what is this
Notes on Dorohedoro, the manga by Q Hayashida. It ran for eighteen years and three magazines — Monthly Ikki from November 2000, then Hibana when Ikki folded, then Monthly Shonen Sunday, where it finished on 12 September 2018. Twenty-three volumes.
I read it first in Kyoto, in a second-hand shop in 2006, because a friend there put a volume in my hands and refused to tell me anything about it beyond that it had a lizard in it. I could not read a word of it. I bought four volumes anyway on the strength of the drawing, carried them home in a bag that was too small, and spent most of the following year trying to find out what was happening in them. That is a stupid way to encounter a comic and I have never quite got over it.
This site is what came out of that. Character pages, a list of things I have had to go back and correct, and some comparison between the translations I have had access to over the years. It is not a wiki and I am not trying to summarise the plot. What I am interested in is how the thing is built — what Hayashida repeats, what she leaves out, and how a design shifts between a character's first appearance and their two-hundredth. Some of that is guesswork. I have tried to mark where.
updates
So there is an anime now, and there was also a fourteen-page special chapter in February, seventeen months after the ending, which almost nobody seems to have noticed. The anime looks very good and is doing something quite different with the pacing. I do not have anything to add that is not already being said in ten thousand places by people with more energy than me. This site was always about the books. If you got here from the show: start at volume 1, it is a different animal, and the food is better on paper.
Chapter 167. "All-Star Sayonara." I read it two days late because I could not make myself open the file, which is not a thing I have ever done before with a comic.
It is a happy ending, and I did not expect that, and I have spent a fortnight trying to work out why it landed as hard as it did on someone who had twelve years of build-up behind it. I think it is this: the book spent eighteen years insisting that bodies are things which can be taken apart and put back together, and that this is neither a tragedy nor a miracle but simply the condition of being alive in Hole. So when it finally chooses to put people back together on purpose, it is not a reversal. It is the thing the whole book was arguing for, arriving on time.
The last chapter is called All-Star Sayonara and it behaves like one — everyone gets a panel, nothing is solemn, the tone stays exactly where it has always been. Some people found that anticlimactic. I think a finale that changed register at the last minute would have retroactively made the preceding twenty-two volumes into a build-up rather than the point. It refuses to do that, and refusing is the correct decision, and I say that as someone who read the last page in a car park because I could not wait to get home.
I will probably revise all of this in a year. Leaving it as written.
Rewrote most of the Nikaido page. The version that had been up since 2009 was built on an assumption I made in about chapter six and never revisited, which is embarrassing but instructive — see things I was wrong about. Left the old text there rather than deleting it.
Added En. Took me long enough. Also finally got hold of volume 12 after about two years of looking, so the notes below are slightly less of a mess.
New layout, third one. The old one had frames, which I chose in 2007 and then defended for four years out of stubbornness rather than conviction. Guestbook is gone; it was taking forty spam entries a day and I never worked out how to fix it.
Viz have been putting it out in print since March. They had it digitally on SigIKKI from 2009 and I somehow missed that for a year, which given how long I spent trying to read it in Japanese is genuinely funny in retrospect. Anyway — buy it.
Moved hosts. Everything should work. If it does not, there is no guestbook anymore, so.
reading order / editions
There is only one order and it is the obvious one. The editions question is genuinely annoying and worth a paragraph.
I started with four Japanese volumes I could not read, bought on impulse in Kyoto. For about three years after that I was working from whatever translations were circulating, which varied enormously in quality and in some cases in accuracy. Viz began putting it out digitally in 2009 and in print from March 2010, and I went back and reread from the start — which is where most of the translation notes come from. Several things I had been confidently wrong about for years turned out to be artefacts of a translation choice rather than anything Hayashida did.
I still cannot read Japanese properly. I have had bits explained to me over the years, mostly by the same friend who started all of this, and where that is the case the relevant page says so. The Japanese volumes remain the only way to see the original chapter breaks and some of the between-chapter extras, which do not all survive into the collected English editions.