Manga Madness #2: Hyozan

Good day everyone, and welcome to week two of Manga Madness! Without further ado, let's jump right into today's manga; a piece set in Japanese history known as, Hyozan.

Full Title: 魔滅する者ヒョザン (Mamessuru Mono Hyozan)
Translation: Devil Douser Hyozan (Iceberg)

Synopsis: The year is 1869 - the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration. In this new era, broken strands of the past continue to linger throughout the land. One day in the Kitakami Mountains, a village is assaulted by a band of marauders declaring that all who practice evil must appear before them to be 'judged'. But when an unknown wanderer passing through town wielding a samurai's sword challenges them in the village's stead, the marauders cast judgement on the entire town by burning it to the ground and killing everyone in it - as a lesson to the interfering wanderer. Only a young boy and girl survive. Without a home to return to, they now head out on a mission: to seek out the ones who destroyed their home and the man who provoked the destruction.

Origin:
For one of my lit classes in high school, we were given an assignment to write a collection of four short stories in a booklet. I put a significant amount of time into all four, but I made one in particular the main focus; the feature presentation, if you will. It was called, "Wandering Swordsman: You Who Stole my Pride". In it, a young boy named Toshi attempts to befriend a passing wanderer who sleeps in the streets - refusing lodging and food from the other villagers. In the middle of the night, a demon attacks the young girl Sakiko, who was out late in the fields. Toshi rushes to her aid but nearly gets himself killed, until the wanderer appears brandishing a sword and slays the beast. Toshi's childish pride is broken by the event, since he was unable to save Sakiko on his own and had to be rescued, and his curiosity for the wanderer grows into jealous hate. Toshi vows to become a greater swordsman than the wanderer ever was, and the story ends. A year later, I had another assignment for a different lit class in which I had to write a screenplay for a movie. The Wandering Swordsman story had left me with a rather delighted impression, and I was overcome with desire to revisit it for this new assignment. I tweaked the original story and came up with new ideas to make it fit the length of a movie, and it became "Hyozan: The Lost Soul Moves". "Devil Douser Hyozan" is basically the same as that screenplay, trimmed down into more of a regular series format.

Character/Plot:
Hiruma Toshi (his first name is Toshi; for this story I am referring to the characters' full names in the traditional way since the story takes place in a traditional setting) lives in a small village at the base of the Kitakami mountain range. The history he lives in is one that comes from the real history of Japan, but with some added substance and facts to suit the story I'm telling. For example, the Kitakami Mountains are a real location - they can be found in the Iwate prefecture in Japan. Pretty much all of the story takes place within and at the base of these mountains. The marauders who attack his village, however, come from a special group of individuals of my own creation. As Toshi will discover later on, they are called the Taimatsu Group. Little seems to be known about this rouge group of ronin soldiers other than their M.O. - they seek out individuals who have broken the law and punish them, often at greater severity than the committed crime and while exposing danger to innocents close to the guilty party. They exist in the hectic aftermath of the Meiji Restoration - I chose this part of history because it was a radical transitional period; the Hyozan story is just one such event that "could have" occurred during this time when the old ways were hanging by a thread to make way for the new. One day, these men of the Taimatsu Group come to Toshi's village. They take a young girl, Rurikawa Sakiko, hostage, demanding that a certain man of the village, who they claim is guilty of a crime, appear before them. Being a close friend to Sakiko, Toshi steps forward to save her, but he gets quickly beaten to an inch of his life by the gleeful Taimatsu. As they move to kill the girl for the village's non-compliance, a mysterious man with a sword appears and saves her life. The Taimatsu seem to recognize the man, identifying him as "Hyozan" (the same as the title). Despite saving their lives, the appearance of this "Hyozan", who seems to be an enemy of the Taimatsu, is quite unfortunate. In a rage, the Taimatsu label the entire village as criminals and they go on a rampage, killing everyone they find and burning the village to the ground. In the initial confusion, Toshi and Sakiko manage to run and hide from the attackers, and the man called "Hyozan" vanishes as quickly as he appeared. This all is the main bait and hook of the story, but the real content begins following these events. After that traumatizing day, Toshi's heart grows sour and cold; he vows to seek out the Taimatsu and the mysterious Hyozan and make them pay for destroying all that he held dear. Sakiko stays by his side, despite her desire to move on from the past and rebuild their lives, as they travel through the mountains to find traces of the two elusive parties.

Themes:
Hyozan is a study of adolescence and the inner-workings of a mind that sees the world through inexperienced eyes. Toshi represents all of the negative aspects of a protagonist that you can think of. He's selfish and immature. He's prideful and cocky. After the day he lost everyone except his best friend, he becomes a demon of vengeance - his eyes become focused only on the goal of finding the ones who ruined his life. And his true desire for seeking out Hyozan is as petty as you can get - he's jealous because Hyozan had to step in and save Sakiko, the girl he loves, for him. What I wanted to emphasize most of all in this story was how one's shortcomings can come to a head and make a bad situation even worse. Most notably this is seen in how Hyozan's heroic deed dooms the entire village. Toshi exemplifies this as well as he takes the situation of his entire family and village being destroyed and makes it worse by effectively destroying himself - eradicating all his other emotions except for his hatred. As he begins in this tale, Toshi is honestly heading down the path of the villain more so than that of the hero. This is why Sakiko is with him - she acts as his emotional weight; she takes every chance she gets to try and bring him back to the way he used to be. I think it's interesting to see a protagonist who is supposed to be a hero go down a rather dark, villainous road almost immediately. This is another idea I like to play with in this story: the undefined lines of good and evil. We're never really sure who is good and who is bad. Toshi is the "hero", but he's driven to the path of vengeance. The mysterious Hyozan suddenly disappears when the fires start as if he were suddenly unable to help anymore. The Taimatsu themselves are committing horrible acts, but they claim to be on the side of justice. These undefined lines only continue to get more scrambled as the story goes on.

The word "Hyozan" means "iceberg". I picked this name for several reasons. One, it sounds cool. Two, more importantly, it creates imagery of that well-known saying: "the tip of the iceberg". I don't use this analogy to imply that things are bigger than they actually seem, but rather that our preconceptions are often misleading. Our actions don't always have the outcome we expected. Saving the children seemed like the right thing to do, but it ended up costing the lives of everyone else. That situation is extreme, but I construct those situations to specifically be extreme to make my point. In this story, I would really want the reader to question every action the characters take; to ponder if it's right or wrong, and what could happen as a result. Define your own lines surrounding the characters and try to figure out who is in the right.

Thanks for stopping in again, guys! Come by next week for Manga Madness Part 3!

I didn't mention it above, but this series contains an element of sword fighting action, which explains the shounen-style of the image. The boy and girl in the bottom right are Toshi and Sakiko (the same girl from my Freebird image); the man in the upper left is Hyozan himself. This time, since I was already using Photoshop to create the logo for the series (once again, the main features of the logo were hand drawn, then touched up in PS), I decided to use it to add a few after effects to the image and enhance it, namely the gradients creating the shadow behind Hyozan's head and faded texture of his clothing past the draw line. I think it's done pretty amateurishly, but it was a fun experiment and I'll definitely try it out in the future. I was going to add a background pattern as well, but I decided it distracted from the image too much. The diagonal text under the title says, "Let it fly, Hazumimaki!" The 'Hazumimaki' is Toshi's signature sword attack (He trains in swordsmanship in order to stand a chance against those who he's pursuing), and it's also what he's doing in the image. The rotating object is after-images of his shinai (a wooden training sword found in dojos) being quickly spun around by his right hand. The other text is an author credit; but for this piece I decided to use a Japanese pen name I made up for myself some years ago: Souzou Daiguchi. It felt more appropriate given the more traditional backdrop of Hyozan.