銀河鉄道999 · Ginga Tetsudō Surī Nain
A poor boy boards a space train with a mysterious woman to reach a planet where he can be given a free machine body and live forever. The title reduces to 5 — the turn.
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5Filed under 5. The Turn takes a turn, and this entry is changes one.
Leiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 ran in Shōnen King from 1977 to 1981 and was collected in 18 volumes. In a future where the rich buy immortal mechanical bodies and the poor are hunted for sport, Tetsuro Hoshino, whose mother was killed by a machine-man, is given a pass for the Galaxy Express 999, a steam train that runs through space, by the beautiful, mysterious Maetel.
The train stops at a different planet in each episode, and each planet is a parable: a world of people who have given up feeling, a planet of the forgotten, a civilisation that sold its humanity for permanence. Tetsuro's wish for a machine body is gradually tested against what he sees.
Matsumoto's style is unmistakable: long-legged, wistful women, small determined boys, intricate mechanical detail and a romantic vision of space as a sea of stars. His trains, ships and gauges are lovingly drawn.
It is a meditation on mortality dressed as space opera, and its 1979 film adaptation was a landmark of anime cinema. It shares a universe with Matsumoto's Captain Harlock, and together they defined a romantic strain of Japanese science fiction.
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 59 across 2 words, reducing to 5. The weight sits in “Express”, which carries 34 on its own and reduces to 7.
What the 5 brings is change. The reference files it as a turn. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 5's restlessness and hunger for change.
Heart's Desire 3, Personality 11: expression underneath, vision on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
It does not rest on the letters alone. 総画 strokes is 47, an 11, volumes is 18, a 9, years serialised is 5 and debut year is 1977, a 6 — and the 5 arrives there too, by a route that owes nothing to the alphabet. A title can be translated; years serialised cannot.
The 5 asks you to ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. The other entries that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.