It’s even harder to describe what makes a person like the guy. Downright difficult.

But I’m gonna try. He deserves it.

Um, heads up: I’m gonna enlist the help of quotes.

(Cowboy Bebop, also the mindblowing work of Shinichiro Watanabe. I saw Bebop shortly before I saw Champloo, and somehow a lot of my understanding of Mugen comes from it.)

There’s the little things, I guess. How he fights. How he wears the most ridiculous outfit ever. How he makes his sumo beetle drag a rock on a string, how Momo jumps on his face, how he grinned on the roof after painting all over it, how he understood Okuru just by looking at him, how he can care so much while not caring at all. How he fought that one-eyed man, and he seems the kind to win on luck but he’d planned it all out—impossible, unbelievable, true—and it was a beautiful battle. How he nicks money off the altar, how he defeats a man by mimicking his motions, how he didn’t (couldn’t) kill Kohza, how he can’t read and learns to in a day (let it not be said that he’s unintelligent), how he tried on Jin’s glasses that one time, how he loved Sara and she died. Those are Mugen.

Then there are the things you really can’t explain simply, because whatever you say, it feels like you’re —missing something. There’s a strange depth to him that really is hard to understand but that makes him who he is, and it’s so elusive that I can’t really ever—

—I thought the moment he flicked the whirligig and ducked through the door, right in the first episode, that there was something there. Not that you could tell what it was, of course.

You go on to see that Mugen is kind of, well, unique. In a somewhat insane manner. He’s a wanderer, he’s a miscreant, he’s ruthless, he’s almost fatalistically accepting of death. And he has no morals, no shame, no sense of fear or mercy, he loves the blood and the dance of the fight. He’s kind of like a wild animal. You can admire him at that point for the sheer crazy, but you can’t quite get him.

And then you go on, and you realize things about him. He doesn’t stop to think—he thinks on his feet, makes it up as he goes. He refuses to follow rules, but there’s a moral code somewhere in there that he himself doesn’t know about. He doesn’t care about many people unless he bitches about them and at them. He doesn’t belong anywhere. And, somewhere in his past, he figured that when hell was already a step away and there was no reason to live anyways, there was no reason to fear.

And then you go on, and he realizes things about himself.

The last couple of episodes. He fights three times in them. (That’s how it goes, a real swordsman can say everything with his swordwork? etc.) They’re different from the rest of his fights, if I’m right.

Kariya, I remember, was the first fight he ever ran from.

The brother on the boat was the first real fight I remember that he wanted to end—he purposely took a blow so that it would end faster. (It was also the only fight I remember that he did not smile in. Not once.)

And the last fight, the one-eyed man, was the only fight he’d ever surrendered in.

It means a lot, when a person like Mugen puts his sword down.

I think the point of Mugen is change. That’s the kind of story his is.

See, I still remember him showing up at the church, at the end. Mugen terrifies me in that scene. Mugen, with this look on his face—it isn’t a smile, but it isn’t quite fury, it isn’t really anything at all, and that’s the worst part about this all because Mugen doesn’t look like that. Mugen shouldn’t look like that. Mugen is an idiot, the boy never knows what he’s doing and he never thinks about things enough, but then you realize how much stupidly worse it somehow is to see him there and realize that for once he knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s doing it anyway.

For once, he knows exactly where he’s going. He’s a wanderer, and he’s a runner, and he’s never been headed anywhere in particular, and he’s never had a purpose in life except to try and forget that he had nowhere to go. Now he knows what he’s doing, and you can tell he doesn’t care what happens afterwards. Because he’s never really had a past he cared for and now he’s got very little to lose, but he has seen just enough of life to begin thinking that, maybe, some things are worth losing everything for.

And he fought, and he fought wildly but he did not fight recklessly, did not fight to win, did not fight to die— he fought because there was something he needed to do, something he needed to live for, and he didn’t smile—

(Don’t the people say that you are only truly alive when you have something that you would give up your life for?)

And he stands there, with the ocean behind him stretching on into infinity (infinite, that’s what it is), and his arms are at his sides and his hair is dripping saltwater and blood pooling at his feet, and he just stands there looking so solitary and he won’t move, he has no sword and he won’t fight, he gave that up.

Obokuri Eeumi is a very beautiful song.

There’s something about how a series like Samurai Champloo, outwardly blatantly so silly and stylish, blood and breakdancing, bad jokes about porn, burning pot fields, etc, and it’s hard to figure out—without having seen it—how a song like Obokuri Eeumi might fit into it. Like that, there’s something about Mugen, and sometimes you wonder how it is that something so beautiful could have anything to do with the boy, but there it is, it lies underneath.

(he opened his eyes in the bright blue reverse-sky and they were like liquid gold
—because that is what he is, that is how he grew up, he grew up in a horrid but beautiful place—)

There’s a folktale from Japan: ‘Hyakumankai Ikita Neko’, The Cat Who Lived a Million Times. If you’ve seen Cowboy Bebop, you know how the story goes. Search up the poem sometime, it’s really a good one.

[Of course, it’s not Mugen without the obliviousness, causticity, abrasiveness and dire disrespect, complete insensitivity, flippancy, knack for destruction and all-around idiocy, but come on, nobody’s perfect? The charm of Mugen is that he isn’t particularly trying. Mugen is steel-lined sandals and beatboxing samurai. Mugen is backflips and crotchbiting, baseball and zombies, tossing a coin way too high. Mugen is hitting on the wrong girls, ‘ROFL Jin’s trying to catch a fish!!’, dining and ditching, eating with the spatula, almost getting killed by a hooker again. Mugen is feral grins and eternal scowls and reckless careless grace, the whir and swoop of a sword tracing patterns that shouldn’t work but do regardless, and Mugen is everything between the lines, underneath the surface. Mugen is Champloo.]

ryukyu pirate with the heart of a samurai
stray dog wild whether you live or die

no excuses
when you draw
dividing manjuu?
kill two win all

goes back for fuu
i could rape you
don't care, don't mind
is it true?

not ruler nor ruled
can't stand you
telling me what to do

saves japan with a baseball
crab things? crunching shells raw

no beginning, no end
no boundries, no limit

no no no me
INFINITY
eh?

[the line "no no no me" is supposed to be hiragana ... ]