Dororo: Part Two
Nakamura Masaru
Translator's Afterword
Light Up the Dark World
Dororo: Part Two picks up the first part's dark world and themes and seeks to subvert or transform all of them, with varying degrees of success. The expanded role of demons (such as Yaomukade, who was never named in the movie) largely works, but the larger role for the Kaneyama Clan mostly fell flat, at least from my perspective. While it's understandable for the Daigo Clan—and Daigo Kagemitsu especially—to have enemies, they are also Hyakkimaru's enemies and slaughterers of women and children. Trying to make them sympathetic was probably misguided from the start.
Such is my initial, somewhat muddled impression of what this novel tried to do. The dark world of the first part is obviously alive and well; Hyakkimaru's quest for both wholeness and sympathy with the human species continues as a through-line, and Dororo is motivated to show a softer side of his character, albeit briefly. But there is no resolution here: no settled ending. Hyakkimaru and Dororo continue on a very dangerous quest. There's hope that they'll return to the Daigo Clan fortress and safety again one day, but there's no guarantee that anything will work out for the best.
In some ways, this is like Osamu Tezuka's ending. Tezuka (the original manga artist of Dororo) didn't know how best to end it, so he kept tacking on new scenes to see if they worked and was never entirely satisfied with it. Nakamura Masaru's solution seems to be to keep Dororo and Hyakkimaru together, through thick and thin, but he also never completely closes the loop regarding why Dororo chose to follow Hyakkimaru in the first place. Dororo doesn't tell Hyakkimaru that he doesn't want the sword in his arm anymore in this novel. Their friendship could still be seen as mercenary by the cynical, and a few scenes near the end recall the rocky start that the two characters had.
That's not to say that the ending is an unhappy one, or that Dororo and Hyakkimaru aren't friends. The death of Kagemitsu unites them in an uncomplicated way; Tahōmaru's general acceptance of them both makes their place in the world a little easier. And Hyakkimaru has learned to see himself as human, with all the complexity that this perspective requires. In the end, Hyakkimaru sees light in the dark world.
But the dark world still exists, and Dororo and Hyakkimaru can't change that. Not entirely. That may be the main difference between the movie and the novelization of it. While the movie is focused on the forces that destroy the Daigo Clan from within, the book is more concerned with external consequences: what happens to a country that's been constantly at war for twenty years?
Obviously, the world can't recover from a tragedy like that quickly. Hyakkimaru can't be expected to recover fully from what happened to him, either. The best the novel can offer is that the world's circumstances have changed enough to not produce another Kagemitsu. The movie offers more: Dororo and Hyakkimaru travel through a land at peace, anonymous, on their own terms. Reading between the lines, both the book and movie offer much the same thing, but by including so many world details and complications, it's harder to leave the novel's characters frolicking on the seashore. Their world was more broken to start with, and it will take a lot more time to fix.
Still, the world's transformation over the course of Part Two is remarkable. Hyakkimaru gets the answers he's looking for, spares several enemies, and largely pulls back from the awkward, generalized dislike he has of most people in the first part of the novel. Dororo gains a comfort in her own skin that allows her to put on and take off gender roles as she sees fit. Hyakkimaru and Tahōmaru develop a genuine rapport that bodes well for the future. Biwabōshi encourages a half-demon child to find her own humanity. There are bright spots here and there—light in the dark—even though they're few and far between.
The movie begs for a sequel. I think the novel does, too. Taking the dots of light in the plot as seeds of hope, it's possible to extrapolate a better ending. Perhaps that was the point. The journey to becoming human never actually ends, and we're all on that same path, whether we're missing literal pieces or not. Like the tagline to the original Dororo manga says: "No one is born whole." This is a novel that lacks wholeness and cohesion, perhaps because we're supposed to supply that ourselves.
Ainikki the Archivist
December 2022
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