This past June, I was at a panel discussion on fantasy literature and worldbuilding and was surprised when an audience member asked what the panelists thought about worldbuilding in manga series. In my experience, most people keep discussions of novels and manga separate, but it seems like the two mediums are overlapping more in people’s heads.
With that in mind, I thought an entry in the Occult Reading List touching on manga series would be interesting: Vagabond is my favorite manga series, and Berserk is one I’ve heard about for a long time, but just recently sat down to read.
For those who aren’t familiar, here’s a pair of quick summaries:
Vagabond is about Miyamoto Musashi, a wandering swordsman in the Sengoku/Edo period who seeks to master swordsmanship and become ‘invincible’. It’s inspired by Eiji Yoshikawa’s novel Musashi.
Berserk is about Guts, a wandering swordsman traveling a fantasy realm in a quest of revenge against his former comrade Griffith, who has ascended to god-like status by betraying and cursing Guts.
Although the series have vastly different art styles and tones, at heart, they’re both about a solitary young man who’s chosen a life of seemingly never-ending violence and bloodshed. Despite the exciting fight scenes, the real conflict for both Musashi and Guts is internal: they’ve trained themselves to be ‘strong’ and self-reliant, but they constantly struggle with their own pain, loneliness, and self-doubt.
Weakness is something both protagonists fear—Guts would rather die than survive as a weakling, and Musashi sees the path to invincibility as a way to exorcise his own weakness. This is an interesting contrast to a lot of stories, manga and otherwise, where the protagonist leads an ensemble cast and accepts, by default, that their strength comes from their friends.
This level of subversion may be pretty basic, but it touches on a deeper question: what is our relationship to others, as human beings, and what should the relationship be between a ‘hero’ and others?
Vagabond: Zen and the Path of the Bodhisattva
Stories like Vagabond and Berserk portray the path of the outcast, the rebel, and the loner. As mentioned before, these are stories of pain and anguish, but the loneliness of the path gives their protagonists the space to reflect on themselves. Instead of wrapping up their sense of identity with the roles they play for others ( as fathers, husbands, sons, etc), they are allowed to be alone with themselves and discover what, if anything, lies at the heart of their being.
What’s especially interesting is that, at least in the case of Musashi, he seems to arrive at the conclusion that keeping himself cut off from others impoverishes his life. Although he is ‘free’ and independent, he chooses to make himself part of the wider community of humanity. This is especially meaningful, I think, because of Vagabond’s connection to Zen: the monk Takuan is a recurring character in the manga, and Musashi himself approaches the paradoxes of Zen through the lens of swordsmanship.
According to some conceptions of Zen I’ve heard, the path of a bodhisattva, a heroic type of enlightened person, usually involves traveling to the peaks of mountains—a metaphor for undergoing trials, isolation, and reflection—in order to find enlightenment. But instead of staying in the ‘mountains’, they return to the world of everyday life, the ‘villages and towns’, and use their wisdom to improve the world.
The bodhisattva is one blueprint for what it means to be a hero, and it’s one that resonates with me a lot. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth portrays a similar, circular path for a hero, as well as a similar, transformative change in the ‘hero’, and although Campbell’s monomyth has its own issues, the way he portrays the ‘return’ to the world sticks out to me:
The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the [ups and downs] of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why [share] the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before [others].
I think this, too, is a challenge for a hero—finding a way to continue living in a world that seems simple, even mundane, and still see the wonder in it.
Hope in the Face of Never-Ending Darkness
I’ll admit that getting through the first volume of Berserk was tough. The combination of the grimdark atmosphere and the light-hearted comedy from Puck (Guts’ unwanted elf companion) really grated on me. Similarly, Guts’ insistence on being a stereotypical, edgy anti-hero and the general moral bankruptcy of every character encountered made me wonder how something this one-note could have such an enduring fanbase.
However, once Griffith is introduced, the manga begins to reveal that all this wallowing in hatred, despair, and bloodshed has a purpose.
I’ve only gotten to Volume 5 of Berserk, but one theme has become clear so far: the struggle to retain one’s hope and humanity in the face of a world that seems utterly corrupt, cruel, and hateful. Going into this series, I had heard that there was going to be a lot of disturbing, graphic content, and Berserk didn’t disappoint: as an infant, Guts is found squirming in the mud and afterbirth of his dead mother (who has been hanged to death from a tree). As a child, he fights in bloody battles as part of a mercenary company, gets relentlessly abused by his adoptive father Gambino, and then is raped after Gambino ‘sells’ him to a comrade for a night.
What’s more, Guts is treated from the beginning as a bad omen, causing him to be mistrusted and abused by the adults around him. He tries to prove he’s worthy of love and acceptance by being useful to Gambino, which means learning to be a warrior, and soon he uses his new skills to hurt and kill the people who abuse or threaten him. This culminates in one scene where he kills Gambino after the latter tries to murder him. However, this only reinforces the hatred and mistrust of the rest of the mercenary band, which chases him away.
All of this adds up to a young Guts who refuses to trust others. All he wants to do is fight on the battlefield and die in combat so he can put an end to his horrible life. Like a wounded animal, his first instinct is to treat every person, friendly or otherwise, as a threat.
But then something changes. Guts joins the mercenary group called the Band of the Hawk and grudgingly connects with Griffith, the leader. Over the course of several battles, he finds a semblance of belonging, friendship, and connection. Guts even tells one comrade, Casca, that he’s changed—he’s not the ‘mad dog’ he used to be.
But, as this is all a flashback, the reader knows how this turns out: Griffith betrays Guts in the worst, most agonizing way possible, leaving Guts a lonely, hate-filled, misanthropic killer once again. The question on my mind while I read Berserk is whether Guts will retain his humanity or give it all up in order to get revenge.
I’m a strong believer that protagonists need to be pushed to their limits, and that being a hero requires a leap of faith: to be a hero, one has to choose to act without the guarantee that they will receive a reward or even make a difference. In Berserk, I think it’s the latter prospect, that any good act will be a meaningless gesture, that drives the manga’s persistent sense of hopelessness and existential dread, and that sense of despair seems to be Guts’ real enemy.
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