Episode 100

EPISODE 100

明かされる邪眼の秘密 (Akasareru Jagan no Himitsu)

The Secret of the Jagan Revealed

First Broadcast: October 1, 1994

Equivalent Manga Chapter(s): chapter 160 (WSJ #15, 1994, March 28)

Summary: Hiei fights Shigure to a draw, with both critically wounded.  Mukuro taps into Hiei’s mind, learning his past.  She puts him into a medical machine to heal his injuries, and shows him her true form.

Anime/manga differences after the jump.

Differences from the Manga

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• The episode starts with a re-do of last episode’s closing scene, as Shigure explains that the fee he charged for his services was for Hiei to not reveal his identity to his sister even if he managed to find her.  Last episode Mukuro’s thoughts on how great fights are was depicted as her internal thoughts, like in the manga, while this time around she says it out loud.

• Manga chapter 160 has the narrator recap who Shigure is, with Mukuro and Hiei’s thoughts on the fight.  Then the two fight and are both critically wounded, and as Hiei heals in Mukuro’s medical machine Mukuro reads his mind and learns his past, which is depicted as a long flashback.  In the anime, as Hiei and Shigure charge each other the scene pauses and there’s a flashback to Hiei’s past right there.  We see baby Hiei get tossed from the Land of Glaciers again, after which it’s basically the same flashback as the manga, besides being relocated.  However, in the manga the flashback is narrated by Mukuro, who is reading Hiei’s memories, while in the anime Hiei himself narrates it.  The anime expands on the flashback by showing how Hiei was adapted by a band of thieves (as opposed to the narration just mentioning this fact in the manga), showing more of the fight where Hiei lost his keepsake Hirui Stone, etc.  

• Most significantly, the anime version of the flashback includes a lengthy scene showing Hiei and Shigure’s fight meeting.  After Hiei requests the Jagan implant from Shigure (who seems to live in a Malaysian Buddhist temple for some reason), he stabs himself with his own sword to show he has the fortitude to withstand the extreme pain of the operation.  We then get to see a bit of the operation itself, and once Hiei wakes up afterwards he goes outside to find Shigure practicing with his circular sword.  He explains to Hiei about how the sword is made from the bones of a type of Demon World bison, which in the manga was information provided by the narrator at the start of chapter 160.  Hiei starts to walk away, but Shigure insists that he stay and learn swordsmanship from him, since the operation has left Hiei incredibly weak and it’d be a shame if he got himself killed after Shigure went through all the trouble of giving him that new eye.  The flashback then ends as Hiei explains how he decided to do as Shigure said so that he could “steal” Shigure’s sword techniques, and we don’t learn the rest of Hiei’s story until after the fight (in the manga it’s all one long flashback that comes after the fight).  In the manga Mukuro says that losing all his power to gain the Jagan actually suited Hiei, since he wanted to punish himself for carelessly losing his keepsake Hirui Stone; the anime leaves this out.

• Hiei and Shigure’s fight is just 8 pages of uninterrupted fighting in the manga, 2 pages of which are simply a spread showing the top of Shigure’s head soaring off.  This sort of thing always presents a problem for the anime, since if they animated it straightforwardly it would only be a couple seconds.  This time they come up with an interesting solution though: after the two fighters dramatically charge each other, the whole fight plays out almost instantly, so that we can’t even tell what happened.  We just see that Hiei gets a nasty cut in his torso and Shigure’s has the top of his head lopped off.  Then Mukuro reviews the fight in her mind, and we see a slow-motion replay of the fight, which essentially shows the manga version of the fight, only slow.  So there’s still the sense that Hiei and Shigure had a lightning-fast battle, but we still get to clearly so what happened, and enough time is devoted to the fight so that there doesn’t need to be more padding elsewhere in the episode.

• In the manga Hiei’s final sword slash sends the top of Shigure’s head flying off, while in the anime it slowly slides off. 

• As Hiei collapses following the fight, he thinks that a draw isn’t so bad.  In the manga he then notes that the old him wouldn’t be satisfied with a draw, and wonders when he started thinking that way.  The anime leaves this out.

• The anime expands on the second part of Hiei’s flashback too, showing his return to the Land of Glaciers, which is depicted as having surprisingly ordinary-looking wooden houses.  Hiei meets Rui, the friend of Hina’s who tossed him from the Land of Glaciers as a baby.  She tells him about Hina and her daughter, who has gone missing.  Hiei doesn’t reveal his identity, but Rui figures it out anyway.  One of the other things Hiei learns from Rui is that Hina took her own life shortly after giving birth, while the manga is more vague as to why she dies.  Since it’s said that all Ice Maidens who give birth to boys die “without exception”, it may be simply an automatic, natural side-effect, but it’s also possible that they’re strongly pressured into committing suicide.

• Hiei’s flashback in the anime shows him fighting Kurama when they first meet, something based on the manga side story depicting the start of their partnership.  Kurama has the same short hair and school uniform he had from the side story.  The manga at this point actually showed Hiei and Kurama fighting the demon Yotsude, the story’s villain.  While this episode doesn’t show Yotsude, he was briefly seen in the last episode as part of Hiei’s memories.

• The anime version of the flashback also goes into a lot more detail on Hiei’s meeting with Yusuke and the other events from earlier in the series.  The manga goes pretty quickly over this stuff (featuring simply the panel with Yotsude, one of Yusuke, and one of Hiei fighting Seiryu), presumably wishing to focus more on things we haven’t seen before.

• In the manga Mukuro reads Hiei’s memories while he’s healing in her medical machine, and once the flashback ends we see that Mukuro is already undressed, revealing her true form to Hiei.  In the anime Mukuro reads Hiei’s memories while he’s still lying on the floor immediately after his fight with Shigure.  The scene then switches to Hiei in the medical machine with Mukuro standing before him, still in her full getup, which she takes off to reveal her true form.

• Mukuro’s backstory in the manga is that she was a slave as a child (implicitly a sex slave), and that to quell her master’s interest she poured acid over her body at age 7, gaining her freedom but leaving the right half of her body horribly scarred.  The full details of this are only revealed in chapter 172 (after the tournament has wrapped up), but it’s hinted at here at the end of chapter 160.  This origin story was apparently judged unsuitable for the TV version, which tones it down and makes it all very vague, so that it’s never explained why Mukuro has her scars.  I’ll look at this further once I get to episode 109 though.

• So anyway, at this point in the manga Mukuro says that from the time she was born she was “a plaything, a slave”, and she lost half her body to gain her freedom (the implication being that the scars covering half her body are a result of this, but this isn’t verified until chapter 172).  Were it not for Hiei’s Hirui Stone, which seems to absorb negative feelings, her body would still be nothing more than an object of hate for her, with fighting her only method of release.  But now she is proud of the scarred half of her body, and has no intention of healing it.  She says she can show Hiei everything, and that now he can probe her own memories of her past.  In the anime though, Mukuro instead says by the time she was born she was already a prisoner, and lost “something” to gain her freedom.  Were it not for Hiei’s Hirui Stone, her heart would have filled with hatred, with fighting her only method of release.  She then goes straight to saying she can show Hiei everything, and he can probe her own memories.

• This is the only point in the anime where we get a good look at Mukuro’s unveiled face.  Apparently this was too intricate a design for animation, so once Mukuro takes off her veil to fight in the tournament, the anime still has her cover the right side of her face with a little napkin thing.  Even here, the anime version of Mukuro’s face and body falls rather flat compared to the manga version, but the picture in the manga is incredible, so I can’t really fault the anime too much for not living up to it.  Mukuro’s hairstyle is also a bit different in the anime, mainly in that her hair is longer, extending almost to her shoulders.

• The anime version of Mukuro’s origin, given in full in episode 109, places a great deal of importance on the chains around Mukuro’s arms.  There, Mukuro is depicted as wearing those chains since her earliest memory, and being unable to remove them no matter how strong she got, until Hiei finally breaks them during their battle at the tournament.  In the manga these chains are nothing more than part of Mukuro’s outfit, and she takes them off at will when revealing her true form to Hiei.  Oddly, the anime version follows the manga here, with Mukuro clearly not wearing her chains during the end of this episode.  Apparently the anime staff hadn’t fully ironed out their version of Mukuro’s backstory yet.

• The closing narration for chapter 160 says that Raizen dies half a year later, by which time Hiei had already solidified his position as Mukuro’s right-hand man.  The anime just says Hiei later becomes Mukuro’s ring-hand man, without mentioning Raizen’s death.