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 her 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
No comments:
Post a Comment