Shin
first seen .. ch. 2
affiliation . En Family — cleaner, partnered with Noi
abilities ... removal / extraction; a hammer
status ...... alive as of v11
my source ... Viz vols 1-11
One half of En's cleanup team, and the character doing the most work in the book's balancing act between horror and comedy. He is introduced doing something genuinely awful and is, within about thirty pages, extremely likeable. Hayashida does not treat these as in tension and the book is better for it.
design
The mask is the whole design and it is a good one. A blunt shape with a heart on it, worn by a very large man who kills people for a living. The joke is legible instantly and never stops being slightly unsettling, because the mask does not emote and you spend a lot of scenes trying to read a man whose face is a picture of a heart.
Underneath, he has the heaviest linework of the main cast. Thick outer contour, dense hatching in the folds of the jacket, hands drawn noticeably larger than strict proportion would give him. Put him next to Caiman in the same panel and the difference in line weight is obvious — Caiman is drawn as something slippery, Shin as something structural.
He gets more visual variation than most characters over the run. The mask changes, the hair changes. I do not have a good theory about what tracks with what and I have stopped pretending I do.
what he is for
The En Family needs to be threatening and also needs to be somewhere the reader wants to spend time, which is a hard combination. Shin is how it works: the violence is real and the people committing it have lunch afterwards and complain about their boss. That is not moral confusion, it is the book's actual argument — these are two ordinary employees, and the horror is structural rather than personal.
He is also half of the best-drawn relationship in the book, which gets its own paragraph on Noi's page.
notes & corrections
- The mechanics of what his magic actually does are described loosely enough early on that I had them slightly wrong until volume 6 or so. I do not think the looseness is accidental.
- Someone emailed me around 2012 with a convincing argument about the mask's design that I have unfortunately lost along with that entire email account. If that was you, please send it again.