Living Outside of the Law in Inio Asano’s Mujina Into the Deep Volume 1
The world doesn’t love you. It won’t care for you or even try to protect you. It will make you believe that the best thing for you is to give up your basic human rights to survive and to live outside of society. The world just doesn’t care for you and it is up to you and I to be there for each other. That’s the harsh introduction in Inio Asano’s first volume of Mujina Into The Deep, a book about our changing times and the need to adapt to them. At just 40-some years old, Terumi Morgan once worked at a prominent game design company but now labors as a contractor in a small game studio, struggling to connect with his much younger co-workers. Much of his life revolves around the disconnect he feels with young adults and children like his stepson, who is caught up in the turmoil of his mother and Terumi’s divorce.
Additionally, there are the Mujina, a stratum of society who have given up basic human rights and the rule of law. These are (largely) young people who have forsaken their citizenship rights to live outside the confines of normal society. They thrive beneath the feet of “lawful” society, acting as assassins for hire and influencers. Mujina like the popular online influencer Tenko have become the new heroes for generations younger than Terumi, experiencing a freedom that those confined to the boundaries of society yearn for. Even Terumi finds himself longing for that freedom or something akin to it.
The book opens with an adrenaline-filled sequence with a woman jumping around Tokyo’s rooftops hunting down her prey as another girl gets off the bus in the big city, running away from home. The runaway doesn’t realize the danger in the man who greets her at the train station; she’s that innocent. This opening is large, exciting, and a bit of a Trojan horse for a different story that we’ll get in the second half of this book where the action leads into reflection. The opening is action-packed, a thrill ride that gets us into Asano’s book but it’s not the story that Asano is telling.
Through these people, Asano expresses a restlessness with the way that the world has changed around him and the direction it’s going in. Or maybe it’s the direction that Asano going in as Terumi’s discontent could be a reflection of the artist’s own longings. Terumi looks at the world around him and one part of him wants to yell at his younger co-workers “Get off my lawn” but there’s another side of him that is intrigued by the youthful Mujina movement, even if he doesn’t want to admit it or maybe doesn’t realize it. He’s a man who has remained frozen in a moment as the world has shifted around him. And that shift has opened up a new society free of the rules that bind you and me. And all you have to do is sign away any rights you have to a normal life to step into this new society. Those younger game designers see a kind of freedom in that life, a freedom that Terumi can’t wrap his head around.
Ubume, the assassin we encountered at the beginning of the book, lives by a Mujina code that’s enforced by the sword. Even though she lives on the rooftops, her world is the Tokyo underground. Asano doesn’t reveal that much about Ubume, not nearly as much as he does about Terumi or the runaway Juno Oshima, Ubume and Tenko, the influencer Mujina, are storms tearing through normal people’s lives; they’re alike but so different and we get a taste of the Mujina life through them. So when you have this new kind of society developing, where does that leave the rest of us?
Ubume rescues Juno from her predators and suddenly Juno finds herself in this liminal space between Terumi’s ordered world and Ubume’s chaotic existence. Terumi may be looking at the Mujina world from the outside but Juno finds herself accidentally thrust into it without being a true member of it. Asano establishes these competing ways of just getting through this world and then explores them by having the characters move back and forth through them.
In his storytelling, Asano has never shied away from the cruelty of the world (see A Girl on the Shore, Goodnight Punpun, or even Solanin.) Juno is the receiver of that cruelty here, revealing the reasons why she ran away. Her story begins almost comically cliche-ish— the runaway picked up at the bus stop and then exploited into sex work. But it turns out that her story isn’t about what happens when she runs away but what she is running from. And what she’s running away from is a cruelty that only people who should care for you can inflict on you. What she finds in Tokyo isn’t necessarily a family but the beginnings of a community.
That’s what this book is— a beginning. It’s hard, a bit cold, and it’s not all that interesting in making things easy for the reader. Asano rarely wants to make it easy for us; he wants his stories to confront us. Mujina Into The Deep Volume 1 brings us into a lived-in city that doesn’t care for us but that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for empathy or even love in this city. That’s what Asano is searching for in his manga— those connections that help us realize that we’re not alone in this world. This volume lays the groundwork for these people to make those kinds of connections that have been missing in their lives, whether they live in an orderly society or a messy anarchy.