Part 282: The Master Builder in the Personality: Gantz, a Black Sphere, and the Numbers of a Nasty Masterpiece

A young man is hit by a train. He does not die, exactly. He wakes in an unfurnished Tokyo apartment with a group of strangers who have also just died, and in the centre of the room is a large black sphere. The sphere does not explain itself. It issues instructions in cheerful text, hands out weapons and skin-tight suits, and sends them out to kill aliens, and when they are killed in turn they are reconstituted and sent out again. Nobody consents. Nobody is told why. The rules are precise, arbitrary, and enforced without appeal.

Hiroya Oku's Gantz (ガンツ), serialized in Shueisha's Weekly Young Jump from 2000, carries a Destiny number of 5 — the Freedom Seeker, freedom, disruption, and restless movement — but the number worth the essay is the Personality: a 22. The Master Builder. The highest of the master numbers in the scheme this series has used throughout, and the one it has had almost no occasion to deploy.

The Sphere Is a 22

In the traditional numerological reading, the 22 is the 4 — the Builder, structure, labour, lasting systems — raised to a master pitch. It is the number of the architect of things that outlast their architect. It is, in the horoscope-column version of all this, supposed to be the most powerful number available, and it is usually attached to people who build cathedrals or nations.

Attach it instead to a black sphere in an empty apartment that hands out scores and revives the dead, and something interesting happens. Because Gantz, whatever else it is, is a manga about a system — and specifically about a system that is total, opaque, and utterly indifferent to the interior life of the people inside it. The sphere does not hate anyone. It does not reward virtue. It allocates points. It has a scoring rubric, a shop, a revival mechanic, and a set of penalties, and it applies them with the flat consistency of a vending machine. It is, in the most literal sense, a machine for processing human beings, and it was built by something that never bothered to explain itself.

Whether Oku intended a critique of the systems his readers actually lived inside — the salaryman's employer, the examination hell, the algorithmic scoring of a life — is beyond my ability to demonstrate, and I am not going to fabricate a quotation to close the gap. What I can say is that the manga's most memorable and most disturbing sequences are the ones where the horror is procedural rather than monstrous: the point tally after a mission, calculated coldly while people are still screaming; the shop where a hundred points buys you your life back; the flat fact that dying badly and dying bravely earn the same score.

Kurono, Master 11

Kei Kurono — the protagonist, and one of the least likeable heroes in mainstream manga — reduces to a Destiny 11 with an 11 in the Heart's Desire as well. A doubled master number: the Visionary, inspiration, tension, and heightened awareness.

This is either very funny or very apt and I have decided it is both. Kurono, as introduced, is a coward, a creep, and a self-absorbed adolescent whose first instinct on being handed a weapon and a rubber suit is to leer at the woman standing next to him. Oku's early characterisation of him is genuinely unpleasant — not in the anti-hero way that signals "he will be redeemed," but in the way that suggests the author does not much like him either. Readers dropped the manga over it. That was, I think, the intention.

What the manga then does — slowly, over a very long run — is put him through the machine enough times that a person comes out. Not a good person, exactly, and never a noble one, but someone who has learned to act, to take responsibility for people who are relying on him, and eventually to be the thing he was pretending to be at the start. The 11's tension is the right word for it: Kurono is a character held under permanent pressure, and the arc is not redemption so much as compression. He is not improved. He is forged, which is a nastier and more convincing process.

The Nurturer Who Drew This

Here is the reading that made me laugh out loud, and I include it in the spirit of honesty about what this method actually produces. Hiroya Oku — author of one of the most gleefully brutal, sexually leering, viscera-strewn manga of the 2000s — carries a Destiny 6: the Nurturer and Harmonizer. Care, community, and the weight of duty.

You can, if you squint, build a case. Gantz is fundamentally about a group of strangers who must learn to cooperate or be annihilated separately, and its best sequences are about people choosing to go back for someone. And Oku's later work, Inuyashiki (いぬやしき), is explicitly about care: an elderly, ignored, dying man given godlike power who uses it, almost exclusively, to heal people — set against a boy given the identical power who uses it to murder families for entertainment. That is a manga about duty, and it is unmistakably by the same hand.

But I would be lying if I said the 6 predicted anything. It is a coincidence with a good story attached, which — as this series has now admitted repeatedly, most recently in the essay immediately before this one — is what almost all of these numbers are. The honest version is: the number sent me back to Inuyashiki, and re-reading Inuyashiki made me see something in Gantz I had not seen, which is that the cruelty was never the point. The point was what people do when the cruelty is a fixed condition of the world.

Saying the Unflattering Part

And since this series has lately committed itself to not flattering its subjects: Gantz is also, for long stretches, a leering and adolescent piece of work. The camera lingers where it should not. Female characters are introduced through their bodies with a regularity that is tedious rather than shocking. The 3DCG-assisted art, revolutionary at the time for its photoreal Tokyo, has aged into an uncanny stiffness. A serious critical apparatus for manga — which, as the Serialization Machine essays argue, we barely have — would be able to hold both of these judgements at once: that this is a genuinely major work about systems and courage and the ugliness of being a person, and that it is frequently juvenile in a way that costs it readers it deserved to keep.

The black sphere, at least, would not care either way. It would simply allocate the points. That is what a 22 does: it builds the machine, and then it lets the machine decide what you are.