The Fall of Daigo
Book 3 of the Dororo Novel Series
Toriumi Jinzō
Remembering Tezuka Osamu
On July 20, 1988, Tezuka Production Studio teamed up with a Japanese-Italian Production Studio to create the anime Stories from the Bible. It was right around the lunch hour, so Mr. Tezuka was sitting down eating from a bento box. He was only nibbling at his oden, and I thought that he didn't seem to be eating enough.
Tezuka Osamu invited me to eat with him. After lunch, we went outside. I asked him if there were any projects in the works that he was excited about. I wanted to collaborate with him on making something. I was developing a stage play for the Dororo manga based on Maimai Onba, the moth demon. When I explained what I had in mind, Tezuka graciously granted me permission to go ahead with the play on the spot.
I was regrettably very rude and forgot to thank him at the time. I always meant to thank him later, I think, but I never got the chance.
In November of that year, Tezuka was working on an anime for the Shanghai Anime Festival. As soon as his work in China was done, he returned to Japan, fell gravely ill and was hospitalized. At the time, I was thinking of developing a Dororo novel series, so I wrote a letter to the leading editor at Tezuka Productions, Matsutani Takayuki.
By January of the next year, it was clear that Mr. Tezuka would never go home again, and by February, he had passed on. That day in July 1988 was the last time I ever saw him. I thought my dream of writing a series of Dororo novels was dead on arrival.
Some time passed after the funeral, but I did finally get a letter back from Masutani Takayuki, giving me the green light to go ahead and write novels based on the Dororo manga. In the letter, I read that Tezuka himself had granted me the rights to create these novels just before his death. I was deeply moved. I couldn't believe that he'd taken the time to read my letter when he was so ill—or that he'd agreed to make my dream a reality.
I first met Tezuka Osamu in 1964, four years before Tezuka Productions was its own full-fledged studio. At the time, Mr. Tezuka was hard at work creating and producing Astro Boy. He rarely looked up from his desk when he was working. The final script for Astro Boy was considerably longer than most other anime at the time and had to be split into thirty parts. Because of how busy things were, production of the Dororo stage play had to be put on hold.
At the time, I thought Tezuka was showing some signs of nervous tension. He was pushing himself too hard. I believe his creative genius maintained its grip on him for all of the twenty-four years that I knew him. I was only a year older and certainly felt the slowing and difficulties that come with age, but Tezuka never seemed to slow down. The creativity inside him was always being expressed—to the detriment of his physical health, it seems. He lived a life of the mind that only he truly understood.
At around this time, I was working on another novel, Shin Heiyōden (New Legend of the Demons' Revolt). The Dororo novels were never far from my mind, so I threw myself into an exhaustive research phase. Shin Heiyōden takes place in ancient China; the Dororo novels take place in medieval Japan. I had a lot of ground to cover.
The Dororo manga was first published in 1967 in a children's magazine for boys, Shogakukan's Weekly Shōnen Sunday. What is now firmly established as the shōnen (for boys) genre was only then becoming explosively popular. It went through many printings, and even now, some thirty years on, Dororo remains a bestseller and a popular work in Japan.
In 1969, Dororo was adapted into an anime by Tezuka himself and a very talented team, but sadly, the budget ran out before Hyakkimaru could eliminate all of the Hall of Hell demons.
I kept working on adapting the story into novel format and had the realization that it was a much more difficult task than it had first seemed to be. (Anyone who has ever written a novel is likely laughing at me right now.) I became obsessed with recreating the story in a way that seemed realistic. When I first acquired the rights to adapt the stage play, Tezuka and I discussed the idea of Hyakkimaru as a cyborg, so I had originally intended to write him that way. I had the idea to make Hyakkimaru's arm into a gun at around this point. I thought of ways to make Hyakkimaru's body more mechanical, more manufactured. I read the manga over and over, but Jukai's methods for crafting Hyakkimaru's body are never given much detail. However, Hyakkimaru's struggles for mastery over his new limbs are. It made sense to me that the limbs should be as difficult to create as they were for Hyakkimaru to manipulate. On that part more than any other, I diverged from the manga, again in the attempt to set the story in a way that felt realistic and plausible.
I originally conceived the story as a single novel, but it kept growing and growing until I had to cut it into three. The first novel treats Hyakkimaru's birth and the development and creation of his cybernetic body, set against the backdrop of the Ōnin War. While based on the early chapters of the Dororo manga, much of it is original. The second novel adapts the Maimai Onba and Nihil (demon sword) chapters of the manga in some depth, but again with changes; I wanted to juxtapose Hyakkimaru's first love with Mio and the loving relationship between Sabame Nuinosuke and Lady Mai. The third novel details Dororo's backstory, has Hyakkimaru find his birth family, and gives the entire tale a more settled ending than is given elsewhere.
I knew from the start that Hyakkimaru would be the primary protagonist and that Dororo would be the secondary one. I also knew that Daigo Kagemitsu and the Hall of Hell demons would each have vital roles to play, though their roles do admittedly differ from the original manga and anime. Having Hyakkimaru go on a quest for body parts and a quest to find his birth parents proved inefficient from a narrative standpoint, so I combined the two quests into one. I also decided on a definitive historical setting for the story to take place in. The original manga gives only a few hints about when the story takes place: the Asakura Clan, Daigo Clan, and Togashi Clan exist, but aside from that, nothing specific is mentioned. But the world of the Dororo manga is a world at war, and I could easily imagine Hyakkimaru fighting his way to Kaga Province in the midst of one of the fiercest civil wars of Japan's history.
With this in mind, I decided to have Hyakkimaru raised on Mount Kurama, close to Kyōto, much as the legendary samurai Yoshitsune was. Hyakkimaru's early education involves listening to stories of battles and history, and his later education would have him fighting in those battles himself. History and story moved together from the moment Jukai found Hyakkimaru floating in the Takano River.
The three main settings of these novels are Mount Kurama (especially the Valley of the Tengu), Ezichen Province, and Kaga Province. Ichijōdani is a very well-preserved historical site in Ezichen and was the ancestral seat of the Asakura Clan. I knew I wanted to use it, but I wasn't sure how until Hyakkimaru and Dororo found themselves in need of information that only Asakura Takakage and his brother Mitsuhisa could provide. I was tickled by the idea of these two characters meeting these historical warlords whose reputations long preceded them.
Mount Monju is also a famous historical location in Ezichen, which I was introduced to by an NHK documentary that toured mountains in Japan. I was so fascinated by it, particularly its similarities with Mount Kurama, that I went down a bit of a research rabbit hole regarding the ancient Ryōgon Temple Complex on the mountain. It got to the point where I could feel myself standing in the huge rock garden at the summit where Hyakkimaru trained to recover his psychokinesis.
The setting of the final novel is primarily Kaga Province, and it was here that I decided to set Dororo's story. Everyone who's read the manga or seen the anime remembers how devastating it was for Dororo be left orphaned by her (or his, depending on Dororo's current gender preference) mother in a blizzard. I saw an opportunity in keeping Dororo's mother alive, and changed her name slightly from Ōjiya to Ochika to reflect this alteration. This single change made the final novel much more action-packed than I anticipated.
Another significant change I made was to the death of Daigo Kagemitsu, which is entwined with Tahōmaru's character. In the original manga and anime, Tahōmaru dies in a fight against Hyakkimaru. Daigo Kagemitsu survives in the manga but dies in the anime. I beg the indulgence of readers in making these changes, but I couldn't bear to kill Tahōmaru—and I believed Kagemitsu as a human was more compelling than Kagemitsu as a demon.
I strove to make medical science correct to the period as well, though psychokinesis is of course the exception. It wasn't possible to create artificial limbs that move like real ones in Jukai's time; that's not even possible in the modern age. And so, while Hyakkimaru's body parts were made with real techniques and materials available on hand, his power to use them derived from Yōda, a mountain sage who developed Jukai's psychokinetic potential. The world "psychokinesis" or "telekinesis" is usually rendered 念動；I opted for 念導 instead, since the first kanji compound means "sense movement" and the second means "sense guidance." Psychokinesis is more a potential than power; it needs to be encouraged and guided to grow in order to be of use.
I have two doctors to thank for their invaluable guidance: Fukushima Kunio and Higashi Tettoku. Dr. Fukushima specializes in ancient herbal medicine and gave me several books to read. Dr. Higashi is a fan of medicine in fiction, particularly accurate medicine, and he gave me pointers on how Jukai would have gone about practicing medicine in the 1400s. Any errors that may still exist regarding historical medicine in this text are my fault, not theirs.
Many novelists, mangaka and animators have adapted Tezuka's work over the past three decades. I am far from unique in that, but I wish Tezuka could have lived to read these books. I carried that thought with me all throughout writing them. Sometimes I wished that psychokinesis were real, so that he might sense the energy of the universe and be drawn to the things that he created when he was alive. I often wondered if he would like this scene, or scold me for that one, or if he'd have a better idea of what to do somewhere. But mostly, I wanted this series to be both my original interpretation and a more or less faithful adaptation of Tezuka's work.
Finally, I would like to thank the following people for their assistance in the creation of these novels: my editor, Kojima Kasturoshi (of Yohaku Company), Dr. Fukushima Kunio (of Nerima Hospital of Plastic Surgery), Dr. Higashi Tettoku (of Higashi Clinic), Tokumo Sachihikoshi (for providing information on general topics), Satō Keishi (for granting a thorough and very helpful interview on Ichijōdani), Iwazaki Kunshi, who collaborated with me on ideas and storyboarding, and Kuroiwa Satoekoshi, an expert on historical dialects and dialogue.
Toriumi Jinzō
November 2001
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