Usagi Yojimbo #9: "Homecoming Part Two"

Part two! The burrowing brigands have broken into the blameless boy's bedroom, bullying the beleaguered bunnies into bequeathing their bounty of bread! Can our heroic hare help his harried hometown? Probably, he's good at killing ninjas. Let's go.


We start with Kenichi hurrying over and arriving at the bedroom entrance just behind Usagi and Mariko. He comes to some very questionable conclusions. Ones that are making me rethink my earlier, mostly positive, assessment of him.

Dude, what? You led half the village after the moles. When Usagi got Jotaro free, you decided to use the opportunity and charge forward. How the hell are you blaming this on Usagi?

Even if he's just panicking and not really thinking about his words right now, the fact that his first reflex is to look for someone else to blame does not reflect well on his leadership ability.

Fortunately, while the ninja repeats his ultimatum - that they will get Jotaro back alive if and only if his gang get away with all the food - Jotaro himself decides that he's had enough of this shit. Either inspired by Usagi's example or just taking advantage of the mole not paying attention, he bites down on his captor's arm. Like I said in the previous post, I'm not sure how much these characters' animal physiology normally does for them, but in this particular issue we seem to be leaning into that more than usual, and, well...have you ever been bitten by a rabbit? If you haven't, you'll just have to take it from me that those gigantic incisors aren't just for decoration. The mole is surprised and thrown off balance long enough for Usagi to seize the opening.

After thanking Usagi again, Kenichi's family start mobilizing the town again as best they can. Unfortunately, the moles moved much more quickly this time, and the storehouse has already been emptied, and this time they took the supplies back into their tunnels instead of retreating overland. Since the moles collapse their tunnels after themselves, there's no way to pursue them underground. However, when Usagi examines the dead one's body, he notices some clay particles stuck in his clothes. There happens to be a large amount of reddish clay on the slope of a mountain just east of the village, which suggests that the moles have been burrowing in that area a lot.

Sound reasoning, though I'm not sure why Usagi is the only one around here capable of figuring this out; they all know the landscape at least as well as he does, right? I guess Usagi is the one who was investigating the body, being as he's the one who killed it, but it still kind of feels like giving him an unfair extra W here when he already got enough of those fair and square in this sequence.

Well, anyway. Kenichi rallies his forces, such as they are, and prepares to lead a search and hopefully raid on the shimolbi camp. He also manages to put his personal feelings aside and invite Usagi along. Usagi may have just made him look bad by having to save his son for him and also being the one to figure out where the moles are based out of, but he also proved himself too useful to not use, and Kenichi is still pragmatic above all else.

Skip ahead a little bit to the villagers ascending the mountain, looking for aboveground signs of mole tunneling. As he climbs the familiar slope, Usagi has another reminiscence, this time to his childhood rather than his teens.

Babby Usagi and Babby Kenichi are out on the mountainside mushroom-picking. Meanspiritedly trying to outcompete each other at various petty little things. Eventually Usagi tells Kenichi that he's going to go catch a baby dinofrog (apparently they're called tokage) and keep it as a pet, prompting Kenichi to furiously declare that he's going to catch it first. I'm not sure, the visuals are a little unclear, but I think Kenichi might have also punched Usagi in the head to give himself a head start. Anyway, he chases the hokageling into a cave, but then gets promptly chased out of said cave by its older packmates.

After evading the angry reptiles, Kenichi accuses Usagi of tricking him into chasing the baby tokage into the cave. Which is a pretty stupid accusation, considering that it wasn't even running toward the cave yet before the boys started chasing it. And like...even if Usagi somehow had masterminded that, Kenichi punching him over (if that is what happened earlier) sort of made him retroactively deserve it.

We do see Usagi laughing as Kenichi chases him, which might mean that he (somehow) planned that, but is more likely just him thinking it's funny that it happened. That ends the flashback, and also puts Usagi in mind of that cave near their current location.

Usagi reminds Kenichi of that cave, and snidely insinuates that he might be having trouble thinking past his lizard trauma if he's forgotten it. Lol, kind of a dick move to bring that up Usagi, but I can't say Kenichi hasn't given you ample provocation since you returned.

I wonder why they aren't considering the possibility that the moles are just living in an underground warren that they excavated all on their own? Maybe they just wouldn't have enough air in that type of structure, at least without leaving some other obvious openings. Also, cooking and staying warm would be a problem with that. So yeah, cave makes more sense.

They go in and find the missing supplies. However, the ninjas expected their arrival, and were waiting just under the floor to burst out and surround the intruders. This cave has a soft earth floor, apparently? Unusual. The moles have the advantage to begin with, but then one of them happens to kill the villager holding the lantern and sets the straw matts on fire. That ends up being the worst mistake our subterranean friend could have possibly made.

They're able to route the moles once they've been blinded by the sudden flames. It isn't THAT easy, though. Usagi and Kenichi both save each other from getting ninja'd in the back at least once. So, that's nice. After the moles are all dead or fled, it's a frantic rush to get the parcels out of the cave and contain the fire before the food all gets burned.

Heh, looks like there are still a few tokages around. The ninjas and/or weather probably chased most of them off, but there's still at least one.

They end up saving, if not all of it, then at least enough of the food to keep the village alive through the winter. The next morning, Usagi and Mariko go on a walk to the graveyard where Usagi's father is buried. Usagi will be leaving the next day; Kenichi isn't being such an over-the-top prick to him now, but Usagi still feels like it would be best if he didn't spent too much longer in town. As they walk, Mariko observes that Usagi is much grimmer now than he used to be. She hasn't seen him smile once since his return, whereas he was all smiles and jests before he went off to war. After visiting the grave, Usagi gives her a brief one, just for her.

Then, on the way back to the village, he starts asking her the questions.

Usagi asks her if she's ever thought about leaving Kenichi. Erm...I don't think he's actually serious about this. More just asking for the sake of a retrospective "what if" musing. It's not like his own lifestyle would be conducive to this, after all, and even in his worst moments Usagi doesn't seem like someone who would do that to Jotaro. Still, she takes understandable offense to this, and tells him that she could no more do that than Usagi could betray a sworn liege lord. She has her own Bushido, just like he does. He tells her that she's a better samurai than him. What he means by that, I'm not sure. Maybe just that she'd never even raise topics like this in conversation, unlike him.

As they wander on back to town, they pass a tree that they share some memories regarding.

The two laugh about how silly they were, back then. Then they return to the house. Usagi to the guestroom. Mariko to the master bedroom. They do their evening routines, with the addition of pulling some mementos out of the bottoms of their pack/cabinet and looking at them wistfully before turning in.

Would they have been better off together than either of them are now? I'm not sure. And, unfortunately, part of the reason I'm not sure is because we only ever got a couple of fluffy, flirty little snapshots of their relationship, and absolutely nothing about how she fell in with Kenichi. That's the end of the story though, so I guess what we see is what we get at least as far as judging this episode goes.


This story needed more meat on its bones. Both in flashbacks (a more comprehensive understanding of how Usagi, Mariko, and Kenichi grew together and apart before Usagi left) and in the denouement (I feel like the story is sorely missing a scene between Kenichi and Usagi at the end, or even one with Kenichi and his family, musing about how things might have come full circle now in terms of his and Usagi's father's actions.

Kenichi seems like he's meant to be the bridge that connects the "Usagi's backstory" thread with the "evil mole ninjas" thread. He didn't get enough material to make that bridge work, at least for me.

This wasn't a bad story, but it could have been a lot better than it is.