Usagi Yojimbo: "A Quiet Meal" and "Blind Swordspig"

More Usagi! I'll probably be alternating between this, Look Back, and K6BD for pretty much the rest of this month, so I hope y'all like comics.

A Quiet Meal​

As per established tradition, Usagi starts the story walking alone down a scenic back country road. This one is particularly pretty though; just check out those dragonflies and flowers, and the shading around/under Usagi's hat:

So much prettier than it needed to be for what is essentially an interchangeable generic intro panel. The frieze-style grass in the background just brings it all together too.

The pretty ends, and Usagi approaches a remote inn standing alone amidst the trees and meadows. I'm guessing this is either later in the timeline, or in a much less war-ravaged corner of Japan, because I can't imagine an inn like this still being inhabited unless it at least has a palisade or something around it. Usagi comes in, and there's just a short, dorky-looking innkeeper there, no armed people. Yeah, this is not in the same year and region as the last few stories, for sure. Anyway, Usagi soundlessly indicates that he'd like a table for one, and smiles gratefully as the innkeeper seats him and brings him his meal.

The tranquility doesn't last long, though. A group of thuggish looking individuals, led by a pig with a literal cloud of flies following him around and a pair of insanely intimidating eyebrows, come swarming in and loudly demanding sake that they clearly don't need more of.

They claim to be gamblers who have just won bigtime and are looking forward to spending it all on booze and hookers. This inn doesn't appear to have any hookers, but it does have booze, so they're ordering lots of that.

They're not seated for long before the innkeeper has to beg them to stop disturbing the other customers with their endless shouting and mess-making. They start threatening violence really, really quickly in response to this, in a way that makes me suspect that they might have made this windfall doing something much less legal than gambling.

Also, there's a three-headed fish dragon hanging around outside when they begin menacing the innkeeper.

I don't know if this is a crossover gag like that appearance by Groo the Wanderer earlier, foreshadowing for a future dragon-centric episode, or just a major escalation in the creator's decision to make this world's wildlife weirder and weirder with each passing episode. A patron told me that that thing is supposed to be King Ghidorah, but I’d have never thought Ghidorah from looking at it.

Dragon or no dragon, the drunken thugs throw the innkeeper out of his own establishment and keep helping themselves to his sake with no intent to pay. I guess maybe this inn SHOULD have some security onhand after all, but unfortunately it does not.

Usagi, meanwhile, continues eating his meal without looking up from it. Seemingly oblivious, as if everything is being drowned out by music that only he can hear.

On one hand, outright ignoring this seems a little out of character for Usagi even in the greedier and more self-absorbed moments we've seen so far. On the other, I can totally understand how after this kind of bullshit happening near constantly for what seems like years, he might just...zone out, occasionally. Get to a state of mental exhaustion where he just dissociates rather than properly reacting. He was being unusually quiet and minimalistic in his words and movements from the moment he reached the inn, so...yeah, that makes sense. Poor bunny.

Usagi continues to eat his meal in near-catatonic tranquillity even as the thugs go on the warpath and start picking fights with random patrons. Who end up being thrown out the door right after the innkeeper. And, in some cases, right into the innkeeper.

Eventually, for want of other civilians to bully, the drunken bandits start crowding in around Usagi and asking him if he's got a problem with them. No response, he just keeps eating his food as if in his sleep. They press in closer and closer, until finally the pig who seems to be the leader of the bunch gets a little too close and snaps Usagi out of his space-out.

When they first get over being startled, the bandits assume that this ronin must be even drunker than they are, flailing around wildly with his sword like that and not putting so much as a scratch on the pig. Then, they notice that the cloud of flies that have been following Piggy around is gone. Usagi just Daniel Larusso'd the whole swarm of them, and the thugs slowly realize that their tiny bodies are laying, bisected, on the floor all around.

The bandits promptly flee the establishment themselves, allowing the innkeeper and other patrons to slowly, nervously creep their way back in. Usagi has spaced out again, and resumed eating his food as if nothing happened.

The end.


Cute, but filler-y. Definitely feels like Sakai threw it together to fill a page space deficit in another issue.

So, next.

Blind Swordspig
​

Lots of pigs turning up in the cast, recently. Maybe Usagi will get along a little bit better with this one.

Open on the blind swordspig making his way down a road, feeling the way ahead of him with his walking stick as he thinks to himself about where he's going and what he can smell along the way. That nose of his is very powerful, even by pig standards, and he's able to infer a lot about the village he's wandering into just by scent.

He muses that he might be able to find his long-desired peaceful retirement in this farming village. Unfortunately, his nose isn't quite good enough to smell wanted posters.

Whatever he wants a peaceful retirement from, it seems that the shogunate has yet to forgive him for it.

As the pig enters the town square, the locals immediately recognize his face from the signs. I can see how disguising one's face by smell alone might be difficult, so yeah, this is a weakness of his. They whisper (or even just shout) to one another about how the notorious murderer "Blind Ino" has arrived in their town, and that they should kill him both for their own protection and for the reward. These "simple farmers" are awfully bloodthirsty, I must say. Too many years left to fend for themselves against ubiquitous bandits, ninjas, and demonic kitties, I guess.

Hearing their voices, or perhaps just smelling aggression on the air, Blind Ino grumbles to himself that it looks like we're going to have to do this again after all. As he speaks, he pulls his walking stick open to reveal a concealed sword.

Cut to a little while later, with Usagi wandering into the village and wondering what the hell happened here.

How the hell did Ino manage to set those buildings on fire? Or knock those other heavy wooden sheds over? He may have other tricks up his sleeve besides just being unusually good at swordfighting for a blind man.

Usagi interrupts a peasant who's struggling to put out his house before it burns down and demands that he explain to him what happened here. Wow, dick move Usagi. The peasant hurriedly explains that the notorious outlaw Blind Ino - a brute seven feet tall with fangs like a warthog, wielding a greatsword the size of a more typical person - stormed into the village without warning and laid waste to everything. Unprovoked. Without speaking a word.

Peasant is exaggerating just a tad. And also omitting the part where the townsfolk were all closing in around Ino discussing the bounty on his head. Granted, this particular guy might not have been there for the beginning, in which case he's filling in the blanks on his own. I doubt any of the people who were planning to attack Ino are still alive to give an accurate account.

Usagi also, notably, feels obligated to avenge the townsfolk and put an end to the menace, without musing at all about a reward. Very different from how he acted the last time he found his way into a village in need, even if it was still pretty dickish of him to stop the guy carrying water to a burning house. I'd infer that we're either looking at an older Usagi again, or else just one who's in a better financial situation at the moment.

Flash forward several more hours, to Usagi warily pressing on down the road in the direction Ino was said to have gone. He keeps his hand near his swordhilt and his eyes peeled. Eventually, he hears a voice calling for help from what looks like a half-dug well by the side of the road.

Blind Ino has some great lines, by the way.

Another one, in an adjacent panel:

Usagi: "Yo! In the hole!"

Ino: "Ho! Out of the hole!"

I like this pig, even with the collateral damage he seems to cause.

After Usagi helps Ino out of the pit, the two trait introductions. Miyamoto Usagi, currently on his way to the village he was born in to see it for the first time in many years. Huh, interesting! I hope the next story will continue this thread, because seeing Usagi's hometown could be pretty cool. Ino doesn't name himself, but does claim to be a masseur traveling the country following his profession and hoping to find a place to settle down eventually.

Usagi, surprisingly, doesn't seem to see the warning signs. "Blind Ino." This blind man traveling in the direction you were told he was going in being unwilling to share his name. He may just be playing along though, we'll see.

Usagi is surprised when Ino somehow discerns that he's a ronin. Ino explains that he smelled the blood on Usagi's sword, and that there was too much of it for him to be someone's sworn sword, so he must be a wandering adventurer. Damn, Usagi really needs to clean his sword more often.

Ino has another little charming moment following from this. He's a pretty chill piggy.

Anyway, Usagi warns him about the fearsome outlaw on the road, and Ino either does a good job playing dumb himself or is actually oblivious.

They travel together for the rest of the day. Come evening, they make camp and forage. Ino's nose makes him significantly better at finding food than Usagi, but they both manage to contribute enough. As they have dinner around their campfire, Ino suddenly looks up, sniffing the air in alarm. When Usagi asks him what he smelled though, he just shakes his head and tells him it was nothing.

Hmm.

The next morning, Usagi wakes up to find Ino and his stuff already gone, with the last of the previous night's roasted trout left spitted up over their campfire ashes for Usagi. Pig bro really is a bro. Definitely a step up in quality of friends over that fucking rhino. Usagi decides that the masseur must have just decided to get an early start on his travels and didn't want to prevent Usagi from sleeping in if he felt like sleeping in. He does seem perfectly capable of taking care of himself, provided there aren't any more random pits along the road.

It appears that Ino didn't get *that* much of a head start, though, because Usagi catches up to him again in just a couple of hours. As he comes within sight, he sees that Ino has just been accosted by a trio of armed warriors. Usagi fears that these could be Ino and his gang. In fact, of course, they are bounty hunters trying to bring Ino in.

You know, if they had just shot him full of arrows from a little way downwind this fight would have probably gone a lot better for them. It's not like we've never seen archers in this comic before lol.

Usagi sees the wanted poster that the bull dropped, and realizes who Blind Ino is. He also reacts in horror at the way Ino just killed all those men without hesitation, which strikes me as immensely hypocritical considering what happens to armed men who accost Usagi himself. Pretty sure the only time we've seen him give more of a warning than a verbal "don't fuck with me bruh" is in the last story, when he was dealing with some unarmed drunks. Yeah, I think Usagi's house is pretty glassy for him to be throwing these stones.

Usagi asks why the hell he slaughtered half a village the other day. Ino just retorts that they attacked him first. They *always* attack him first. It's been this way for so long, he just wants people to stop attacking him, why won't people stop attacking him? From childhood onward, Ino says, he's been abused and mistreated for being blind. He thought that learning swordplay would make things better, but no, it's just made things worse, and worse, and worse.

The next words out of Usagi's mouth aren't the most diplomatic or carefully chosen. Nonetheless, Ino's own response to them is...telling, to say the least.

Yeeeeeah. "I hate you, and what I hate I kill," with only a couple of spoken sentences needed to earn his hatred. Ino's definition of self-defence seems to be considerably broader than everyone else's. Both in terms of what merits it, and in terms of what it entails (setting buildings on fire when all he needed to do was fend off the people surrounding him is hard to reasonably explain as anything but an act of spite and revenge). Whether Ino's wrathful, vindictive ways are a consequence of lifelong abuse as he claims, or if he was always a ragemonster even before he had the sword skills to act on it, is irrelevant to the present. As it is, his Jekyll and Hyde deal makes it impossible for him to find that peaceful life he supposedly wants; even if he went somewhere where no one could identify him and there was no ableist stigma, how long would it take for something or someone to set him off?

Usagi tells him that he doesn't want to kill him, they can talk about this. Ino says that if Usagi doesn't want to kill him, then that means Ino will win, because when Ino draws his sword *someone* dies, no exception. Yeeeah, not helping your case here, Ino.

Ino charges. Usagi counterattacks. It's a brief, furious altercation, and it ends with Ino losing the one thing that allows him the agency and power he possesses.

If there was ever any chance of Ino accepting Usagi's offer, it's gone now. He wishes aloud that Usagi had just killed him instead of condemning him to this. He hates him more than he's ever hated anyone, and that means he's going to kill him harder than he's ever killed anyone before.

Usagi can't bring himself to euthanize Ino, but he also can't bring him with him. So, he's forced to leave him bleeding, scentless, and cursing by the side of the road.

Jump ahead two months. Somehow, Ino survived his predicament, and he's doing his best to bounce back. He's at a master woodcarver's workshop, being given the delicate piece he commissioned; I guess he had quite a bit of money on him, and I'm sceptical that he got it all from giving massages.

His first action after getting the wooden nose is slicing the woodcarver's pet saurofrog in half, just because he hasn't had an outlet for his wrath in two months and there's nothing the carver can do about it. Whether or not he kills the carver as well for making his pinewood nose too pine-scented, we'll just have to wonder, because the story ends here.


I think this story makes the first real addition to Usagi Yojimbo's rogues' gallery since Hikiji and his underlings, and I think it's a good addition. Ino strikes a good balance in terms of being a sympathetic monster (even if he was less innocent to begin with than he's letting on, the fact that he at least *earnestly believes* he was an innocent victim adds at least a touch of pathos). He's also an opponent who can theoretically be dealt with permanently before the end of the entire comic series without really hurting UY's possibility space, since he's functionally just another wandering murderhobo like Usagi himself. So, meaningfully developments can happen at any time with this thread.

The pig definitely has charisma too, and in a more nuanced way than the bounty hunter rhino, whose charm is pretty much just the "love to hate him" dynamic. How much IS Ino a victim of Edo society, as opposed to just being unwilling to take responsible for his own personality defects? I imagine we'll learn more in subsequent appearances.

Granted, the fact that Usagi defeated him so handily in their first encounter, and that with his wooden nose he'll probably be weaker going forward, does raise some questions about Ino's threat level. He'll need to do something lateral in his next appearance in order to really threaten the protagonist.

Speaking of the protagonist though, I feel at this point like the author is still figuring out Usagi's personality. You could infer that the stories are written out of chronological order as I did at first, or that Usagi's personality shifts along with his fortunes, but after this story I'm starting to think that Sakai just isn't sure which samurai movie archetype(s) he wants his protagonist to fill. The paragon? The scoundrel? The world-weary cynic? I figure he'll get more consistent as time goes on, but some of these early stories make it easier to imagine that they're about different ronins altogether.

Still, both as a standalone piece and as an instalment in Usagi Yojimbo as a continuity, "Blind Swordspig" was probably the best since the "Lone Rabbit and Child/the Confession" two-parter.