Usagi Yojimbo #9: "Homecoming Part One"

Alright, time for more Usagi Yojimbo. And, unlike most of the recent stories since the "Lone Rabbit and Child"/"The Confession" duology, this one might be building continuity. In the previous episode, Usagi mentioned that he's heading back to his home village for the first time in years. And now, this one is called "Homecoming." So yeah, regardless of when they take place relative to the other tales, these two definitely come one after the other.

Also, damn this cover art is gloomy:

Either he's heading up into the mountains, or his journey home ended up taking quite some time, because it didn't look like winter in "Blind Swordspig." If Usagi's hometown is somewhere in the central Honshu area then this could fit. If we're trying to hew close to history with this detail, the exact birthplace of Miyamoto Musashi isn't known, but it's known to be in a region that partially overlaps those mountains, so it fits.

Well, let's check out the Bushido Burrow! Wakizashi Warren? Nah, Bushido Burrow, it's definitely Bushido Burrow.


Usagi crosses the depressing snow-covered landscape, looking fairly depressed and snow-covered himself. He happens to come across some uniformed badgers (chipmunks? weasels? I'll just call them badgers for now) coming the other way carrying some heavy bundles and dragging a scared-looking little rabbit after them. Raiders? Tax collectors? Bounty hunters? The little bunny doesn't look like a criminal, but we'll see.

The lead badger spots Usagi, and warns his companions to spread out and prepare for a potential hostile. Usagi tells them he's just a traveller, but boss badger doesn't believe a lone traveler would just be wandering out here at this time of year; he must be one of the villagers, and they warned the villagers not to follow them.

Well. Guess they're raiders. Uniformed raiders, though, so not just common bandits. They look more like a ninja clan. Also, instead of producing weapons they just reveal these gigantic claws that suggest moles rather than badgers. I guess there's a motif with the shinobi gangs being mono-species. Cat ninjas, mole ninjas, etc. Well one of the shimolebis tries to apprehend Usagi, and it goes just about as well for him as you would expect. The captive rabbit (who we now see close enough to tell is actually a child) makes a break for it as its captors rush forward into a suicide-by-Usagi.

But, the shimolebis get saved by the bell! Sort of! They see another large group of interlopers coming in from the right, and decide that they'd best retreat now that they're outnumbered. Ironically, they'd probably all have died if those newcomers didn't show up just then. They drop those smoke bombs that pop culture ninjas always cover their escapes with, and vanish.

...

You know, this made me curious enough to look it up.

Apparently, ninjas actually did use smoke bombs historically speaking, at least occasionally, but they also used a lot of other tricks that don't seem to have stuck in the popular imagination either in the west or in Japan itself. Maybe smoke bombs are just sexy enough that people liked the idea of them. Or maybe there was a particularly famous incident where a ninja used a smoke bomb that created the meme.

At any rate, what I'm getting is that ninja smoke bombs were a thing, but they weren't nearly as prevalant as samurai media makes it seem, and ninjas were hardly the only fighters in feudal Japan who used them. I kinda figured it was like that.

...

The newcomers arrive in the wake of the moles' disappearance, and the baby bunny runs over to them. The group consists mostly (but not entirely) of rabbits, which...okay, what DO the specific animal features represent? Now it seems like it's supposed to be a regional or ethnic thing, but that doesn't neccessarily align with all previous instances. I really don't know. Should I just be assessing each instance in total isolation?

Well, these are the people of Usagi's own hometown, so he personally knows many of them. The kid he just rescued didn't exist the last time Usagi was here, but his parents did, and it turns out Usagi knows his mom.

Old girlfriend? Looks like she might be an old girlfriend. Well, if she has a kid now then it's probably too late for them to try again unless her husband has been conveniently murdered by mole raiders or something.

Cue flashback for Usagi! Younger versions of himself and Mariko are on a date, and she's annoyed at him spending all his time painting instead of talking to her.

I want to say that that's a mockup of an actual famous painting. And it doesn't even look like he's painting HER, what a jerk!

...this might actually be another stealthy historical reference, actually. The real life Miyamoto Musashi was indeed an artist and poet as well as a fighter, who saw these arts as part of the samurai way. More pointedly, there's this one quote from him...I can't seem to find it at the moment, but I remember it clearly...that was almost literally the "while you were chasing women, I studied the blade" meme. While he did have a few minor flings here and there, Musashi never really made sex or romance a big part of his life, and remained very proudly unmarried until the end. Some historians suspect he was a closeted gay, or perhaps a closeted ace, but either way this scene of Usagi being too busy with samurai stuff to have a normal date definitely feels like its playing on that part of Musashi's legend.

Granted, it doesn't last long. Eventually Mariko grabs the brush out of his hand and paints a mustache on him, and then it turns into an ink fight which turns into a makeout session. It's super kawaii and all that. However, Usagi is snapped back to the present when Mariko is joined by her husband, a sour-faced rabbit who's been sort of giving Usagi the stink-eye from among the crowd for the last couple panels.

His ex-girlfriend married his ex-rival while he was away? Cliched, but it's one of those realistic cliches that you can't really complain about due to its plausibility.

Also, the baby bunny's name is Jotaro. I won't bother making jokes, I'm sure the comments will handle that on their own.

Cut ahead a little bit to Usagi being invited into Kenichi and Mariko's home. Kenichi might not like Usagi, but he did save his son's life, so he isn't going to not host him after that. In their conversation over dinner, we learn that Usagi's father was the previous magistrate of this village, and that Kenichi is the current magistrate of this village. I would say that this sounds shady, but Usagi himself may have guaranteed it by going off to join Lord Whatsisname's army and...

...hmm. Actually, this would have happened during the late Sengoku. I don't think there was a nation-wide standardized system for local government succession until Tokugawa set one up. So yeah, I have no idea if magistrates would have been appointed by the local lord, hereditary like some kind of minor nobility, or elected by the community, in this specific time and place. Okay, neverminded. I don't know enough to make any guesses yet.

The topic of discussion turns to the circumstances of Usagi's father's death. Sure enough, it happened while Usagi was off being Daimyo Mifune's unsuccessful bodyguard. Apparently, Mifune's defensive positioning wasn't great, because Lord Hikiji and his vanguard just rode right the fuck into one of his undefended villages and started extorting food out of the locals. Usagi's father made an honorable, but foolish, decision.

Hmm. Not sure how I feel about this. Even if Usagi didn't know that Hikiji personally murdered his father until now, the fact that he was killed directly by Hikiji's forces feels like something that definitely should have been mentioned before this. As one of the reasons, if not THE reason, that Usagi wants revenge. It kind of hits a little closer to home than "outfought my own liege using less-than-honourable tactics." I'm not saying he NEEDS that intimate of a reason, but if he does have one then he should have made it a focus long before this.

Also, going further with that last detail, I just feel like it's a cliche that the comic could do just as well without. Usagi still has a good enough reason to hate Hikiji without this, let alone without the excessive drama of Hikiji doing the murder in person. Thanks to some non-Usagi POV sequences in "Lone Rabbit and Child"/"The Confession," we the audience know that Hikiji even more of a slimy bastard than Usagi realizes, so it's not like we need more reason to hate this guy either.

Well, regardless of my feelings about this revelation, the flashback continues for one more panel to explain how the new magistrate was chosen. It...well, it probably wasn't ever the standard procedure locally or otherwise, so there's no way I would have guessed it.

Kenichi was made the new magistrate on the spot, by virtue of happening to be the closest adult male villager to Lord Hikiji at that moment.

Well then.

Mariko explains that many starved in the coming winter, but Kenichi - who is starting to feel a little attacked - interjects that if he hadn't done what he did, Hikiji would have slaughtered half the village and then stolen all of their food and let the whole village vanish. That's what Kenichi believes Usagi's own father would have done, him always having had much more pride and honor than common sense. And where the hell has Usagi himself been, anyway? Why did he never come back and try to help them, that winter? Frankly, he's not sure he even wants him back in town at all at this point, and strongly encourages Usagi to leave as soon as he's touched bases with old friends and paid his respects to his father's grave as he came here to do.

Kenichi does have some legitimate grievances here, but not ones that would justify this amount of hatred. There's obviously a lot more to this grudge of his than he's saying, and I suspect the rest of it is all much pettier. You'd think saving his son's life and allowing his people to take back whatever those mole ninjas stole would make up for at least a big chunk of this, but apparently only enough to buy Usagi one night of grudging hospitality.

After Kenichi and Jotaro go to bed, Mariko and Usagi have a bit more private conversation. She apologizes for her husband, and says she's surprised at his childhood grudge having somehow intensified over the years instead of dissipating. Usagi just apologizes himself for disrupting the harmony of their home, and thanks her once again for letting him stay in it.

He then asks her who those mole bandits even were, and she - with visible hesitation - tells him that they just showed up a few days ago. This winter is another harsh one, and the harvest that preceded it another poor one, just like the year Hikiji conquered their land. Just like then, a group of armed ruffians came barging into the village demanding food and supplies. This group was a bit smaller and less heavily armed than Hikiji's army, though, and the villagers are scrappier now than they were then, so they refused. The shimolebis didn't try to attack them head-on in response, though. That's not the ninja way. Or the mole way, for that matter. Instead, they burrowed up through the ground under the floor of their storehouse in the middle of the night and just started stealing shit.

Jotaro happened to be in the storehouse at the time, so they grabbed him too to use as a hostage to discourage pursuit. The villagers pursued them anyway, as we saw at the beginning, but they were reluctant to show themselves - let alone attack - until they had an opening to do so without getting Jotaro killed.

...

From the sound of things, Kenichi is actually a pretty good leader. He knows which fights his people can win and which ones they can't. When defeated, he makes cautious, well-thought-out plans to try and recoup the losses. Definitely seems like a smart, well-intentioned guy doing the best he can with very limited resources.

He's also being a total prick to Usagi, but that's irrelevant to his qualification to be magistrate. Hikiji could have definitely made worse choices, not that he "chose" him by anything besides sheer random chance.

...

Unfortunately, that burrowing mole we see in the panel beside Mariko's isn't a flashback illustration. He's digging up through the ground underneath the house right this second. See, they said that either they'd get the supplies or the kid would die, and it would seriously damage their reputation if neither of those things ended up happening. There's a guard in Jotaro's room, but he doesn't last long when the enemy suddenly breaks through the floorboards.

They somehow knew the layout of the house well enough to come up inside of a specific room? That's...impressive, but also sort of baffling.

It also leads to a bigger question, connected to some ongoing thoughts I've had about what, if anything, the anthropomorphism actually means. Like, those digging claws are apparently functional. They can tunnel through the ground at least as well as real moles. Does this apply to other animal people too, though? Can Usagi jump unusually high or change directions mid-step because of his rabbit legs? Can Tamoe see in the dark? Will we ever see Lord Hebi poison someone with his bite?

We sort of touched on this with the blind swordspig, but in his case the sense of smell was framed as the exceptional ability of an exceptional person, not something that any pigman can do. The thing with the moles isn't being framed like that.


That's the first chapter of this two-part story. Next time, the conclusion.