Caiman
first seen .. ch. 1
affiliation . none. lives in Hole, eats at the Hungry Bug
abilities ... immune to magic; the man in his mouth
status ...... alive as of v9
my source ... Viz vols 1-9, plus the older translations for 1-8
The protagonist, in the sense that the book opens on him and mostly follows him around. Reptile head, no memory of his life before it, and a second face living inside his mouth that identifies sorcerers when he puts their heads in there. He is looking for whoever did this to him. He is also, and this matters more than it sounds, extremely relaxed about it most of the time.
design
The thing I keep coming back to is that the head is not scary. It could very easily have been scary. Hayashida draws it with a wide flat snout, small round eyes set far back, and a permanently visible row of teeth that reads as a grin more often than a threat. When he is angry it barely changes — the expression work happens in the shoulders and the hands. That is a deliberate constraint and she holds to it for hundreds of chapters.
The silhouette is the other constant. Long coat, hood, that head. You can identify him at any size, in any crowd, in a panel where he is forty pixels tall. Given how much visual noise is going on around him at any moment, that is clearly load-bearing.
Something I noticed on the reread and am fairly but not completely sure about: the cross-hatching on him gets denser over the run. In volume 1 he is relatively clean, almost flat in places. By 8 or 9 there is texture all over him — scale detail, grime, wear on the coat. I do not know whether that is deliberate or just Hayashida's line getting denser generally, because everything else gets denser too. If it is the latter the effect is accidental and still works.
what he is for
Structurally he is the reader's hole in the world. He knows nothing, so people have to explain things to him, and because he is immune to magic he can walk into places the plot otherwise could not go. Very old device. Hayashida is not hiding it.
What is less standard is that he is not driven. An amnesiac revenge protagonist is normally consumed — the search is the whole personality. Caiman spends most of his page time eating, arguing about food, being cheerfully violent, and hanging around with Nikaido. The search is real but it runs at roughly the intensity of a hobby. I think this is the single most underrated thing about the book's construction. The tone would collapse instantly if he actually behaved like a man on a quest.
notes & corrections
- The mouth-man's dialogue is formatted differently from everyone else's and the two translations I have read handle it inconsistently. See translation notes.
- corrected 2012-05 — I had a paragraph here for years claiming his magic immunity was total. It is not quite, and the distinction turns out to matter later. Cut rather than patched.
- Still unsure whether the head is meant to read as a specific animal. "Caiman" is right there, obviously, but the snout proportions in the early chapters look more gecko than crocodilian to me. Possibly I am overthinking a name chosen for sound.