Episode 109

EPISODE 109

対決！飛影とムクロ (Taiketsu! Hiei to Mukuro)

Showdown! Hiei and Mukuro

First Broadcast: December 10, 1994

Equivalent Manga Chapter(s): very loosely adapted from parts of chapter 172 (WSJ #29, 1994, July 4)

Summary: Hiei goes up against Mukuro in the tournament.  Mukuro began her life as a prisoner, and even now retains shackles on her arms.  Outmatched by Mukuro’s power (including her ability to cut space itself) Hiei fires his Koku-Ryu-Ha, which she manages to completely destroy.  However, the attack breaks her shackles.  Though Hiei has lost, he and Mukuro both seem more at peace with their past.

Anime/manga differences after the jump.

Differences from the Manga

(What's all this about?  Read here)

• This is the third episode in a row that is essentially all anime-only material.  In the manga we are told that Hiei lost to Mukuro in Round 3 of the tournament, but we see nothing of the fight.  So this episode shows it.  More than that though, this episode very loosely adapts material from chapter 172, one of the short, self-contained stories the manga has between the end of the tournament and the actual end of the series.  This chapter goes over Mukuro’s origins, and has her briefly fight Hiei (“fight” in the sense that she instantly takes him out in one punch).  And so this episode explores Mukuro’s origins and has her fight Hiei, but in the context of the tournament, rather than after it.  However, Mukuro’s backstory in the anime is almost completely different than her manga backstory, which was apparently considered too harsh for TV.

• First, let’s look over chapter 172.  Kuwabara’s family are all at home watching TV, and see an interview with a woman who claims to have been abducted by aliens.  The artist’s rendition of the alien she saw bears a striking resemblance to Hiei (Yukina takes this to mean that Hiei is, in fact, from outer space).  Over in the Demon World we see what’s really going on: Mukuro and her underlings, Hiei included, have been assigned to patrol for humans who are accidentally drawn into the Demon World by random spatial distortions, and ensure that they are safely returned home.  Hiei’s part in this is to use his Jagan to hypnotize the humans so that they’ll forget their little trip to the Demon World, but some of these people apparently recover the memories later and misunderstand them as alien abduction.  

• The reason why Mukuro and co. are stuck doing this is because they lost in the tournament (why Yusuke and Kurama are apparently exempt isn’t explained).  Shigure wonders why Mukuro lost; Enki certainly is strong, but he didn’t seem so strong that Mukuro couldn’t have defeated him if she gave it her all.  Kirin though says that she was giving it her all…all the power she had at the time, that is.  According to Kirin, Mukuro’s power varies based on her emotional state, and at a safe, laid-back tournament like that she’d only be able to put out half her maximum power at most.  Kirin doesn’t think they’ll be seeing Mukuro’s true power anymore either, since these days she’s getting pretty gentle.  However, once a year she gets incredibly dark.  About 100-200 years ago, she obliterated the current No.2 at such at time.  Everything up to this point is adapted in the final episode of the anime.

• Hiei is intrigued by all this talk of Mukuro’s true power.  He goes to Mukuro’s room and asks to see this power, but she says she’s not in the mood to bother with him.  However, when Hiei mentions “the slave merchant Chiko”, her eye color instantly changes.  Hiei heard this name as part of the memories Mukuro showed him after his fight with Shigure (at the time, Mukuro read Hiei’s memories of his past and shared her own memories with Hiei).  We get to finally see what memories Mukuro showed Hiei back then.

• In her memories, Mukuro says she was modified immediately after birth, to make it easier for “him” to play with her.  While still less than a year old she was already a “splendid toy”, and on each birthday she got a fresh wound.  The more she resisted, the happier it made him.  He’d whisper to her that he’d cut off her head, and laugh like a child when she said he was welcome to do so.  On Mukuro’s seventh birthday she poured acid over herself to quell his interest in her, and so he promptly threw her away.  Amidst the cesspool she said that this was the true start of her life.  This is all illustrated by various pictures.  One is of an enormous naked fat man (presumably Chiko, the “he” Mukuro speaks of) surrounded by catatonic-looking women and a rather Giger-esque four-legged monster.  Another shows the young Mukuro wearing a black dress, with her arms bound behind her back, looking as catatonic as the other women.  Then there’s a shot of someone’s legs (presumably Mukuro’s) sprawled out on bed sheets, with Chiko’s enormous hand reaching towards them.  I probably made that sound more graphic than it is, but the implications are there.  Finally we see the young Mukuro wearing a nighty, with metal shackles on her feet.

• After this flashback, Hiei understandably asks Mukuro why she’s left Chiko alive, since surely she knows where he lives.  Mukuro is increasingly upset by this, and while she struggles with herself she sees a very different set of memories: happy ones where Chiko is treating her kindly (and, thankfully, is clothed).  Hiei says it wasn’t hatred that made Mukuro grow strong; it was her doubt and confusion.  He calls her pitiful, and that finally does it: Mukuro snaps and punches Hiei in the chest, sending him flying out of the base and far off into the distance.  Mukuro orders her men to keep the base moving forward, unless they want to die too.  Hiei however is not dead, though he’s left with a nasty wound on his chest.  He bandages it and heads to Kurama’s house in the Human world, where he asks him to prepare a certain plant.  Hiei feels his wound and mutters to himself that she would have easily won the entire tournament if she had used such power back then.  Hearing this, Kurama realizes Hiei’s wound is from Mukuro, and asks if the two are having a “lover’s quarrel”; Hiei threatens to kill him.  Changing the subject, Kurama says he can prepare the plant Hiei wants, but wonders what it’s for.  Hiei says nothing special.

• Back in the Demon World, Hiei shows up at Chiko’s palace (which looks like a Russian church).  Chiko has apparently not changed in any way during the last 1,000+ years, and is sitting naked on his couch demanding more women.  Hiei walks in with a creepy plant and says he’ll introduce him to a “splendid woman”.  He returns to Mukuro’s base, where he explains that her happy memories of Chiko were nothing but false memories implanted as a safety precaution, simple hypnosis to stop her from taking revenge on him.  Whenever she’d think about killing Chiko, these happy memories would flare up and make her too conflicted to do anything.  But Hiei will release her from all that now.  He’s brought in Chiko, who has now merged with that creepy plant Kurama gave Hiei.  It’s actually a parasitic plant, the “Hito-Modoki” (Human-Mimic), and instinctively heals its host.  Mukuro can now torture Chiko as much as she wants, and the plant will helpfully repair the damage so he’ll be ready for fresh torture in no time.  He’ll go on living like this practically forever, so long as Mukuro doesn’t destroy his brain, so she can keep carving him up and kill him whenever she’s finally satisfied.  “Happy birthday”, Hiei says.  The end.  And they all lived happily ever after.   

• There probably wasn’t any need to write such a detailed summary of chapter 172, but it’s possibly by favorite chapter in the entire series, so I did it anyway.  There probably also wasn’t a need for me to write this little note explaining this, but I did that anyway as well.

• So anyway, compare this all with the anime version of Mukuro’s backstory.  I’m just going to transcribe the Funi DVD subtitles here: “I was abandoned soon after I was born.  It was just like being sold”.  We see baby Mukuro crying and being carried off by somebody.  Next we see Mukuro as a girl, wearing rags and with shackles on her arms and legs, walking through the snow.  Then she’s in prison; we can see that at this point she doesn’t have her scars yet.  The shot of Mukuro here as a girl sitting chained up in prison is modeled after the image in the manga of her sitting with her feet chained together, wearing a nighty.  Her narration continues: “When I realized what happened, I was a prisoner.  I didn’t know who my father, my mother, or even who I myself was.  Already, I did not have any freedom”.  The scene switches to Mukuro running through the rain.  She’s got the same rags and chains on as before, but now, without explanation, the right half of her body is scarred.  

• “In desperation, I ran away.  I fled from the circumstances I was in.”  She jumps off a cliff into a river, and despite still having shackles on her hands and feet she somehow makes it to shore somewhere.  We see her pounding her arms on the ground.  “No matter what I tried, I could not get my shackles off.  However, I decided to make them a token of my hatred.  Even now, they remain on my arms.”  We get a good view of her arms at this point, showing that her right arm already has the same cybernetic (?) parts she has in the present.  Those things are never really explained in the manga either; I think the idea is that Mukuro’s scarred right arm needs mechanical enhancements to function properly.

• We now see Mukuro wearing her familiar attire, complete with the bandages masking her face, as she goes around clobbering people: “After that came my days of fighting.  I gathered up my hatred toward everything around me, and sacrificed anything to continue fighting.”  Notably, Mukuro is shown fighting with a sword here, and firing an energy blast from her right hand.  The scene returns to her overseeing Hiei’s healing after his battle with Shigure, standing before him naked (we get to see Mukuro’s fully uncovered face again, for the only other time in the anime).  “Before I realized it, I had obtained some followers, and had become influential enough to oppose Raizen.  However, I---“ She looks at the shackles still on her hands, and the flashback comes to a close.  At the end of the episode, Hiei’s Koku-Ryu-Ha succeeds in finally destroying those shackles.  All very symbolic of course, but I can’t help wondering what those darn things were made out of.  Adamantium? 

• During her fight with Hiei, Mukuro fires energy blasts from her fist, similar to what we see in her flashback, although here rather than a visible beam it’s more like she punches and this creates an explosion in the direction she aims at.  Hiei starts ragging on her like in the manga (irritatingly, in this version his comments focus more around her being a woman) cumulating in him calling her pitiful, and just like in the manga Mukuro responds by punching him in the chest; her punch in the anime is directly based off the picture in the manga.  Like in the manga, Hiei is sent flying and ultimately crashes into a hill. 

• Perhaps the most interesting anime-only attack is Mukuro’s ability to cut through space itself.  According to Kurama, her right arm (and only her right arm, it seems) can cut through any substance in this way.  The space she cuts “remains cut” and if you touch it the very space you’re in will be cut as well.  Mukuro creates these cuts by swinging her arm around, and they look like shiny lines in the air.

• Also notable is the way Mukuro flat-out destroys Hiei’s Koku-Ryu-Ha, rather than deflect it like Bui did.  It breaks open like a Chinese finger trap being torn apart.  

• Backing way up, before the fight some random crowd demons pull out a piece of paper with the tournament chart written on it and check to see who’s up next, and there’s a close-up of this chart.  It’s actually based pretty closely on the huge one shown in the manga.  We see that someone named “Mezu” has defeated “Dai-On” (Mezu, “Horse-head”, is one of the guardians of Hell in Buddhist legend, together with Gozu, “Ox-head”) and that Rinku has lost to Sasuga.  Above that we see (in ascending order) that Natsume has defeated “Tobibi”, while “Gapi” has beaten “Angya”, and Mukuro has beaten “Kabura”.  This is all identical to the chart for the first half of Block D in the manga, except that there Hiei is the one to fight Tobibi in Round 1, while Natsume instead fought Chu in for the first battle in Block D.  As gone over before, the anime has Natsume and Chu fight in the preliminaries rather than the main tournament.  As the demon guys’ gaze scrolls up over the chart, it cuts off before we see the uppermost match in Block D, the spot taken by Natsume/Chu in the manga.  Presumably though, in the anime Hiei must have fought in that spot, because Koto announces that he and Mukuro will now fight in Round 2 of Block D.  In the manga Mukuro fights Natsume in Round 2, then Hiei in Round 3 (the same round Yusuke and Kurama get taken out in), but the anime switches Hiei and Natsume’s place in the tournament chart and the order in which they fight Mukuro.

• As the fight is about to begin, Yusuke and Hokushin discuss it from the sidelines: Hokushin is still trying to view the matchups in terms of whether they benefit Yusuke’s “side”, much to Yusuke’s annoyance.  During this conversation, Hokushin sheepishly reveals he’s already lost.  In episode 107 he defeated Shishi-Wakamaru in Round 1, so presumably he lost in Round 2.  There’s no word on who he lost to, though.  In the manga, Hokushin and Shishi-Wakamaru would instead go up against each other in Round 2.  Assuming Hokushin won that fight as he does in the anime, he’d get defeated by Koko in Round 3, so perhaps we can assume that in the anime Hokushin fights Koko in Round 2 instead.