Usagi Yojimbo #16-18: "The Tower," "A Mother's Love," and "Return of the Blind Swordspig"

More Usagi Yojimbo. I'll cover another trio of short stories today, this time sharing a...hmm. Well, two of them share a darker tone. The third is extremely silly, but - perhaps just owing to its proximity with the others, but perhaps not - it gave me the same sort of dismal, misanthropic flavor even in its goofier package.


So, "The Tower," aka "In Which Usagi Gets a Pet Saurofrog." This one uses a very strange and surreal permutation of the "cat in a tree" cliche. Our story starts with a saurofrog nosing around in a village marketplace, as they're wont to do, and managing to steal some meat from a restaurant. The owner, well. Between this and the fact that we have another Blind Swordspig episode coming up, I'm starting to wonder if "porcine" is just Sakai's visual coding for "has serious anger management difficulties."

He's committed enough to this to stand guard over the foot of the tower for as long as it takes the animal to either get blown off by the winter winds, or freeze to death. You'd think the business he loses in the meantime would be worth more than the food this one little stray cat-analogue has been stealing, but I guess not. As this is going on, Usagi wanders through the marketplace and decides to climb up there and rescue the shivering saurofrog. And this absolute lunatic of a snackbar-guy tries to threaten the obvious armed and experienced samurai into staying back.

When Usagi pushes him out of the way, raegpig decides to kill him along with the reptile. He can't climb as fast as Usagi though, so instead he opts to arrange for a slower demise and also sabotage the village watchtower. Using an axe he snatches from a random woodcutter without asking.

Dude is lucky Usagi was barely paying attention to him.​

For some reason, Usagi is very invested in the welfare of this one specific dinofrog. He spends his time on the tower trying to win its trust so that he can keep it warm and feed it. And rejects plans for getting down that don't also account for the dinofrog. Even after it starts snowing and he's shivering as well.

Eventually, Usagi accidentally knocks enough snow and spills enough of his warm tea off of the tower onto the lunatic restaurant pig - who assumes it was intentional - for the latter to lose his mind completely and try chopping down the tower like a tree. Usagi and his new pet are able to jump off onto a nearby rooftop mid-fall, and the tower lands on the guy's own restaurant.

Oh hey I think that's the same monkey woodcutter who hatched Godzilla last time.​

So yeah, Usagi has a saurofrog now. He names it Spot.

This one was obviously another joke episode, what with Usagi himself being almost as irrationally obsessed with the lizard as the bad guy was, but like...I just can't get that restaurant guy out of my mind. He's a one-dimensional comic caricature (like seriously, there's no way he'd have even survived this long threatening ronins with his cleaver at the drop of a hat), but at the same time I just can't not see him as a person suffering from serious mental health issues who needs help instead of karmic punishment.


Like I said in the intro, this is at least partly being colored than the story that comes right after it. A decidedly not comedic episode that raises the question of what it really means to play the heel-of-the-week in a samurai serial.


"A Mother's Love" starts with an old lady sharing her picnic lunch with Usagi, and Usagi helping her back home afterward.

She's reluctant to let him see her home, but he insists, and she relents. When they get there, they see some thugs brutally shaking down townsfolk who owe money to the boss. One gets the impression that most of the town owes money to "the boss." The old lady seems to know the thug by name, and him hers, but while he's moderately respectful toward her he ignores her demand for him to stop beating people up. Also, he almost kills Usagi's pet dinofrog before Usagi threatens him not to, just to make sure we know he's a bad guy. Once the legbreaker moves on, the old lady tries to help the victims, and, well:

Earlier, she said she had walked to that shrine to pray for her son. It is now revealed that she was praying for her son to stop being a such a gallantly galloping douchebag.

The story here is that the woman's late husband was a successful merchant who would have been an outright wealthy one if he wasn't so generous and forgiving with his moneylending. He died well liked by all the townsfolk, but things have changed since their son Atsuo took over the family business. Atsuo has made loan-sharking their primary source of income, and unlike his late father he is absolutely brutal with interest and enforcement. He's also got the local government bribed into his corner, so he functionally runs this town and uses it mostly as something to wring profit out of.

Atsuo and his mother still live together, but their relationship at this point is, well.

You'd need an entire megachurch babbling in tongues at once to have any hope of praying this case of douchebaggery away.

Also, he's instantly unfriendly-bordering-on-hostile to Usagi specifically. In a way that seems disproportionate to "had a spat that didn't actually come to blows or halt operations with one of my goons a little while ago."

...

This, to me, is a flaw of the story. You'd think a guy like Atsuo who runs his business largely via hired thug would be happy that a mysterious ronin is being cheerfully introduced to him by a family member, right? Even if he doesn't have any openings right now, it pays to know skilled replacements in case you need them later. It's not like most samurai - either historically or in the world of this comic - are anywhere near as principled as Usagi, and ronin in particular are rightly or wrongly regarded as being sketchier than landed knights.

But, we have limited page space to work with and we need to make absolute sure that the reader hates this guy, so he's just going to be a dick to the protagonist for no readily apparent reason. Even though it would be both more logical and establish his type of villainy better if he greeted Usagi with shallow charm that obviously only exists for people with katanas.

I feel like this is sort of a recurring thing with the way Usagi Yojimbo handles its antagonists, with this story just being a more obvious example. I'm pretty sure this isn't just one of those genre things that come with the territory (I know I've seen 20th century pop-samurai stuff with savvier, more naturalistic baddies), and limited page space only accounts for part of it.

...

Anyway, Atsuo's mom talks him into putting Usagi up for the night even if doing so gets her slapped. Usagi even manages to shame him into apologizing to her via his superior staring contest skills, but it clearly won't last beyond the next few sentences.

I'm impressed with Sakai's dedication on this page. He could have gotten away with just copy/pasting the same drawing of Usagi's face five times, but he chose not to. The minute differences in the shading lines, fur edges, etc make it clear that Usagi IS still standing in the room with the other characters, and things like the shifting firelight and the movements of his own breath ARE acting on his body even though he's holding still. At least five times the work (more than that, on account of how much effort keeping them *almost* identical must have been) just for that little bit of extra visual fidelity.

The next morning, as he gets ready to leave, Atsuo's mother starts crying. She remembers what Atsuo was like as a kitten. She remembers him smiling up at her, hugging her back when she hugged him, falling asleep to the lullabies she sang him. This isn't how she and her husband raised him to be. He WASN'T this, until he was. And now, just hearing a man of around the same age refer to her with the "mother" honorific that Atsuo himself barely uses for her anymore makes her sob.

In a fit of shame and sadness, she tells Usagi that he should kill her son and hopefully let her salvage what's left of the town and her relationship with its people. Usagi tells her that she clearly isn't in her right mind, and that he therefore won't judge her for proposing that provided she drops the subject. Which she does. He then, rather naively, lets her wheedle him into staying for another night, and believes her when she promises she'll get her son to allow it and it won't lead to trouble.

I guess he's been this gullible before, in one or two earlier stories, so I suppose it's in character.

Later that night, Atsuo's thugs proactively go looking for Usagi to kill him, without explanation. He's forced to kill them first. The one guy who tried to kill Spot earlier makes a point of grabbing him again, and the dinofrog proves itself a worthy pet for Usagi when it scores a human (well, "human." you know what I mean) kill.

Not bad, for an animal that's regarded in-universe as the equivalent of a feral cat for us.

Usagi enters the house, calling for the (weirdly, still unnamed) old woman and demanding to know if Atsuo or his minions have harmed her. But no. No living minions left in the house, after Usagi cut down the guys in the entrance. No Atsuo either. Just his mother, standing over a bloody knife and a corpse.

While his men were all out hunting for Usagi, she lured her son into a false sense of security and then stabbed him in the heart.

She begs him to kill her now too. She had intended to turn the knife on herself after killing Atsuo, but she lacked the nerve to do it. She asks him to let her die and let the gods judge her as they will.

He refuses. As he walks out of the house, the background art emphasizes the corpses of the hired goons as he whispers about how he, too, hopes the gods will be merciful. The ambiguity of who's eventual judgment he's referring to seems very, very deliberate. Behind him, the old woman cradles her son's corpse, and sings it the same lullaby that she sang to her baby long ago.

The big, soulful howl by Spot on the last panel is counterproductively cheesy, but not enough to completely ruin the tone.

Partly, but not completely.


I don't know if this story was trying to be a meta-commentary on its own genre, but I can't help but read it as one.

Like a lot of other schlocky adventure genres, the samurai series is very liberal with its human-on-human (or, well, "human") lethal violence. You're expected to suspend your disbelief and just roll with this version of feudal Japan being this thick with bandits who value their own lives this little. They might have some verisimilitude, but really they're here to be evil props for the hero to do righteous, spectacular violence to.

But...what if these inexplicable evil caricatures *aren't* just being spawned by the game engine whenever you reload the area? What if they have parents? What if the guy whose personality consists entirely of ticking boxes on the bad-guy-of-the-week Bingo card and immediately goes out of his way to antagonize the protagonist for no apparent reason did, somehow, have a normal childhood behind him? How does an innocent little boy who loves his mother grow up to be a two dimensional prop in someone else's hack-and-slash adventure, while the mother in question can only watch in mystified horror? Are all of the corpses Usagi left outside the house much like Atsuo's, with loving, devoted parents behind them who did everything right only for their universe to decide it needed more mooks to throw at Usagi? Which souls, and how many souls, does Usagi think are in need of divine mercy?

But then, on the other hand, I've read testimonies from the parents of incels, neonazis, cartoonishly and ideologically evil people like that. A lot of them sound a lot like Atsuo's mother in this comic. We only have their own blinkered perspectives to go on, just like we only have her own blinkered perspective here, but...are they unreliable narrators like I've always assumed, or can that really just happen to a kid for no apparent reason regardless of how you raise them?

Maybe this isn't a meta-commentary at all? Maybe this is just true to life?

I don't know. Maybe I don't want to know.

I feel like this story might have been a little excessively misanthropic in some ways. Especially considering the way it reflects on the other stories in its proximity, particularly the "Tower" one that Usagi still has a living reminder of in the form of Spot.

On the other hand, unlike the basic popcorn entertainment value of most UY episodes (it's well written and very well drawn popcorn entertainment, but still popcorn entertainment), "A Mother's Love" actually made me stop and think about something. So, maybe that really makes it the best of the bunch?


Last of this set is "Return of the Blind Swordspig." I didn't actually intend to cover a complete story-arc when I decided I'd fit these three episodes into this post, but by total coincidence it worked out that way. You'll see what I mean in a second.

We open on the wooden-snouted swordswine in question as he wanders across the countryside, singing to himself in his usual happy, well-adjusted way.

He's great. Let's all give him a big hand, ladies and gentlemen.

As he angries his way through the farmland, a startled frogosaur alerts him to the presence of the latest gang of bounty hunters waiting to ambush the notorious "Blind Ino." After he flips his shit and slashes the hunters to ribbons, Ino sniffs out the dinofrog and is surprised at how friendly it turns out to be. Almost like it's used to being someone's pet. There's a great moment where Ino wonders if maybe he's found a companion who won't end up hurting him after all, and maybe this saurofrog will be a respite from solitude. He starts singing about how much he loves it, until it slips away into the fields again, and without skipping a beat he switches to cursing it out and ranting about how he never actually liked it anyway before going back to his first song.

What a great reintroduction for this character, really. It hits all of Ino's major beats in just a couple short pages, both explaining his deal to new readers and reminding old readers of all the important bits that they might have forgotten. And he carries this little mini-story as an antiheroic protagonist pretty dang well even without the switch to Usagi's POV on the next page.

Sounds like Usagi is starting to tire of the ronin roaming, but only willing to project that onto his murder-frogosaur so far. Well, regardless! Not long after Usagi departs the inn, Ino arrives at it. He thought he smelled someone or something familiar on that dinofrog before, but it's not until he gets a fresher whiff of it off of Usagi's old table and chair that he can put his finger on it. Cue quest for revenge!

Spot seems to like both of them well enough, because when Ino approaches the old shrine the dinofrog runs out to greet him again. Alerting Usagi to the newcomer's presence just as he alerted Ino to the bounty hunters' in the process.

And god, Ino really is the best member of Usagi's rogues gallery. Just look at this "we meet again" exchange:

He's still that jovial, self-deprecatingly witty, likable masseur who Usagi befriended for a little while last time. His murderous temper and propensity for grudges exist alongside that, rather than subsuming it. Even while confronting the object of a deadly vengeance quest, he can still let parts of it show.

Usagi tries talking Ino down, but it's no more use this time than it was last time. Ino manages to gain entrance to the shrine before the clash of blades begins, and he cleverly puts out the only lightsource and puts himself between Usagi and the door. This time, he'll be the one with the sensory advantage.

Sakai has gotten much better at handling fight scenes in the darkness since the Mutant General Toda battle. Mostly by biting the bullet and lightly shading the whole scene while having the characters' words and actions explain to the reader that it's meant to be pitch-black. Same thing movies usually do. Anyway, sure enough, Usagi cannot out-blindfight a blind man. He gets cut, gets disarmed, and then almost gets impaled before Spot puts himself between Ino's sword and Usagis body.

Ragemonster though he is, Ino can't quite bring himself to kill the friendly dinofrog just because it happens to be in his way. He does owe that animal his own life, after all. So, he tells Usagi he'll be walking away now, and that Usagi should take care not to cross his path again and also be very grateful to that frogosaur.

Usagi, for his part, decides to send Spot away to join Ino. Ino, after all, is theoretically looking for a place to settle down and live a more dinofrog-comfortable life, while Usagi isn't ready to just yet. And also, Usagi hopes, having a pet might help Ino become a little bit less miserable and therefore a little less murderous.

On one hand, Ino going back to singing the happy friendship song when Spot rejoins him is telegraphing a good end. On the other hand, given how he's seen Ino turn from friendly to vicious on a dime, you'd think Usagi would be slightly more reluctant to leave him alone with Spot. Usagi went to great lengths to keep that dinofrog safe two stories ago, and this seems awfully careless in light of that. Like, I can see Usagi betting the life of a random froglizard against a chance of helping Ino and the people around him a bit, but he's invested in this particular froglizard. Yeah, I dunno.


So, that's Usagi and Spot. I was starting to wonder if maybe these stories are all supposed to be in chronological order after all, even though that doesn't seem to add up, if Usagi will persistently have Spot after "The Tower." Getting rid of him two stories later lets the author preserve the timeline ambiguity.

Next time, three more UY shorts, leading up to the next major story "The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy."