Nikaido
first seen .. ch. 1
affiliation . owns and runs the Hungry Bug
abilities ... see below. this is the part I got wrong
status ...... alive as of v13
my source ... Viz vols 1-13
Caiman's friend, and the reason he has anywhere to be. She runs a restaurant in Hole, cooks extremely well, fights extremely well, and for the first several volumes appears to be exactly what she looks like, which is a competent ordinary person in a world that mostly is not.
This page was rewritten in November 2016 because the version up since 2009 was wrong from about its third sentence onward. The old one is in the corrections log because deleting it seemed dishonest.
design
Short hair, practical clothes, a build Hayashida draws with actual muscle on it — unremarkable until you notice how rare that is across the rest of the cast, where bodies tend toward either the very lean or the frankly enormous. Nikaido is drawn like someone who lifts things for a living, because she does.
The consistent note is that she is almost always doing something with her hands. Cooking, carrying, hitting. I went through volume 4 once counting panels and she is holding an object in roughly three quarters of her appearances. Whether that is characterisation or just what happens when you set a lot of scenes in a kitchen I cannot tell, but the cumulative effect is a person defined by competence rather than by dialogue.
what she is for
The obvious answer is that she is the emotional anchor — the reason Caiman's search has somewhere to return to, and the thing that keeps the book warm while its content is not. True, and most of it.
The less obvious answer, which is what I missed for seven years, is that she is also a structural fuse. There is a category of information the reader needs that no other character can plausibly deliver, and she is holding it the whole time. Reread the early volumes knowing that and a number of scenes that looked like ordinary friendship business are doing something else entirely.
notes & corrections
- corrected 2016-11 — the big one. Full account on the corrections page.
- The restaurant's name is translated slightly differently between the editions I have read. Minor, but it changes the joke a little.
- I still think hers is the least ostentatious design in the book and that this is on purpose. I cannot prove it. It might just be that she is the character who spends the most time indoors.