this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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This chapter's done a good job answering a lot of the outstanding Robin questions I had, but the big one is still there. What's the goal of his experiments?
Also, what is the implication of the monument in the square? That she had something to do with the orphanage after they fled Asakusa?
That's exactly what I was wondering, and especially the last one.
I didn't recognize the statue - was I supposed to? My first thought was that it was the director much younger, but we've already seen flashbacks to the younger version of her, and that wasn't her. So who was it?
And the memorial was to "New" Heaven. I don't recall the other place being called New Heaven - just Heaven.
Part of the problem is trying to sort out the timelines. I was pretty sure that
The statue is definitely supposed to be recognizable, but we haven't seen her in quite a while now so I don't blame you! Mikura Manaka is the person who tasked Kiruko with protecting Maru on his medicine delivery quest from the start of the series.
spoiler
She is also the director after the transplant operation that put her brain in Nata's body.My confusion comes from what the monument to her is meant to imply though. With it being presented like that on the last page of the chapter, it looks like it should be a big revelation, but I don't see it. Feels like it has to be more than just "she helped take care of the children here for a while".
I missed that this place was New Heaven though... It's a stretch, but what if the children here are a new generation of Hiruko? Mikura must have been doing research somehow if she was able to develop a cure.
So yesterday I started that post and got partway through it, but got bogged down because I was going to talk about specific characters who are filed away in my brain as "that one," which works in the context in my mind, but not on a page. So I was going to have to do some legwork to get it written, and had other things I needed to do, and never got back to it. I came here this morning to finish it up, only to find that I apparently butt-posted it somehow (it's all on my phone). That's a first (thinking about it, I'm sort of surprised I haven't done it before)
So anyway -
On your spoiler - right. I forgot about that. When that was all being revealed, it took me a bit to sort out who that kid was, and I hadnt made the connection. So part of what's left to reveal is the events between what we've seen of the new version of the director and whatever it was she did to deserve a memorial.
A lot of the problem is that I can't get the timeline straight in my head. There's a weird circularity to the whole business of the Hiruko that I can't sort out. And it seems that there have been more events, and more generations of kids, at (New?) Heaven than the timeline as I understand it allows for.
And there's an odd circularity to the whole business of the hiruko that complicates it - somehow they're both a cause and an effect.
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but that whole hiruko/maneater thing reminds me of the Alzabo in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. It too could somehow absorb consciousnesses/memories which could then later be extracted and even, apparently (though the narrator is both dishonest and insane, so it's not certain), be given new life.
Along with that, I suspect that there's some relevance to the way in which hiruko and maneater seem to be almost-but-not-quite synonymous. There's the obvious distinction between the ones in human form and the monsters, but it seems to go beyond that - as if those are effects of a more fundamental distinction or something.
And yes - Robin. I assume there's some connection between his issues with his sister's death(?) and the circular nature of the hiruko - some hoped-for opportunity or something of that nature.
And thinking about all of this, it's weird that my impression when I first caught up with this was that most of the questions have been answered, since the more I look, the more questions I find.
I'm going to have to re-read it from the start, hopefully sometime in the next week or two. That's another thing this shares with Book of the New Sun - I've re-read it multiple times over many years, and I still discover new details. This looks to be the same.
Haha I was wondering what you were pretty sure about with that last sentence there.
I'm not familiar with Book of the New Sun, but can hiruko actually absorb memories? I was pretty sure that was just something the innkeeper was telling herself to feel better about her son being eaten by Taka, and the only reason it took so long to kill her was because she kept feeding it guests. I'm not sure I understand the hiruko being both the cause and effect though, what do you mean? I was thinking the timeline has been pretty linear so far.
After thinking about it more, my best guess on Robin's motivation is that he wants to somehow use the hiruko's regenerative abilities to bring his sister back, and that's the end goal of his experiments. The guy from back on the ship with the rotting hiruko part mentioned a rumor about how attaching a piece of one to yourself would make you immortal and that there's a doctor at the Immortal Order who will do the surgery. That rumor probably didn't originate from Dr. Usami since his work was on prosthetics, but Robin also spent time with the Immortal Order, and we've seen what his experiments were...
In Book of the New Sun (it's a science fiction tetralogy, and one of the best things I've ever read) the protagonist encounters a creature called an Alzabo, which absorbs the consciousnesses and memories of people it's eaten. It seems to be unintelligent itself, but it can attract prey then through a sort of mimicry, by vocalizing the thoughts of those consciousnesses, and that seems to be the entirety of the point as far as the creature is concerned.
Alongside that, there are people who ritualistically imbibe an enzyme taken from the Alzabo along with the flesh of a dead person, and duplicate the effect - temporarily absorbing the consciousness of the dead person. And that gets into some complex existential territory that's significant to the story.
Probably because I was primed by having already seen the concept elsewhere, I took the innkeepers claim more or less at face value - as a sort of seeming myth that's rooted in some degree of truth.
That's undoubtedly where the impression that the maneaters are both cause and effect came from too. The innkeeper isn't the only one who's essentially cultivated a maneater, and I've just assumed that there's some underlying reason, and that that's it. And when I saw the rumor about immortality linked to them, I assumed that the notion of just essentially getting some of their flesh stitched onto ones body was a misconception, and there was something more profound and likely sinister going on - specifically, possibly, that the actual mechanism involved in that nominal immortality is being eaten and, as the innkeeper asserted, absorbed by a maneater, then somehow being extracted from the maneater (and possibly that last bit is still in the experimental stage, and that's tied in with Heaven, and most notably with the monstrous babies - they're failed experiments).
Granted that that's all quite speculative, that's the rough outline of what I think of as the cause end of the cycle.
The effect end is of course much more obvious - the human-appearing hiruko apparently (certainly in some cases - we just don't know if it's universal) become maneaters. But even with that, we have that weird bridge between death and life again, since they don't simply transform - they die as humans and are reborn as maneaters.
As far as Robin goes, we don't have enough information yet for any solid guesses, but I think it's notable that his big issue is the (apparent - we self-evidently can't take it at face value) death of his sister, and the whole thing with the maneaters and the hiruko and the kids at Heaven deals with these weird cycles of death and life. The simplest assumption is that he's trying to bring her back, but this story hasn't followed the simple path yet, so it could be about anything. I'm sure there's something there though.