Keiichi Arawi
7The Inquiry · 70あらゐ けいいち
The creator of Nichijou, a master of absurdist comic timing.
7A 7 by its name: analyst & seeker, and therefore the inquiry.
Career
Keiichi Arawi made his debut in Kadokawa's magazines in the mid-2000s. Nichijou began in Monthly Shōnen Ace in 2006.
The work
Nichijou is his best-known work, adapted as an anime by Kyoto Animation in 2011. He has also drawn CITY, a comedy about the eccentric residents of a town.
The style
Arawi draws with clean, simple lines and lots of empty space, and his comedy depends on timing and scale: tiny events treated as epics, and disasters met with calm. Many of his gags are visual and wordless.
Why he matters
He is one of the most admired comic artists of his generation, and Nichijou is often recommended as a model of manga absurdist humour.
The name by its numbers
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 70, which folds down to 7. The weight sits in “Keiichi”, which carries 45 on its own and reduces to 9.
What the 7 brings is inquiry. The reference files it as an open question. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 7's pull toward the hidden and the unresolved.
The vowels alone reduce to 7, the consonants to 9. The presentation folds back into the want: reckoning in service of inquiry.
人格 core is 4 and 総格 total is 16, a 7. That the 7 turns up in 総格 total as well as in the letters is the sort of coincidence this reference collects rather than explains.
The 7 asks you to sit with the part that was never explained. The 7 mistakes withholding for depth. Some works filed here are obscure because they are unfinished, not because they are deep. The other entries that reduce to 7 are collected on The Inquiry.