The novel Hyakkimaru's Birth is the first of a series of three novels based on Osamu Tezuka's Dororo manga series. The author, Toriumi Jinzō, chooses a hard historical angle, incorporating real history, politics, and philosophies toward power and medicine into the narrative. The result is part adventure story, part history lesson, and part fantasy: a story of war-torn ancient Japan told through the metaphor of a child whose body is stolen by demons.

The Story

Dororo itself has been adapted something like a dozen times since its creation by the legendary manga... more>> artist Osamu Tezuka in 1967. The story was first serialized in a children's magazine for boys, Shogakukan's Weekly Shōnen Sunday, between August 1967 and July 1968. It was canceled, then concluded in another children's magazine, Akita Shoten's Bōken'ō, in 1969. The manga was never officially completed, and there are conflicting endings.

Some details vary by interpretation, but the basic plot is always the same. In a war-torn world full of violence, hunger, and plague, a samurai lord, Daigo Kagemitsu, becomes utterly desperate to save his people (or elevate his own social position). To this end, he visits a cursed temple called the Hall of Hell, where forty-eight statues of demons stand in silent vigil. These statues were created by Unga, the son or disciple of Unkei, a Buddhist image maker who was trying to represent demonic evil on the earth. In this novel, the statues specifically represent the forty-eight sins of mankind. Daigo proposes a deal to the demons: he will give them anything they want in exchange for the power to reverse his fortunes and turn the world around.

The demons accept this deal, taking the body parts of his newborn son in exchange. The baby is so malformed and hideous that Daigo orders it killed; his mother or a servant floats the baby down a river in a washbasin. The baby, Hyakkimaru, is then picked up by Jukai, a brilliant surgeon, who realizes that the baby is still alive, despite the fact that he's missing so many pieces. Over the years, he crafts Hyakkimaru artificial limbs and appendages to help him pass as an ordinary person.

Hyakkimaru's life with Jukai changes after they are attacked by a demon. Hyakkimaru wasn't supposed to survive his mutilation; when the demons discover that he has, they come to finish him off. Why? Because if Hyakkimaru kills one of them, he'll regain a body part. When he learns this, Hyakkimaru sets out on a long journey to restore his body, find his birth family, and become truly human.

The last quest proves to be the most critical, and the most difficult. Hyakkimaru can only become whole by embracing the violence inherent in the world into which he was born. The iconic image of Hyakkimaru has him with swords embedded in his arm prosthetics as he cuts down demons and humans alike with practiced ease. By the time he meets Dororo, a pint-sized thief who wants to steal his sword arms, he's more than half a monster.

It is Hyakkimaru's friendship with Dororo that forms the bulk of the story. They travel through 15th century Japan, fighting demons, saving villages, regaining body parts, and recovering from the abandonment and trauma of their pasts. Tezuka left the story unfinished; in many versions, the story ends before Hyakkimaru is physically whole. The most important part of the quest, though, is always preserved: the story cannot end until Hyakkimaru becomes human.

Many commentators and fans have remarked on the title of the story; the main character seems to be Hyakkimaru, not Dororo. In Japanese, dororo is a nonsense word; it is a pun on dorobō (thief), making the manga's title something of a children's pun on the concept of theft. The title thus has a double meaning: the character's name, and the major plot point of Hyakkimaru's body literally being stolen because of his father's selfishness and greed.

This novel mainly treats Hyakkimaru's early childhood with Jukai. Jukai is a secondary protagonist whose backstory is treated in some depth. Dororo only appears near the end, but she is a primary character in the other two novels in the series, Demon Sword Dance and The Fall of Daigo.

The History

This novel has a hard historical slant. Unlike the original manga, whose time period was kept somewhat generic, Toriumi Jinzō chose to set the story's events during specific times and places. The main plot begins roughly eighteen years before the start of the Ōnin War (1467-1477). ŌNin refers to the Japanese era during which the war started; the war ended during the Bunmei Era. A dispute between a high-ranked official, Hosokawa Katsumoto, and a regional lord, Yamana Sōzen, escalated into a nationwide civil war involving the Ashikaga shogunate and a number of samurai lords in many regions of Japan. The war initiated the Sengoku Period, called "the Warring States period" in English. This period was a long, drawn-out struggle for domination of Japan by individual lords that would not end for almost two hundred years.

The secondary plot begins roughly fifty years before, and fills in the backstory of the legendary doctor, Jukai, who takes in Hyakkimaru, builds him an artificial body, and teaches him to fight to survive. This backstory also contributes details about the history of medicine, including specific details about available treatments and medicinal ingredients that were used during this time period.

Fantasy and Magic

Hyakkimaru's Birth is rooted in history, but its source is equally rooted in East Asian ideas about magic. Toriumi Jinzō has limited interest in using magic as a catch-all for explaining the inexplicable; he spends more time than any other adapter of Dororo as a work on describing how Hyakkimaru's mysterious capabilities come to be. How can a boy see without eyes? Hear without ears? Walk and fight without limbs? He cares about these questions and takes the time to answer them.

His answers lean heavily on old ideas about Buddhism and ancient gods. Hyakkimaru is attacked by a malevolent force at the start of the novel that Jukai repels with a Buddhist prayer gesture; Jukai believes that Hyakkimaru is blessed by the god of a shrine near where he is discovered. Jukai's beliefs are well-founded: praying to the gods always has some effect, though it isn't always immediate or obvious.

Nature and the natural world also play a powerful part in Hyakkimaru's healing process. The bulk of the novel takes place on or near Mount Kurama; this is where Hyakkimaru grows up and makes his first friends—monkeys, deer, and birds. He learns to speak when the monkeys take an interest in him; in one terrifying scene, six bears appear around Hyakkimaru in the forest at night to help him learn how to see without real eyes. Mount Kurama is famous in folklore and literature for the strong presence of minor Shinto gods or demons called tengu, which can take the shapes of animals, especially monkeys and birds.

Overall, the magic system maps most closely to Shintoism, the belief that all creatures and objects have an animate spirit. This idea is combined with Japanese tropes about hermit wizards who live on mountaintops. These story elements have long roots in Japanese folk tale tradition; examples of stories of this type are Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s The Wizard, and Toshishun.

Jukai, the surgeon who gives Hyakkimaru his limbs—and his sword arms—learns how to create prosthetics from a mountain mystic named Yōda. Hyakkimaru and Jukai are a bit like mountain mystics themselves, living in seclusion and mastering secret powers through self-discipline, focus, and the occasional help from a god or a spirit.

This novel was originally published in Japanese on July 15, 2001. I read and translated it novel during the COVID-19 pandemic, isolated and locked away from the world; it is the first novel for adults that I ever read in Japanese. When I began learning Japanese in 2018, I despaired of ever reading it. A primary theme of this novel, and its source, is persistence in pursuit of the essential goal of being human. It was a unique and wonderful experience to finally be able to read it. <<less