Hyakkimaru

Also known as 百鬼丸 (Hyakkimaru)

Hello, My Name (in English) is…

His name is a combination of the Japanese words hyaku (百) oni (鬼) and maru (丸) which together have the meaning of “a circle of a hundred demons”.

Distinguishing Features

Although missing 48 body parts, you can pick Hyakkimaru out of a crowd by his distinct, spiky black hair tied up in a large ponytail and equally long bangs that covering a good deal of his emotionless face.

Status: Series Lead (★★★)

Hyakkimaru is the very definition of a fighter. Having survived a childhood of disability – missing the 48 body parts that his father sold to a cadre of demons at his birth – Hyakkimaru has had to fight every inch of the way. This has made him hard and grim, the perfect Star to be cast in a samurai period adventure featuring supernatural monsters of all sort.

In a way, Hyakkimaru can also be considered an “older brother” to one of Tezkua’s major Stars – Black Jack. Besides the sullen and emotionally distant disposition, the two also share a certain visual similarity, with a hairstyle the covers half their face. What’s more, Hyakkimaru’s quest to re-assemble his body from the parts he retrieves from defeating the demons has a certain “medical” quality to it. As such, Hyakkimaru is considered by many to be a prototypical version of Black Jack.

Notable Roles

Although the series isn’t named after him, Hyakkimaru made his debut in, and is arguably the main protagonist of, the series Dororo (1967-69), where he appears as a samurai warrior on a mission to hunt down and destroy the demons who effectively stole 48 of his body parts when he was a baby. Besides his appearances in that series, he has also appeared twice in Black Jack (1973-83) in the chapters, “Miyuki and Ben” and “Ashes and Diamonds”, and made a short cameos in Gum Gum Punch (1969) and Gachaboi’s Biography (1970).