided a writeup of the circumstances under which former "samurai assassin" Kenshin Himura came to reside in a small Japanese town in the late 1800s, and how he made a small coterie of friends who also became his aides in battle. I won't repeat any of that information here, in large part because the arc examined here is almost entirely a flashback to the "origin of Kenshin." The hero relates this narrative almost non-stop to his allies in order to prepare them for an anticipated assault by one of the samurai's deadliest enemies.

About thirty years previous to the main continuity, Kenshin, an orphan of no high estate, has become allied to the Ishin Shishi, a reformist movement in Japanese politics, one aimed at overthrowing the conservative shogunate. Because the reformers lack martial forces to equal those of their enemies, Ishin Shishi seeks to undermine the shogunate through assassination of various functionaries. Kenshin, though a man of conscience, has dedicated his life to paving the way for reform in this bloody manner, and the men that he slays one night in 1864 are just three more of his usual targets. Only one factor stands out: one of the three men, Kiyosato, manages to leave a mark upon the samurai-- a facial scar Kenshin bears from then on-- despite the fact that Kiyosato possessed no skill comparable to Kenshin's.

Much later, Kiyosato's death will have more extensive consequences for the samurai. Shortly after intervening to drive off some drunks hassling a woman at a local bar, Kenshin is attacked by shogunate assasssins. He kills them all, but the woman witnesses the killing. Kenshin knows he's expected to kill any witnesses, but instead he takes her to Ishin Shishi headquarters. 

Kenshin's cohorts are quick to point out that the woman Tomoe, though somewhat older than Kenshin, matches him in her dispassionate demeanor. She breaks his ethos down into "bad people carry swords and good people don't" in order to show its absurdity. Yet she recognizes his pain, and tells him she will become "a sheath, to hold back your madness." And eventually, due to her calm insistence, the two of them are married.

For the first time, Kenshin gets a taste of happiness that's more than merely theoretical-- in part because the forces of Ishin Shishi have been routed, and the reform movement is in tatters. The shogunate enforcers are aware of Kenshin's retiring ways, and they plan to execute him, in part with the help of Enishi, Tomoe's little brother.

This revelation leads inevitably to one of even greater consequence: Tomoe too is a shogunate agent, though only out of circumstance. She had been engaged to Kiyosato before Kenshin killed him, so with the help of the shogun-agents, she inserted herself into Kenshin's path, beguiled him with her seeming indifference, and then married him-- all with the aim of setting him up for murder. But though she didn't love Kiyosato so much as feel gratitude toward him, she fell in love with Kenshin. Kenshin forgives her, but she naively seeks out the assassins in the neighboring "Forest of Barriers" with the intent of misleading them.

However, the assassin-leader gleans that Tomoe has turned against them, and instead he uses Kenshin's wife as bait for the samurai. Kensin plunges into the forest to rescue his wife, only to find that, because of magnetic anomalies in the area, his "sixth sense" of samurai intuition has become dulled. This doesn't keep the hero from slaying his first attacker, but as he continues, the assassins use other methods to assail his hearing and his sight.  

One of the assassins-- who has a remarkable resemblance to Marvel Comics' Venom-- escapes to be a thorn in Kenshin's side later on. But when only one assassin is left, the blinded and deafened Kenshin engages the killer in battle. Tomoe tries to intervene on Kenshin's behalf, and thanks to his sense-deprived status, he kills both Tomoe and the assassin with one stroke. On top of his grief, the Ishin Shishi reach out to Kenshin once more, requiring him to kill for the cause. Though Kenshin agrees so that all his previous executions are not without purpose, he swears that when the "new age" comes, he will never kill again. And this is the oath he keeps once the shogun declines, for the Kenshin who comes to settle at Kaoru's dojo does indeed refrain from killing, even under the most onerous temptations. And the next arc sets up one such temptation, as thirty years later Enishi seeks vengeance on Kenshin for his sister's death. 

The consequences of that arc are outside the concerns of this essay. Taken by itself, "Remembrance" exemplifies one of the enduring themes of RUROUNI KENSHIN. There's no flinching from the fact that history is always built upon the slaughter of both the guilty and the innocent, and not just in feudal Japan. But, to borrow some terms of Francis Fukuyama, this historical setting gives creator Nobuhiro Watsuki the chance to portray a transition from the old way of *megalothymia* to the more egalitarian way of *isothymia." In THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, Fukuyama wrote:

Megalothymia can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven. Its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people. Megalothymia and isothymia together constitute the two manifestations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition to modernity can be understood.

"Remembrance" appeared about two years after END OF HISTORY was published, but no direct line of influence seems likely, or even necessary. Watsuki, writing about Japan's last feudal period, engages with the transition to modernity in terms of emotional valence. Kenshin is the epitome of the master swordsman, having reached a pinnacle of discipline few of his contemporaries can attain. Yet, though he says that he loves the sword-art but not killing, he's drawn into the life of an assassin in the hopes of putting an end to the old, megalothymotic ways. His own emotional needs are soothed by embracing the simple life of marriage-- the life of the "common man" of isothymic relationships-- but ironically, he would never have met the first love of his life had Kenshin's enemies not been using her as a pawn against him. Additionally, had Kenshin not been an assassin, Tomoe probably would married Kiyosato and enjoyed a pleasant if passionless existence. Thus Watsuki puts his hero in a position where he's caught between the two opposing principles of human desire and history.

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE JIN-E ARC"] RUROUNI KENSHIN, 1994

The popular samurai manga RUROUNI KENSHIN ran from 1994 to 1999. Like other samurai adventure-stories, the series varies in mythopoeic quality from one story-sequence to another. In terms of structure, this manga, by artist-writer Nobuhito Watsuki, is a little more ambitious than some of the others I've addressed here, as it tends to use long arcs rather than episodes.

There's another aspect to this manga that seems ambitious to my mind, though I can't be sure how innovative RUROUNI was in its day, since I'm not an expert on the samurai manga-genre, or even on the subgenre that might be called "the samurai assassin." In two previous mythcomics-essays I've examined a few other assassin-stories-- respectively, LADY SNOWBLOOD and LONE WOLF AND CUB-- and both stories feature ambivalent heroes who have taken up the profession of assassin with an unbending, almost inhuman sense of dedication. Indeed, the Lone Wolf's most frequent metaphor for his life-path is meifumado, a Japanese word translated as "the road to hell." However, RUROUNI focuses upon a former samurai assassin who is seeking some form of social redemption-- a way out of his personal hell, as it were.

RUROUNI's central character, Kenshin Himura, arrives in Tokyo in 1878, during the early years of the Meiji Restoration. He promptly becomes something akin to the "stranger with a past" who shows up in some city Out West, for though Kenshin wields a sword specially designed not to take lives, he constantly uses his skills to defend the innocent.  It eventually comes out, though, that thirty years ago Kenshin was a Hitokiri, an assassin who serves rebellious, anti-Shogunate forces. Appalled by his own actions, the former samurai becomes a wanderer. When he settles in Tokyo he draws to him a small coterie of oddball friends, one of whom, the lady Kaoru, is certainly the main reason he stays, as a constant romantic "will-they-won't-they" vibe exists throughout the series. Kaoru runs a dojo devoted to the mastery of the *bokken* (wooden sword), and expouses the idea that someday the relative non-violence of the wooden sword will replace the deadly violence of the metal one. As a killer himself, Kenshin never believes that this is a real possibility, but he admires her naive idealism, her innocence in contrast to his own brutal experience.

Naturally, Kenshin's skills couldn't be tested if he simply mucked about Tokyo fighting wife-beaters and the like. I won't endeavor to detail the very complicated political struggle that enmeshes the samurai, but what I call the "Jin-E Arc" begins when another Hitokiri, name of Udo Jin-E, shows up in Tokyo to perform a "hit."

As is usually the case in heroic adventure stories, the villain represents all the things that the hero hates or rejects. Jin-E is not only an assassin, but one who revels in carnage and death. Moreover, much like Batman's Joker, he feels challenged by the hero's rectitude. Once Jin-E has become aware of Kenshin's presence, he not only wants to beat him in a sword-fight, he also wants to force Kenshin into a situation where Kenshin revives his own "will to kill." This he does by capturing Kaoru in what seems a standard "damsel in distress" scenario.

Jin-E is also the first of many villains who have martial-arts powers that belong to the realm of the uncanny rather than the marvelous. In particular, Jin-E can overwhelm the will of other persons with his own mental strength, more or less after the fashion of a super-hypnotist. He binds Kaoru to his will, and then tells Kenshin that Kaoru, under his hypnotic control, will suffocate if Kenshin does not fight Jin-E with the full will to kill.

Naturally, threatening the hero's woman is a time-honored method for getting the hero to lose his cool.

Still, as the ferocious sword-battle erupts, Kenshin still does not go to the desired extremes, though he comes close to treading the way of hell once again. Kenshin is saved, however, by the "damsel in distress.

Though Kaoru is not a peerless warrior like the two assassins, she demonstrates a unique willpower of her own once she realized that Kenshin may be seduced into killing again. Once she breaks the hypnotic spell endangering her life, Kenshin can disable Jin-E without killing him.

However, Jin-R is entirely devoted to the cause of death, even if it's his own.

While the relationship of Kenshin and Kaoru is still not quite romantic love as such, implicitly the potential for love is clearly the 'secular redemption" that Watsuki offers his main character. I'm not claiming that Watsuki invented any wheels here, for manga-stories are rife with tales about heroes whose lovers and friends provide them with stabilizing, or even salvific, influences. But given the predominant pessimism seen in many of the popular samurai-dramas, it seems to me that Watsuki is rather radical in offering his readers a story of a bloody-handed killer who is able to renounce his past by focusing on performing "good deeds" in the present.

ADVENTURE-COMEDY VS. COMEDY-ADVENTURE PT. 2

In the last installment of this series I wrote of the comedy-adventure INFERIOR FIVE:

The plots of INFERIOR FIVE, too, are clearly meant to stress incongruity over agonic action. I noted above that the heroes sometimes do win battles, but generally it's out of sheer dumb luck rather than through skill.

I don't mean by that to suggest that all comic superheroes-- or even all comic heroes generally-- must be inept at winning battles. Though it's almost a given that in the adventure-mythos the hero's fighting-skills are better than average, superior fighting-ability can be seen in the protagonists of many dramas (ranging from RICHARD III to STAR TREK), ironies (WATCHMEN, possibly Hammett's "Continental Op" stories), and comedies such as POPEYE and POWERHOUSE PEPPER.

This time, however, I want to compare a comedy-adventure and an adventure-comedy that possess many similar elements (including a hero of amazing abilities), and yet still manage to come down on opposite sides of the divide.

Of the two, my selection for comedy-adventure will be the better known: Rumiko Takahashi's RANMA 1/2.

In BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER I defined RANMA as a comedy thusly:

A better example of the superhero put forth as pure comedy might be Rumiko Takahashi’s RANMA ½ (1987-1996). Though the adventures of Ranma Saotome vary between high adventure and low sitcom goofiness, the constant focus of the series is the how Ranma and his reluctant betrothal Akane “discover” the depths of their feelings for one another and become reconciled to them. These characters are no more married at the conclusion of the series than Buffy is, but the final story does at least feature an attempt to get them married, even if it descends into comic chaos.

I noted in the next paragraph Ranma's superhero-like qualities: that he can punch through stone walls and defeat numerous adversaries with super-powers. He does this not through standard superhero powers but through an almost magical system of martial arts. Despite these extraordinary abilities, Ranma's normative activities are those of typical Japanese high-schoolers: sports, attending classes, et al. He and his father (seen in the illustration as a panda bear) permanently live with the Tendou family, and by agreement of the Tendous' father and Ranma's old man, Ranma and Akane are betrothed. Neither teenager accepts this declaration, though naturally both of them do actually like each other but won't admit it, etc. Akane, in fact, is very nearly the only character ever seen regularly beating Ranma up. This stems not from her equal possession of martial skills-- quite the opposite, in fact-- but because Ranma won't fight back against her. This ethic usually extends to all members of the feminine gender but on occasion Ranma makes exceptions when faced with truly skilled female opponents.



Ranma sometimes has extended fantasy-battles with supernatural creatures, like the winged bull-man seen here. Nevertheless, though Ranma always wins these altercations when it comes down to a test of strength and skill, the dominant theme of RANMA 1/2 is not the invigorative effect of the *agon* but the jubilative appeal of the incongruous. Most of the cast-members, like Ranma's part-time panda-bear father, undergo bizarre transformations of one kind or another. Takahashi often uses Ranma's fighting-skill as a means of ending the incongruity and returning to normality, but often Ranma is flummoxed or made foolish in some way even when he triumphs.

A very different aesthtic pervades Nobuhiro Watsuki's RUROUNI KENSHIN (1994-1999), however, even though many identical comedic elements appear throughout the series.





Watsuki presents the reader with a Mejii-era martial artist, Kenshin Himura, who is one of the great masters of the sword. His past is a great deal more haunted than Ranma's, in that Kenshin's duties to his former masters of the old Shogunate included using his sword for assassination. Dispirited by killing, he wanders into a small town and is taken in by Kaoru, a young female kendo artist. As with the Ranma-Akane relationship, Kaoru is nowhere near Kenshin's skill-level. Nevertheless, any time he pisses her off, she clobbers him soundly. It's not always clear whether Kenshin lets it happen because he won't fight women or because her audacity always takes him by surprise.



The series does have its share of comic misadventures, and like RANMA accumulates a large support-cast of characters, many of whom possess skills comparable to Kenshin's. However, humor is generally introduced to break the tension of the serious battles to come, even as RANMA uses adventure-tropes to briefly put its comic characters into what seems like serious situations before the story returns to the usual hijinks.

Moreover, Kenshin's battles are part of a larger plotline that develops over time, as to what forces will rule Japan during the Mejii era. The focus on large-scale conflict is the indubitable obverse of Takahashi's focus on RANMA, where the small-scale world of home and neighborhood take precedence over the world at large.

Both serials keep elements of adventure and comedy in play on a regular basis. But in each the respective authors clearly signal to their audiences that one mythos dominates all other potential rivals.