I actually wrote these posts a while ago, but hadn’t finished them, mostly back in 2015. My thoughts have changed somewhat but I still wanted to publish these. I’ve scheduled one a week until the end! You can catch up on the older posts here.

Ch. 28 Summary: Shiina’s friend Hiroko and Akira are both bullied. Akira tries to get a boy who likes her at school to impregnate her. Hiroko uses her dragon child to murder her parents and bullies, then takes Shiina’s father hostage in an apparent attempt to get Shiina to kill her. Akira stabs her father.

This chapter takes up an entire volume. And it is some nasty, nasty stuff. Downright brutal. The earlier chapters pale in comparison. It was this chapter when I completely fell in love with the series the first time I read it.

Two Paths to Darkness

I believe that this chapter is meant to establish a contrast between Hiroko and Akira. The scene where the two are sitting in front of Shiina’s doorstep waiting for her to come home stood out in particular:

Both are bullied and alone.

As Akira says, “Me too.”

But they comfort themselves with different explanations for their plights. Akira blames herself. Hiroko blames the outside world.

To illustrate, environment is like the shadow, and life, the body. Without the body, no shadow can exist, and without life, no environment. In the same way, life is shaped by its environment. — Nichiren

The self and the world are not as independent as the children think.  It is the self that shapes the world, and the world that shapes the self. For Akira, much of the fault is indeed her own, but it’s not as if the rest of the world is innocent. Likewise, for Hiroko, obviously her bullies bear much of the blame. But she is unable to ask Shiina, her teachers or her parents for help. Instead, she directs some of her anger towards the people who are trying to help her.

Going back to the Nichiren quote, it’s interesting how he describes the world as a shadow, particularly when we’re reading a manga about “shadow dragons”. We could describe the dragons similarly: without the life of their owner, no shadow can exist. But the bearer is also shaped by their shadow… and the dragons are perhaps representative of the world itself, which is both a shadow and a corpse. (Remind me to get back to this in later chapters.)

Back to Hiroko and Akira. Shiina, through her gift of radical hospitality, befriends each of them and offers a bright point in their lives. She tries to help both of them. She visits Akira. She keeps asking Hiroko if anything is wrong. And she isn’t the only one who tries to help them. Both of them have parents who love them and try to do what’s best for them (even if, in Hiroko’s case, these parents are horribly misguided). Shiina’s dad and her neighbor try to help too. And Hiroko and Akira attempt to offer one another the little comfort they are able to.

Sadly, none of this is enough. Hiroko’s bullying continues, as Shiina remains unaware. Hiroko finally explodes when her father calls Shiina’s in an attempt to prevent Hiroko from seeing Shiina again, threatening to remove the one bright point in her life. Tragically, what Hiroko remains unaware of is that Shiina’s father refuses the request. So she goes on a murderous rampage, brutally killing her parents, her bullies, and finally threatening to kill Shiina’s father.

We have some beautiful imagery in this scene. Hiroko’s punch is welcomed with open arms by Shiina, who still accepts her friend even after all that she has done.

But when Hiroko threatens to kill Shiina’s father with her dragon child, Shiina becomes the aggressor. I was reading the Wikipedia article on Hiroko for some reason (bad idea, I know) and there it’s written that Hiroko wants to kill Shiina’s father because he’s an obstacle to Hiroko’s own friendship with Shiina. I don’t think this is correct. I suspect that Hiroko never intended to kill Shiina’s father. There’s a reason Hiroko did all of this while Shiina was watching: Hiroko wanted Shiina to kill her, now that she had decided to stop enduring. She wanted to be killed by the hands of the person she loved most.

While Hiroko blames the external world and decides to stop trying and destroy the world, along with herself, which the world shadows, Akira decides to change the internal world which she despises. By becoming pregnant, of course. (Like I said, this chapter is some fucked up shit.)

The boy chickens out at the last minute. When her plan to get pregnant fails, Akira murders her father.

Further Thoughts

There’s so much communicated just in the characters’ facial expressions. Especially the eyes. In this one, we see the two other girls’ looking uneasy and guilty. Shiina is completely oblivious. Hiroko looks like she wants to join them but is afraid.

And here we have someone who’s totally smitten.

This one’s my favorite though. Shiina has her usual cheerful exprssion. Hiroko looks like it’s the first time she’s smiled in a while. And Akira looks like “what the hell is going on”.

Here, we can see Hiroko’s pain and determination simultaneously. There’s so much Kitoh is able to communicate with just the face. Which, somehow, I feel is actually unusual for manga. It tends to be quite heavy on dialogue, especially when it comes to conveying emotions. Or maybe I just tend to read bad manga, I’m not sure.

Finally, here we have the “holy shit” eyes.

I didn’t get much into the bully earlier. But she may be the most fucked up part of this fucked up chapter. She forces Hiroko to eat worms and attempts to stick a test tube up her vagina. She’s having sex with that boy when she’s probably 12 years old. Oh, and that boy is her brother. (This detail was, understandably, left out of the official English translation.)

And the boy was messed up, but he didn’t deserve this. I mean Jesus. Nobody deserves that. The boy even told the bully to ease off on Hiroko.

It’s not like even the bully deserves this. Sure, what she did was awful, but…

Hence the title: “My Eyes are the Eyes of a Victim, My Hands are the Hands of a Perpetrator.” We have Hiroko’s hands bound, and only the claws of her dragon child remain. And Hiroko does indeed go from victim to perpetrator. The same can be said of Akira. And Hiroko’s bully. When a 12 year old girl is sleeping with her brother, something has gone dreadfully wrong.