Part 281: Where the Lens Fails: Wandering Son, a Triple Nine, and the Limits of Reading People as Numbers

Every so often this series is obliged to turn around and examine its own method, and the results are usually uncomfortable. Part 165 established, with a twenty-title sample, that a manga's Destiny number is overwhelmingly an artefact of how a translator chose to render it in English rather than a property of the work. Part 318 — the closing essay, whenever this series reaches it — will make the same admission at greater length. This essay is a third instance, and it is the sharpest, because for once the lens has produced a result so clean that a less scrupulous writer could build a cathedral on it.

Shuichi Nitori, the protagonist of Takako Shimura's Wandering Son (放浪息子, Hourou Musuko), returns the following reading: Destiny 9. Heart's Desire 9. Personality 9. Every number identical. In two hundred and eighty essays I have not seen a name do that. The Humanitarian and Sage, three times over — endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles — sitting on a character whose entire story is about a child trying to work out who she is.

And it means nothing. I want to spend this essay explaining, as precisely as I can, why it means nothing, because the temptation to pretend otherwise is enormous and because the manga in question deserves better than to be used as a prop.

What the Manga Actually Is

First, the work, on its own terms and without a numerologist standing over it. Wandering Son, serialized in Enterbrain's Comic Beam from 2002, follows two children through elementary school, middle school, and into high school: Shuichi Nitori, who was assigned male and is a girl, and Yoshino Takatsuki, who was assigned female and is — the manga is careful, and correct, not to resolve this too quickly — working something out. It is one of the earliest sustained, serious, non-sensational treatments of transgender children in any comics tradition, and it was being serialized in the early 2000s, which is worth stating plainly.

What makes it exceptional is its refusal of event. Shimura does not write a coming-out as a detonation. There is no single scene where everything is revealed and the world reacts. Instead there are years: a borrowed dress, a haircut, a school play, a friend who is kind and then cruel and then kind again, a body that starts changing in a direction Shuichi cannot stop and did not consent to. The horror in the manga — and there is horror in it — is entirely ordinary. It is the horror of puberty arriving on schedule, indifferent to the person it is happening to. Shimura draws it in a pale, thin, almost weightless line, and the effect is of watching something extremely delicate be handled by people who do not know they are being rough.

Why the Triple Nine Is Worthless

Now, the number. Three nines. The reader will feel the pull of it — I certainly did — and the pull runs something like this: the 9 is the number of endings and compassion; a trans child's story is one of leaving a false self behind; the tripling signifies an unusually pure or complete expression of the vibration. That paragraph writes itself. It is the sort of thing this series has produced, in one form or another, a great many times, and I have been reasonably careful to label it as a lens rather than a claim. But here the machinery is exposed, and I would rather expose it than use it.

Consider what the triple nine actually is. In the Pythagorean scheme, the Destiny is the sum of all letters; the Heart's Desire is the sum of the vowels; the Personality is the sum of the consonants. If the vowels reduce to 9 and the consonants reduce to 9, then the whole necessarily reduces to 9, because 9 + 9 = 18, and 1 + 8 = 9. The number nine is arithmetically sticky: it absorbs. Any name whose vowels and consonants each happen to land on 9 will produce this "astonishing" triple, and the astonishment is a property of modular arithmetic, not of the person.

And the name itself is a transliteration. Shuichi Nitori is 二鳥修一 — the surname carries "two birds," which Shimura chose with obvious intent, and which the Latin alphabet knows nothing about. The romanization could as easily have been Shūichi, with a macron, which changes nothing in the Pythagorean scheme only because the scheme is too crude to notice. Had she been rendered Nitori Shuichi in the Japanese order — as a great many translations would — the letters would be the same and the number identical, which sounds like a point in the method's favour until you realise it means the method cannot distinguish between a name and its anagram.

The Real Failure

But the deepest problem is not arithmetic. It is this: the method assigns a fixed number to a fixed name, and Wandering Son is a manga about a person for whom the name is the thing in question.

That is not a clever paradox. It is the plain content of the book. Shuichi is a girl. The name in the numerological calculator is a name she did not choose, given to her on the assumption that she was someone else, and the manga's long, patient, painful arc is the process by which she and the people around her come to terms with the fact that the assumption was wrong. A system that reads a person's destiny out of the letters of their assigned name is, when pointed at this character, doing something worse than being inaccurate. It is doing precisely what the world in the manga does to her: taking the label she was handed and treating it as the truth about her soul.

I do not think numerology is malicious. I think it is empty, and emptiness takes the shape of whatever you pour into it. But an empty method pointed at this particular character produces something that looks a lot like the error the character spends four thousand pages surviving, and I am not willing to write the essay where that gets dressed up as insight.

What the Series Is For, If Not This

Takako Shimura herself reduces to a Destiny 4, the Builder — which, for an author who constructs long, slow, architecturally patient works out of accumulated small scenes (Sweet Blue Flowers does the same thing with a different set of children), is a pleasant fit. I offer it and I hope the reader now discounts it appropriately, because I have just spent a thousand words explaining why they should.

So what is this series for? Two hundred and eighty-one parts in, here is the most honest answer I have. The number is a coin flip that makes you turn your head. Most of the time it points at nothing and I have written an essay anyway, and those essays live or die on the manga criticism in them rather than the arithmetic. Occasionally — March Comes in Like a Lion, a few essays ago; rakugo reducing to the number of the man alone on the cushion — it points at something real, and the pleasure of that is the pleasure of any coincidence: brief, sharp, and evidentially worthless.

And once in a while it points somewhere it has no business being, and the right thing to do is to put it down. A method that returns its most dramatic result on the one character it understands least is not a method. It is a mirror. I have been the one holding it this whole time, and Wandering Son is the book that made me look at my own hands.