Ai Coleman's Mind

En

The antagonist, in the loose sense that the book has one. He runs the organisation that produced most of the cast, he is ambitious in a direction the book takes a long time to make explicit, and his magic turns things into mushrooms.

That last detail is the whole character. A crime boss whose power is fungal is either a joke or a threat depending entirely on how it is drawn, and Hayashida keeps it as both for twelve volumes without ever picking.

design

Small. Genuinely small, next to Noi almost comically so, and the framing never lets you forget it — he is constantly drawn low in the panel surrounded by people twice his size who are afraid of him. Efficient way to establish authority without a line of dialogue about it.

The mushroom motif spreads outward from him into the environment. His rooms have growth in them. His subordinates carry it. There is a general principle in this book that powerful sorcerers contaminate their surroundings with their own imagery, and En is the clearest case — you can tell whose territory you are in from the wallpaper.

His name meaning smoke is presumably not accidental given what magic is in this setting, but I have never seen it commented on in anything I have read in English and I might be reading in.

what he is for

He is the reason the sorcerer world has a shape. Before En, sorcerers are an undifferentiated menace who come through doors and ruin lives. After him they are an organisation with hierarchy, payroll, office politics and a boss with a hobby. The horror does not decrease when that happens — it relocates. It becomes institutional, which is worse and much funnier.

notes & corrections

• I put off writing this page for six years because I could not work out whether he was a comic character or a genuinely frightening one. I have concluded the question is badly formed.
• Kikurage deserves an entry and does not have one. It is on the list.

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