Part 301: The Delinquent Who Died First: Yu Yu Hakusho, Yusuke Urameshi, and the Teacher Hidden in the Personality

Yu Yu Hakusho (幽☆遊☆白書) begins with its hero's death. Yusuke Urameshi, a fourteen-year-old delinquent — a brawler, a truant, a boy everyone including himself has written off — dies in the first chapter, hit by a car while shoving a child out of its path. It is an impulse he does not understand and cannot account for, a flicker of decency from someone who believed he had none. The afterlife bureaucracy is as surprised as he is; his death was not supposed to happen, and no one had a place prepared for so worthless a soul. So he is offered a chance to earn his life back, and the manga is the long story of a dead boy discovering what the life he threw away was actually for.

Yoshihiro Togashi's breakthrough, serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1990, reduces to a Destiny 4 — the Builder — but carries in its Personality number the 33: the Master Teacher, the rarest number in the scheme, appearing for the second time in this pass. In Parasyte it sat on the Destiny, out in the open. Here it is buried in the Personality — the number of the outward self, the face the work turns to the world — which is a fitting place for it, because Yu Yu Hakusho hides its pedagogy under the surface of a fighting manga.

The Lesson Under the Tournament

On its surface, Yu Yu Hakusho becomes, fairly quickly, one of the definitive examples of the shonen fighting-tournament structure — the escalating opponents, the power-ups, the Dark Tournament arc that set the template a generation of battle manga would follow. The Serialization Machine essays discussed how the reader survey pushes series toward exactly this escalation, and Togashi has been openly, famously ambivalent about having produced it; the pressures that shaped Yu Yu Hakusho are part of why his later Hunter x Hunter works so hard to subvert the same structures.

But underneath the tournaments, the 33 in the Personality names the real content: this is a manga about a boy being taught how to be a person, by everyone he fights. Each opponent is a lesson. Yusuke learns discipline from the training of the ancient master Genkai, learns about loyalty and worth from the demons who become his comrades, learns what his throwaway life is capable of meaning by repeatedly spending it for others. The dead delinquent is enrolled, without consenting to it, in an education — and the teachers are the people trying to kill him. The Master Teacher's number, hidden in the face the manga shows the world, is the pedagogy hiding inside the fighting.

The Seeker's Number, Doubled

Yusuke Urameshi reduces to a Destiny 7 — the Analyst and Seeker — and so does his creator, Yoshihiro Togashi. It is a shared number that says something true about both. Yusuke is, beneath the brawling, a seeker: a boy searching for a reason his life should continue, testing himself against ever-stronger opponents not out of the pure competitive hunger the genre usually supplies, but out of a quieter question about what he is worth and what he is for. His Heart's Desire is an 11, the Visionary's master number — the heightened awareness under the delinquent's slouch, the perceptiveness he hides behind not caring.

And Togashi's own 7 — the analyst, the seeker after truth — is the number this series would assign him on the evidence of his whole career. He is the medium's great restless questioner of its own forms, the author who cannot stop interrogating the structures he works inside, which is why Hunter x Hunter — discussed at length in an earlier part of this series — reads like a man arguing with the genre he helped define. The seeker's number fits the mangaka who has spent his life refusing to be satisfied with the machine he is inside.

The Close

The caveat holds, and after part 300 it should hold more firmly than ever: Yu Yu Hakusho is a romanization, the 33 in its Personality is an artefact of Latin-alphabet arithmetic, and the immediately preceding essay used Tezuka's own robot to prove, beyond argument, that these numbers measure spelling rather than substance. I have no intention of pretending otherwise one essay later.

But the Master Teacher's number, surfacing a second time in a single pass — first on Parasyte's Destiny, now buried in Yu Yu Hakusho's Personality — sent me back to a manga I had filed as a well-made fighting serial, and made me see the thing under the tournaments: that it is, from its first page, a story about a dead boy being taught what his wasted life was for, by every person who ever tried to defeat him. The 33 is empty, like all of them. What it pointed at is a genuine and moving idea — that the delinquent nobody valued turns out, once he has died, to be worth teaching, and that the teaching is done in the only language he understands, which is a fight. Yusuke had to die to start learning how to live. The number cannot know that. It only made me look, which is the one thing, three hundred and one essays in, that these numbers have ever reliably done.