There is a place in the buried west

[sovay]

Please blame the current lack of content on rushthatspeaks, who lent me the first three volumes of Saiyūki last night. I am at the moment on Volume 7. I will surface presently.

I need an icon of Cho Hakkai.

[edited 2007-03-24 20:13]

I should have borrowed Saiyūki Reload, too. Dammit.

Comments

[sovay]

It was very fun trying to keep a poker face when you were talking about that. I was internally squeeing, and all impressed at your prescience.

Heh. Thank you.

And wondering what was it that tipped you off, do you think? That he would have such a backstory, I mean-- was it just that you found yourself really liking him, or what? And if so, what made you like him?

I should have kept the first volume for reference . . . I liked him almost immediately, I suppose, because in the midst of shouts of "Stupid monkey!" and "Perverted kappa!" from Gojyo* and Goku and grim-faced death threats from Sanzo, he was unfailingly courteous, calm-tempered, and cheerful (if occasionally in the brightly sadistic way of someone who has slept well and is prepared to make conversation while you are still peeling yourself off the floor with a hangover). He was also identified almost from his introduction as a yōkai, which meant that he had to be more than he appeared, i.e., completely human and modest about it. And I would require textual substantiation for this next point, but his protectiveness toward the other members of the group made me wonder; more than once he exhausted himself to keep others safe, and there was a certain determined overcompensation in that, such that I would not have been surprised to learn that he was trying to wipe himself out in some redemptive fashion. (I no longer think this is the case.) I don't remember a deductive process. But historically those characters that interest me the most are at least somewhat morally tangled, cf. Londo, Werner Schramm et al., and with Hakkai I couldn't tell whether I was seeing the results of a complicated past or the set-up for a complicated future. Or both, perhaps. And one of the aspects I appreciate most about this manga is that way that while real emotional issues are dealt with, the traditional mythology of atonement is regularly slammed back down to earth and stomped on. You can choose to die. You can choose to run. But dying alone won't change a thing. Trust me on that one. If you really want things to change, you're going to have to live. Thank God that's in print somewhere.

*Can I get a hand with the orthography here? In this particular manga, I see the word youkai which I have elsewhere seen spelled yokai or yōkai, and in the same way the names Gojyo and Genjyo also appear to be rendered as Gojō and Genjō. What actual sound am I looking at?