Dororo: Part One
Nakamura Masaru
Part 2: Dororo
Chapter 10
After that, Dororo and Hyakkimaru fell into a strange kind of routine. They kept traveling, cutting down Hall of Hell demons with the same speed and efficiency as a farmer clearing bamboo. Hyakkimaru had begun his quest alone, and was familiar with the repetition and drudgery involved in restoring each of his body parts one by one. But as the days passed, he felt himself becoming more and more hopeful. This wasn't a never-ending quest. If he just kept going—
True, demons were demons, and that meant they were disgusting, dangerous, and deceptive. There was no guarantee that any battle against one would end with Hyakkimaru victorious. Hyakkimaru entered every new fight with dispassionate calm, as he'd always done. Dororo's raw rage was a new feature of his quest—one that he wasn't entirely sure how to interpret. It was like Dororo was feeling the anger that he would have felt—should have felt?—if he were fully human.
The cause of Dororo's rage wasn't the demons. The demons hadn't harmed Dororo personally in any way. But Dororo had plenty of reasons of his own to be angry, and he channeled his anger so that he could be useful. Focusing on Hyakkimaru's quest made it easier to bear his own emotional burdens.
Hyakkimaru didn't understand what Dororo was feeling—at least, not very well. He tried. He'd been under a cloud of depressive gloom since losing Jukai and leaving the mountain. Nothing had upset him so much since. As best he could tell, Dororo was simply a sympathetic person. He seemed to take the emotions of others into himself—or maybe it was more accurate to say that he felt the things that Hyakkimaru should, but didn't.
Hyakkimaru first noticed this strange ability of Dororo's when they were fighting a demon.
"I'll kill you for that! No mercy!" Dororo screamed at the demon, slashing at it with his knife.
Hyakkimaru knew that Dororo's hatred for the demon was genuine. For the first time, he felt the flame of rage burning within himself.
"Die, you demon! Give it back!"
Dororo's determination made itself felt, too. As time went on, Hyakkimaru's blank depression started to dissipate like so much mist and fog. In its place were the anger and perseverance that Dororo had planted there.
Dororo also taught Hyakkimaru how to smile without bitterness or cynicism.
One afternoon, they were fighting a demon in the shape of the giant lizard that had sprung on them unexpectedly. Hyakkimaru slew it with the demon-killing sword, but it was a long, hard fight: death by a thousand cuts.
The demon thrashed in rage, swinging its huge tail around. Dororo slithered under the demon and kicked it solidly in the crotch, then rolled to safety. It was a strange sight, like something out of an old folk tale.
The demon exploded as it died, showering both Dororo and Hyakkimaru in a rain of blood.
"Why did you do that?" Hyakkimaru asked. "It's dangerous to get that close to a demon!"
"Haven't you heard the story called 'The Girl Who Kicked a Monster Away From Her Grandfather's House?'1 It's a famous one, full of good advice. The demon didn't die until I kicked it there, right? That must be a weak spot."
The demon was dead, which meant that Hyakkimaru would regain a body part. Usually he was in too much pain during the part's restoration to think about much else, but remembering Dororo's focus as he'd kicked the demon right in the genitals made him laugh, in spite of everything.
"It hurts!" He laughed. "It hurts, it hurts, ow..."
Hyakkimaru didn't stop laughing until he coughed up his gallbladder. And his laughter was infectious: Dororo sat down near him and cackled.
As Dororo laughed, a memory surfaced in his mind. It was from before his village had burned to the ground. Dororo was a toddler at the time: only three or four years old. He was playing with the kid one house over, who was about the same age. Dororo forgot why they started laughing, but once they started it was impossible for them to stop. The other kid laughed so hard, and for so long, that he spit up the rice gruel he'd eaten for breakfast. He was upset and almost started crying. Dororo kept laughing and fell over, clutching his stomach, encouraging the other boy to keep laughing, too. They wouldn't be in trouble until their parents came back.
"Did you just spit up a baby or somethin'?" Dororo gasped between peals of laughter. He looked down at Hyakkimaru's gallbladder. Hyakkimaru looked at it, too, and kept laughing at it as if it were the funniest thing he'd ever seen.
Laughter was one of the only weapons Dororo had against the encroaching darkness of the warlike world. It seemed silly and a touch contradictory, fighting against war with clean, unadulterated joy—but he also didn't know what else he was supposed to do.
Hyakkimaru became familiar with Dororo's coping mechanisms as they traveled. Time passed, and Hyakkimaru gained an awareness of the seasons changing as he saw and felt things through Dororo's thoughts and sense impressions. Up until this point, he'd lived without any awareness of hot or cold; he hadn't even realized that the temperature of the world around him changed depending on the time of year.
They kept fighting demons. Dororo kicked every single one in the crotch if he got an opening to do so, and cursed the demons to high heaven just before Hyakkimaru dealt the killing blow. The demons always exploded when they died, showering Dororo and Hyakkimaru with blood, but Dororo stopped complaining about the grossness of it after a while. It was fascinating to him to watch the color go out of a demon's face after he kicked them where the sun didn't shine. That particular detail hadn't made it into any stories that he was aware of.
"This again," Dororo said after a demon battle. Both he and Hyakkimaru were covered with blood. "There's that woodcutter back there—hope he doesn't get the wrong idea."
"What wrong idea?"
"Well, you wouldn't want to be friendly with a demon slayer, would you? Way too dangerous. And messy. And he might discover the demons' weak spot! We can't have that. Let's keep going."
Hyakkimaru recovered his body parts one by one, laughing through the pain with Dororo by his side for the whole thing. He felt the discomfort of sweat drying on his skin on hot days, and started shivering at the onset of winter. Dororo told him about other changes that he couldn't feel or sense. He hadn't felt so connected to the world around him since Jukai's death.
"The stoneflies are laying their eggs—that means winter's here."
"It's about time for the spider-eye pufferfish to start coming out—it's almost spring. You'll know it's spring when you see the fiddlehead ferns flowering. Oh, and the holly trees—and ginseng—pretty much, if you see plants with flowers, then it's spring."
"You can tell when the season's changing by the smell. Wet dirt after a rainstorm, for instance."
Dororo knew a lot about edible plants. He also knew how to make common medicines based on the plants that were in season. Hyakkimaru was impressed with Dororo's scope of knowledge. He was able to identify every tree, flower, and shrub they passed, as easy as anything. That, too, reminded Hyakkimaru of Jukai. Jukai had taught him about plants and seasons using words, but he'd never really experienced them firsthand before. And all of Jukai's knowledge had been completely focused on drilling in what Hyakkimaru needed for survival: nothing more.
"Oh, hey, a mulberry tree! And it's full of fruit, too!" Dororo climbed the tree to harvest some fruit. Jukai had never taken the time to do anything extra like that.
Hyakkimaru learned how other people reacted to seasonal changes, too, not just Dororo. Everyone seemed happier with winter behind them and spring ahead. Hyakkimaru could sense their mood from reading their thoughts, but he still didn't really understand why spring would be an inherently happier time than winter. He knew that more plants grew in spring than in winter; was that the reason? Was it because flowers were beautiful? He tried to get a grasp on what the people around him were thinking and feeling, but whenever he tried too hard to understand, he lost the feeling.
There were probably a few things Hyakkimaru would never understand, but the experience of Dororo traveling with him taught him a great deal. He now knew that the rainy season was in spring, and could identify many things to eat in spring and summer by touch. He didn't have a tongue or taste buds, so everything tasted more or less the same to him. But Dororo had preferences.
"Ooh, melons! Those'll be ripe in summer. I can't wait!"
Hyakkimaru felt Dororo's anticipation almost as if it were his own. Summer's high heat bothered him so much that he shed his old cloak like a molting crow. It was easier for him to move without it, and he enjoyed the sensation of the wind on his skin. He was more human than he'd ever been in his life before, and he looked it through and through. No one would think he was a monster simply by looking at him.
The year passed and the seasons changed as Dororo and Hyakkimaru traveled, killed demons, gathered food, passed through places… They defeated a demon shaped like a giant cherry tree at the beginning of spring; Hyakkimaru regained his right eye. They killed an enormous salamander during a summer rainstorm, and Hyakkimaru's real vocal cords grew back. It was still the beginning of summer when Hyakkimaru and Dororo killed the lizard-like demon and laughed as his gallbladder returned to him.
Hyakkimaru had almost no conception of the volume of his voice until he had the ability to actually speak. He could shout much farther than he could project his thoughts.
The first person Hyakkimaru spoke to was, of course, Dororo. "Dororo—can you hear me?"
"Duh, what do you mean?"
"No, I mean my voice—my real voice!"
"Aha!" Dororo grinned. "Cool, you got your voice back! Try saying stuff."
"Like what?"
"Uh—'Dororo' again. Sure, why not. Try it!"
"Dororo!"
"Yeah, aniki?"
It didn't matter to Hyakkimaru that Dororo was a woman pretending to be a man anymore. Dororo was Dororo, and he was Dororo's aniki, and they walked over the barren landscape fighting demons. That was just the way things were.
Dororo asked Hyakkimaru if he could sing, but he'd never heard any songs, so he mostly just tried to mimic Dororo's approximation of singing, which sounded a lot like shouting to him.
At night, when dad's asleep
the cursed potato goes on the prowl.
We wake up dad, on his face a scowl,
And ask, "Dad, what's this potato?"
Dad didn't like being waked from sleep--
The rain tapered off, leaving behind a brilliant rainbow in the sky. Dororo and Hyakkimaru walked down the road singing songs. Dororo kept the rhythm with his hand drum. Hyakkimaru couldn't even remember thinking that Dororo was just some kid looking to cause trouble behind the shrine where they'd met. He had one of his ears back, and with it, he could distinguish voices: there were differences in men's and women's voices, and in children's. He was still learning, but he could definitely hear the differences.
"Aniki!"
People assumed that Dororo and Hyakkimaru were family when they traveled because of how Dororo talked to him. And Hyakkimaru did start thinking about Dororo as something like a kid brother—sometimes exasperating, sometimes adorable. He'd never had a sibling, of course, but he found himself wanting to protect Dororo's strange innocence. Dororo was tough in some ways and weak in others, and Hyakkimaru considered it his role to bear the brunt of the world's bitterness and danger, so that Dororo wouldn't change.
But Hyakkimaru's perception of Dororo didn't alter the fact that Dororo was, biologically at least, a young woman. There were times when he doubted his senses, but his human eyes and ears were more reliable about these things than the senses inside his mind. Dororo shed blood every month, as men did not; Dororo was a woman—no matter how much she seemed to hate that fact.
For two or three days out of every month, consistently, Dororo would peel away from Hyakkimaru and stay hidden. Hyakkimaru noticed an accompanying change in mood and assumed that Dororo just needed space—until around midsummer. He knew that women had periods; Jukai had explained the biological differences between men and women to him. But before Dororo, he'd never spent extended time with a woman, and he didn't usually give minor quirks of biology a second thought. His entire body was a crime against nature; all normal biological functions seemed tame and kind of boring in comparison.
Hyakkimaru tried to talk to Dororo about why he disappeared sometimes, but Dororo always ignored him when he tried bringing up the subject. He didn't remember about women and periods until the beginning of summer, but then—well, he'd been pretending that Dororo was a man for so long that it would feel weird to draw attention to the fact that she was female. The only other woman that he'd gotten a good look at recently was Mio, the nun from the burned-out temple—and she and Dororo were so different in appearance and mannerisms that they might as well be different species.
Mio— He pictured Mio in his mind's eye and felt his heart skip a beat. She was beautiful and tragic; thinking of her always gave him a little bit of pain.
Dororo—was his kid brother. Dororo didn't want to be anything other than that, and Hyakkimaru didn't need her to be. But he was interested in why Dororo had decided to pass herself off as a man. Had that been her idea, or her parents'? How long had she lived this way?
Hyakkimaru tried to ask questions about Dororo's past, hoping to relieve at least some of his curiosity. But Dororo clammed up and refused to talk to him. "Shut up! I'm a man!" he shouted. He sounded genuinely angry.
Hyakkimaru could tell that Dororo was furious: he closed off his heart and mind and hunched in on himself. Hyakkimaru couldn't tell why, aside from the idea that Dororo was vehemently opposed to the mere suggestion that he might be a woman. He quietly changed the subject and resolved not to bring it up again.
Dororo is Dororo. And that's fine.
Dororo had a secret that she didn't want others to touch, locked away in a box inside herself. Hyakkimaru decided that he would never open that box. They would go on just as they had before. He would remember his year traveling with Dororo across the countryside and restoring his body as one of the happiest times in his life.
Dororo's motives for traveling with Hyakkimaru were also changing. True, Hyakkimaru hadn't regained his left arm yet—but Dororo might keep tagging along with him even after that. He noticed that Hyakkimaru was happier, but he didn't know that Hyakkimaru had never been happy before.
Translator's Note
1 In Japanese, the name of this story is given as
爺イ呼ぶわりしながら魔物に金的蹴りを見舞った女の話. No record of a story
by this exact name exists, so it's either a made-up story within the world
or is just a bit obscure. ↩
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