Noi
first seen .. ch. 2
affiliation . En Family — cleaner, partnered with Shin
abilities ... healing / restoration, extremely powerful
status ...... alive as of v11
my source ... Viz vols 1-11
Shin's partner, En's relative, and the character I would point at if someone asked me to explain in one page what this book is doing that others are not.
design
She is very tall and very broad and Hayashida draws this without a shred of apology or comment. Nobody in the book remarks on it. There is no arc about it. She is simply built like that, drawn consistently like that, and the art treats her as straightforwardly attractive throughout. In 2007, coming from most of what else was being published, this was startling enough that it is a large part of why I started the site.
Her expression range is the widest of the main cast, which reads as a deliberate counterweight to Shin's mask. He cannot emote and she does all of it — put them in a two-shot and the scene's emotional information is entirely on her side of the panel. It works so well that I did not consciously notice it until the third reread.
what she is for
Mechanically she is the reason the En Family's violence has no consequences for the En Family. Anything that happens to them can be undone. That is a structural cheat and Hayashida uses it deliberately — it is what lets the book stage enormous physical damage as slapstick and then turn around and make a single injury matter when she is not there.
Thematically she is the argument I mention on Caiman's page. In a book where bodies are modifiable, she is the modification. Her existence makes the point the amnesia plot usually gets credited with.
notes & corrections
- The limits on her healing are established more precisely than I first thought, and once you see the rule the fights read differently.
- corrected 2011-04 — I had her relationship to En wrong on the original version of this page. Entirely my fault, not the translation's.