Mujirushi: The Sign of Dreams
Three years. That’s how long it’s been since the last volume of “Master Keaton” was published in the U.S. and the last time anything from Naoki Urasawa hit these shores as well. After “Monster” and “20th Century Boys” established him as one of the most acclaimed mangaka around, you’d think we’d have received something new from him sooner than this. Yet “Billy Bat,” the series he did after “20th Century Boys” has yet to be picked up, and there’s no word as to whether or not his current series, “Asadora,” will find its way out here. So we should be grateful that we’re getting this one-volume story from him at all. Even though it left me wanting it to be better than it actually was.
Kamoda is a man who has fallen on some very hard times. After an attempt to dodge his taxes goes awry, his wife leaves him and then he falls further into debt after a plan to manufacture rubber masks of current U.S. President Beverly Duncan fails to pan out. It isn’t until he spots a crow with a piece of paper wrapped around its leg that his luck starts to turn around. He follows the crow and the symbol on the paper to the France Research Institute where he and his daughter, Kasumi, meet a man who is eccentric as he is buck-toothed. This man has a plan to get Kamoda back on his feet. All he has to do is perpetrate a little art forgery and theft at the Louvre.
Urasawa’s greatest strength as an author is the complete confidence he displays when telling a story. “Mujirushi” throws out so many disparate elements at its start that it might seem like unfocused chaos. As if the mangaka was throwing stuff at a wall to see what would stick. Except that he does have a plan for all of these things, and it’s his focus on Kamoda and Kasumi that allows him to push through all of this and get you invested in the narrative.
It’s easy to sympathize with characters that are down on their luck, and to understand why Kamoda would be willing to go along with this very suspicious individual. Urasawa uses that sympathy to draw you into an oddball plot where art theft is its most grounded aspect. That everything ultimately comes together in the end shouldn’t surprise anyone as that’s what happens when the story is as well-planned-out as this one is. It all leads to a result that’s both expected and satisfying.
More of the former than the latter, however. Urasawa, and his co-writer Takashi Nagasaki, did this on a regular basis over the course of “20th Century Boys” 22-volume run. One of the advantages of having so much time and space to plan these kinds of things is that you can hide what you’re setting up a whole lot better. A reader won’t be able to remember every little detail from a series of that length, so they can be surprised twice: Once when the reveal is sprung, and again when re-reading the story when they see how it was set up.
What I’m getting at here is that “Mujirushi” doesn’t hold much surprise for readers who go in expecting to find one. They’ll notice the oddball elements of the plot at the start, like the president and the many rubber masks of her, and while they may not be able to guess how they’ll figure into the overall plot, they’ll know to expect that these things will be relevant down the line. The same goes for the true nature of the buck-toothed eccentric: Urasawa plays up his untrustworthiness to such an extent that you know there’s some kind of twist here. Even if the characters are likable, they never got me to drop my guard or disengage my anticipation enough so that I was as properly surprised as the mangaka wanted me to be.
Not helping matters are a couple of storytelling decisions that actively annoyed me throughout the story’s length. The first is purely artistic as Urasawa’s design for the buck-toothed eccentric winds up being a bridge too far for his style to cross. Said eccentric is actually a character from another famous manga and anime series (that I have no familiarity with), and one of his distinctive features is his comically oversized buck teeth.
Urasawa has a very grounded style that, while not especially flashy, is perfectly suited for the kinds of stories he wants to tell. He’s delivered enough goofy characters over the years to show that he’s a decent caricaturist as well. Except that this character’s buck teeth clash against all of this. They make him look deformed rather than eccentric, something that is brought into stark relief when we finally see his “counterpart” at the end of the volume.
The other problem has to do with the subject of the rubber masks that Kamoda makes. You see, President Beverly Duncan is a very obvious gender-swapped version of Trump. That’s annoying in and of itself, and that’s even before you consider her utterly hideous character design. What pushes it over the edge into infuriating is the way in which she’s dealt with by the end of the story. These last four years have made it clear that if something like this were revealed, Trump would find a way to brush it off without any consequence. What makes this scandal any different? Urasawa could’ve contextualized this better by having a character go, “Boy are we lucky President Duncan is a woman and far likely to be disgraced by this kind of thing than men are, and that she toned down her rhetoric and lost the support of her base.” I know, it’s thoroughly on-the-nose and yet it still sounds better than what we got in the story itself.
This all leaves “Mujirushi” being far from the best work that I’ve read from Urasawa. While not a terrible story, it’s best enjoyed by going into it with lowered or no expectations. To that end, I can see people who haven’t read anything from the mangaka enjoying this more than those who have. It would’ve been nice of Viz to put some ads for “Monster” or “20th Century Boys” at the end of this collection, just to let those readers know there are better stories than this out there waiting for them. As for me, after three years of waiting I was hoping for a better reminder of Urasawa’s talent than this. May we get one sooner rather than later.