(Mostly about Father because y’all know how I roll.)
Been sitting on some thoughts about Father, Yato, and their relationship and respective childhoods for a long while now.
I didn’t draft this beforehand because I’m not really in the headspace for super structured meta at the moment but I wanted to share some Thoughts™ so please excuse the messiness. First thoughts post of the year!
Currently thinking about how Father said that cull the herd was “the only wish he’s been able to wish in his entire life” and yet we see him as a child first and foremost wondering WHY the gods just watch human suffering, when they bear a human face and hands and eyes.
(grabs you by the shoulders)
Yato is the antithesis of Heaven’s callousness and carelessness with human lives.
His internal drive has always to been to make people happy, he MOURNED the unnecessary deaths of people, he is not an embodiment of Father’s superficial desire for destruction but a god who truly cares for humanity and their sorrows, exactly the kind of god that a young Father would have wanted to see!!!!!!
love how noragami is praised like “wow! the manga examines trauma & abuse and how it fundamentally shapes and affects people throughout their entire lives in such a profound way!”
a chunk of the fandom proceeds to entirely miss the point.
What better way to spend your afternoon than posting a meta right before the chapter drops and possibly destroys everything written in it?)
One of the many things about Father that the readers of Noragami find interesting is his eyes. Specifically how sometimes the shading on one of them is different from the other.
I’ve never really seen how that could be explained. The only volume cover with Father on it has him with one of his eyes closed. Luckily, I’ve recently started collecting all of the volume covers, including the inside covers. Now I know that Father is actually on TWO covers:
1) Volume 11 cover – you know, the one where he’s lying on a heap of newspaper clippings with the articles about the murders he had Yato commit;
2) Volume 16 inside cover.
And this is how he looks on both covers:
That’s it, everything’s clear now, nothing to see here anymore, everyone, go home.
Well, not really.
See, most of the time Father’s/Fujisaki’s eyes are actually evenly colored. They are dark, just like most of the other character’s in the series, regardless of whether he’s in the body of Fujisaki Kouto or out of it (you know, when he’s wearing that black yukata). That must be Fujisaki’s body’s eye color, the one that people who talk to him see. After all, not a single character has commented on this periodic heterochromia he has, so it probably doesn’t really manifest.
For the purposes of this meta I’ve looked at every.single.frame.with.Father.in.it. Also looked at some other characters’ eyes. My observations are listed below.
A character’s eye color often changes to indicate some sort of emotion. Hiyori, for example, has dark eyes (brown), like on the picture of the left. On the other picture they are much lighter than usual. This is a moment from chapter 36 when she thought they have no way of getting Yato out of Yomi, seconds before Amaterasu shows up (the picture on the right is actually from the same chapter, a couple of pages prior).
Sometimes a character’s eyes go completely white, like in the case of Bishamon here. On the left you can see her normal eye color (purple), on the right – the eye color when she’s shocked that the seven gods of fortune are accused of taming ayakashi.
Father’s eyes sometimes become white to reflect two states – either when he’s shocked (on the left) or when he’s plotting something (on the right):
However, in most of the scenes he’s in his eyes are dark and evenly colored:
I’ve actually found only 12 moments when the shading on of the eyes is slightly different. Still, other characters don’t have this feature, so ignoring it is not an option. Adachitoka’s art is very detailed; it can’t be a simple mistake or accident.
Here they are. I’m not so sure about chapter 77 though, ‘cause the different eye color in that one could be attributed to lighting. That’s not the case with the other ones , especially when it comes to Father’s introduction – the darker eye is on the lighter side of his face.
From what we see here, Father’s right eye seems to be darker in most of the cases, except for chapters 63, 80 and 81. Since I don’t see a clear rule on which eye is supposed to be get the extra lighting, I can’t really suggest that one of them means one thing and the other one means something else.
Then maybe we should look into what happens in the scenes themselves?
Chapter 24 – Fujisaki prevents Hiyori from falling down the stairs and tells her to be careful. Father already knows who Hiyori is; according to him, he moved to Tokyo to get to her specifically.
Chapter 39 – Father is telling Mizuchi that Yato will return to them.
Chapter 40 – Father says that he will allow Yato to make a couple of good memories because he’s such a nice dad. Moments earlier he was conducting an experiment – he used the new kotonoha to control a person possessed by one of his masks.
Chapter 44 – Father is talking about gods and how the way their human creator manipulates them is no concern of theirs.
Chapter 45 – Father is watching Kofuku’s house. He then creates a mask that possesses a boy and infiltrates Tenjin’s shrine to get rid of Edachi.
Chapter 63 – Father watches how Bishamon is trying to get to him while thinking that this way she will turn the Heaven’s execution squad’s eyes away from Yato.
Chapter 68 – Father fakes seeing Kazuma to make Bishamon turn her back to him. However, he notices several gods approaching to them and fleets.
Chapter 77 – Father kills “Bishamon”, who is actually Edachi.
Chapter 80 – Father says there’s a way to come back to life/come back from Yomi (he uses both of these phrases in his conversation with Yukine; whether they mean the same thing for him or not is yet to be revealed).
Chapter 81 – Father tells Hiyori that Yukine has started wondering about his past.
Chapter 87, picture #1 – Father suggests that Hagusa searches for his human name around the house.
Chapter 87, picture #2 – Father must be thinking about his past (the first 19 pages of 87-2 are probably his memories that segway into Nora’s tale).
Again, I don’t see a clear pattern here. I could say that these are all moments when Father is plotting something. But there are other scenes in which he does the same yet his eye color is ordinary.
So yeah, failed to notice any correlation between Father’s eyes and his thoughts and/or actions. However, there is one more option left – the different shading on one of the eyes could be a hint that there are two souls in the body of Fujisaki Kouto – his own and Father’s. After all, he has red eyes on the cover of volume 11, where his physical body is depicted, and blue eyes on the cover of volume16, where he’s in his spirit form.
I have mentioned several times now how I believe that Father possesses not just another person’s body, but their soul as well. It’s mostly based on two things:
1) In chapter 80 Father says that himself – that he possesses the soul of the Fujisaki family’s eldest son. This wording always seemed strange to me – why not say that he possesses the body? Of course, Father’s words can’t be trusted without further proof from other characters. In this case, the proof is Thing #2.
2) In chapter 81 Hiyori noticed Father flying above her head on a giant ayakashi, but her friends didn’t. If there were still people left who thought that Father doesn’t actually leave Fujisaki’s body, this moment should have finally convinced them. And during the fight Father showed Hiyori his true appearance, just for a split second. And we know that it actually happened, because Hiyori remembers it happening.
Of course, it’s just a theory. However, it brings up some questions.
1) When does Father transfer to another body (and soul) – right from the body’s birth or later?
2) What happens to the soul he possesses?
Let’s focus on the first one for now and see how Father can hop from one person to another.
1) Reincarnation in an infant’s body
Judging from Father’s words, this seems to be the case – he says that he lives and dies in other people’s bodies ever since his return from Yomi, and that he doesn’t get to choose. So when his current body, he is simply somehow born in another person’s body. And he keeps his memories, personality, goals and motivation, which is creepy of several reasons. The idea of a thousand year old man being in a toddler’s body is deeply unsettling. But it’s very inconvenient for Father, too – having the mind of a growing while being confined in a body that for some time can’t sit, walk and talk every time he is reborn. After all. he doesn’t have the luxury of being able to think rationally and talk without any learning the way reincarnated gods do. His abilities are restricted to the abilities of a human body, and even if they aren’t, he will have to fake it if he doesn’t want to raise suspicions.
And there’s also a question of how Nora must be the one controlling Yato when Father is too small to do that. If we take into account volume 8 omake, then Yato worked as a magatsukami when Fujisaki was a toddler, so it’s unlikely that he was the one finding the jobs, so Nora had to take over. I’ve thought about it, and yeah, I think she could actually handle that. Yato admitted that one of the reasons he kept doing the jobs was because he still somewhat enjoyed I, even the most recent time he returned to being a magatsukami. If Nora waited for an opening when yet another shinki would leave Yato, he would probably agree to do the jobs even without Father’s influence.
2) Possessing an existing human
By which that I mean that Father doesn’t live his life in a new body from the start but rather starts possessing a real existing person. We do have to take into account that he really doesn’t get to choose the person. Why would he choose some random student who doesn’t even live in Tokyo and had to move there? If Father could choose the body, he probably wouldn’t even need Yato. There are many means of destroying humans as it is. If he wanted to use them, all he needed was possesses the right person.
If Father can’t switch bodies on his own volition, there must be some conditions that prevent him from possessing any human he wants. Maybe his soul can only transfer to another person when his body dies? Or maybe there are conditions regarding the person that can be possessed? Divine possession, for example, requires a human and a god to have a special bond:
Maybe not every person can host Father’s soul.
This kind of possession eliminates the whole “grown man in an infant’s body” thing, but it’s not without its cons. It means that Father has to substitute another human and he has to work to successfully impersonate the human he knows nothing about. That being said, there’s nothing stopping him from cutting all the ties this person had before being possessed and moving elsewhere, so there’s no need to pretend. Overall, I think that this option would be more convenient for Father.
If this is the case, I’m curious to know when exactly Father started possessing Fujisaki. Let’s examine some of the things he tells about himself to see if there’s anything in them.
We know for sure that Fujisaki Kouto transferred to Hiyori’s school at the start of the new school year. In chapter 30 he tells a little about himself:
The part about Fujisaki having a sister and nieces is true, but the rest is fishy. When Father stopped coming to school after the rebellion, Yama found out that he had lied about living with his father who moved to Tokyo for work:
Why would Father lie about Fujisaki-senior separating from the family and tell the he only moved for work is unclear. It’s also not clear when did Father get rid of him, if that’s what Yama’s words imply. I do believe though that the apartment where he lives in Tokyo really was Fujisaki Kouto’s dad’s place. After all, moving in with your father, even if he left the family, is easier than finding a place on your own.
As for when did Father start possessing Fujisaki: on the first glance, the sudden move to Tokyo does seem to be exactly what I said he could do in so that he doesn’t have to pretend to be someone else. However, some scenes suggest that he has lived with the Fujisaki family for quite a while. Like how he has to correct himself when he starts referring to Fujisaki’s relatives as if they were his own. SO he had to be Fujisaki Kouto for some time; maybe even his entire life?
BTW, unless Father is lying, he was still living with Fujisaki-senior in summer. So if he did get rid of the “dad” after all, it must have happened later.
Whichever way Father possesses people, from birth or not, there’s the question of what happens to the body’s original soul, i.e. if it has a consciousness of its own, independent of Father. As usual, we have to rely on Father’s information in this case, too. Except he is a very, very unreliable source of information. On the one hand, his words about transfer exam must be true, since no one questions Fujisaki going to Hiyori’s school. He visits classes like everyone else and even does some extra work after school:
Here Fujisaki is so… normal, at least compared to what he’s like in later chapters that it’s almost like he isn’t Father. On the other hand, the Father side manifests itself within seconds:
All in all, I can’t really recall any specific scene where I could tell Father and Fujisaki apart. Even when he acts quite normal it’s much more likely that it’s just Father pretending to be a kind person rather than the real Fujisaki showing through. I’m afraid that either from the moment he was born, or some time after that, poor Fujisaki Kouto is no more than a vegetable, and his soul is completely controlled by Father. I think that they sort of merge into one, to be honest. Whenever Father leaves the body of Fujisaki, he has the boy’s appearance, but wears his own black yukata, the one we see in Yato’s flashbacks. Unfortunately, we can’t compare his case with anyone, since there’s only one other character who is a human able to leave her body – Hiyori. Unlike Father, Hiyori in her spirit from look exactly like her body, clothes and all. Since she is the only one to do so, we don’t know if that’s the norm, but it seems more logical than whatever is going on with Father.
These were my thoughts on Father’s eyes. Whether Adachitoka will ever uncover the secret behind his eyes or let it remain a mystery is hard to tell, but one Father’s differently colored eyes sure make him even more memorable.
Aka me avoiding working on Part 2 of my Father Meta bc idk how to approach it.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve been thinking about this ever since Chapter 80 dropped. And if you’ve been thinking about it, there’s one thing we’re all undoubtedly scratching our heads over:
what’s the loophole?
Well, here’s a singular theory. Elaboration under the cut.
Well, now that I’m back to being lost about whether Father went into Yomi 1) alive to get the kotonoha 2) alive to get his girl back or 3) dead and had to be soul called by the girl might as well look into what other people have to say about it.
For someone who supposedly hates Father, I sure talk a lot about him, huh
While I was flipping through the pages of the manga, I once again came to a stop at the soul summoning scene in chapter 37. Specifically at Nora’s tale about Father escaping from Yomi, which I, apparently, did not pay due attention to.
I’ve never had a single opinion on how Father got in and out of Yomi, so I toyed with a few.
1. When Father was still human, he was already interested in researching ayakashi (like Ebisu, for example), somehow learned about the kotonoha (the Word of Yomi) and decided to get one for himself. He voluntarily ventured into Yomi but asked the pock-marked girl to soul call him beforehand, and she did just that.
2. The pock-marked girl died, and Father got mad at the gods for being directly or indirectly involved. He went to Yomi to get her back, stumbled upon Izanami, saw the brushes in action, and either stole or wheedled out one of them.
3.Father was the one who died while the pock-marked girl lived. While in Yomi, Father encountered Izanami, learned about the brushes, and got his hands on one of them.
In this post I want to examine the last option – the one in which Father died and was resurrected by that girl of his through soul summoning.
First of all, let me remind you that soul summoning isn’t something Adachitoka came up with specifically for Noragami, but an actual Japanese tradition.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that whatever exists in our world is also a thing in Noragami universe. All the locations that we see in the series, specifically shrines, are real places (with the exception of the characters’ houses, Takamagahara and Yomi, obviously). This means that the tradition of soul summoning can easily exist in-universe.
Soul summoning is probably a Chinese thing since I came across a similar scene in the novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant by Yu Hua. There, a child was asked to climb on the roof and call his father who was in a coma so that he won’t die. Therefore I would say it is an actual practice to keep a dying man from leaving this world, not a way to come back from death. So my doubt is still there: was father alive, was he dead or was he in between when he went to Yomi?
Besides, I like the idea of the twin sisters!
To keep someone from dying, huh? Interesting, especially considering that another thing that I’ve been told about Yomi is that some poeple think it’s not a place where people go to the afterlife but rather a place a soul can be lost in accidentally. Was Father in a coma or something and wondered off to Yomi, so that the girl had to bring him back? Beats me.
The problem with looking at the Chinese variations of such traditions is that they’re usually poor reflections of the Japanese traditions. In the early days of Japan (prior to the 9th century), there’s little that you can say didn’t come from China or Korea: politics, fashion, religion (particularly Buddhism), rice farming. Hell, even the Japanese writing system itself was developed from Chinese and Chinese was used by educated men.
(Above:comparison of a Nara period woman and a Tang period woman, which were happening at the same time in Japan and China respectively.)
But by the Heian period (794 to 1185), however, Japan moved away from just mimicking the Chinese and started developing its own sense of cultural identity. Many traditions and fashions that were originally imported from China became transformed and uniquely… well, uniquely Japanese, though Chinese influence was still prevalent. Even Buddhism integrated with Shinto, Japan’s native folk religion – the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas became venerated as kami and many traditional images of kami are strongly influenced by Buddhist imagery.
(Above: Buddhist-Shinto deities, excerpt from my copy of Cultural Atlas of Japan by Martin Collcutt, Marius Jansen, and Isao Kumakura.Kinda old but still a trove of good info.)
Luckily, I was able to find some writings on tamayobaiin its Japanese context in the book Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan by Marilyn Ivy. Rest under the cut because uhhh this might get a little long.
Oh, I read all of it, I just don’t know what else to say about this whole returning from Yomi thing. I mean, Nora heavily implied that the pock-marked girl died from a “natural disaster”, so now I’m really confused when exactly it happened, before or after Father’s little trip to Yomi. Still think she was the one to soul call him though, ‘cause I doubt Adachitoka would introduce her solely to be killed off by the Heavens.
For someone who supposedly hates Father, I sure talk a lot about him, huh
While I was flipping through the pages of the manga, I once again came to a stop at the soul summoning scene in chapter 37. Specifically at Nora’s tale about Father escaping from Yomi, which I, apparently, did not pay due attention to.
I’ve never had a single opinion on how Father got in and out of Yomi, so I toyed with a few.
1. When Father was still human, he was already interested in researching ayakashi (like Ebisu, for example), somehow learned about the kotonoha (the Word of Yomi) and decided to get one for himself. He voluntarily ventured into Yomi but asked the pock-marked girl to soul call him beforehand, and she did just that.
2. The pock-marked girl died, and Father got mad at the gods for being directly or indirectly involved. He went to Yomi to get her back, stumbled upon Izanami, saw the brushes in action, and either stole or wheedled out one of them.
3.Father was the one who died while the pock-marked girl lived. While in Yomi, Father encountered Izanami, learned about the brushes, and got his hands on one of them.
In this post I want to examine the last option – the one in which Father died and was resurrected by that girl of his through soul summoning.
First of all, let me remind you that soul summoning isn’t something Adachitoka came up with specifically for Noragami, but an actual Japanese tradition.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that whatever exists in our world is also a thing in Noragami universe. All the locations that we see in the series, specifically shrines, are real places (with the exception of the characters’ houses, Takamagahara and Yomi, obviously). This means that the tradition of soul summoning can easily exist in-universe.
Soul summoning is probably a Chinese thing since I came across a similar scene in the novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant by Yu Hua. There, a child was asked to climb on the roof and call his father who was in a coma so that he won’t die. Therefore I would say it is an actual practice to keep a dying man from leaving this world, not a way to come back from death. So my doubt is still there: was father alive, was he dead or was he in between when he went to Yomi?
Besides, I like the idea of the twin sisters!
To keep someone from dying, huh? Interesting, especially considering that another thing that I’ve been told about Yomi is that some poeple think it’s not a place where people go to the afterlife but rather a place a soul can be lost in accidentally. Was Father in a coma or something and wondered off to Yomi, so that the girl had to bring him back? Beats me.
Summary: In his many long years on this earth The Sorcerer has had to reincarnate many times. A few of those times are BOUND to be because his idiot son did something an idiot would do
x x x x
“I’m sorry,” Yato said, trailing after the teenager in front of him, scowling with an anger born of multiple generations.
“Oh it’s fine Yato, no problem at all.”
“I didn’t mean to!”
“I should hope not!” The teenager snapped. “I should hope that burning me, your one and only father, alive wasn’t your intention! But then again, maybe I should hope that because then that would mean you weren’t stupid enough to burn down our entire hut.”
“I was trying to make you breakfast! I didn’t know you were keeping gunpowder in the fireplace! That’s a stupid place to keep gunpowder!”
The unfamiliar eyes of Father’s newest incarnation turned on him in a very familiar expression of extreme anger. Yato flinched back several steps.
“Not that I’m calling you stupid, I would never say that, it’s just, seems a little impractical to me.”
“That was the point, no one would think someone would keep gunpowder in the fireplace in the middle of winter!”
“I wasn’t aware that you had even stolen it, much less that it was in the fireplace! I said I was sorry!”
“Ihate being a teenager,” Father said. “You only had to go through puberty once!” He snapped, jabbing a finger in Yato’s face. Yato winced.
“I’msorry.”
“Oh, Father? I love your new look!” Hiiro said, appearing out of nowhere to comment on Father’s new body like it was an outfit. “Very pretty eyes.”
“Andyou never have to go through puberty!” Father said, glaring at Hiiro, still incensed.
“Lucky me,” Hiiro said, dancing around, not caring about father’s temper tantrum. “I remember what a nightmare Yato was. I did try to tell him making breakfast was a bad idea.” There were still remnants of burns all over her body from the mornings explosions, but she paid those no heed as well.
“You didn’t tell me the fireplace was a bomb!”
“Well maybe you should learn to listen better.” Yato scowled.
“I think this is Hiiro’s fault!”
“Did Mizuchi blow me up?”
“No, but-”
“Did Hiiro tell you to blow me up?”
“Not technically but-”
“Then I guess it isn’t Mizuchi’s fault!”
Yato sighed and hung his head, following his father while they scouted out a new place to live, Yato having destroyed the house they were living in. Several minutes later Yato got up the courage to speak again.
“I’m sorry you have to go through puberty again, Dad.”
Father stopped walking and sighed heavily.
“It’s alright son, I plan to be exactly as much of a pain to you as you were to me.” Yato gulped.
Summary: Living a long time is hard, and Father can’t keep track of years and calendars and things, it’s easier for him to refer to time periods by the name of the incarnation he was inhabiting, but Yato absolutely hates it.
*An- I will never write a serious father fic. Also I thought it was funnier if father had wildly out of context names for historical japan. Also for the my name is earl reference.
“I haven’t seen anyone dressed like that since I was Richard.”
Yato scream groaned, trying to veer away from his father, but father reached out without looking and grabbed the back of his kimono, all too familiar with the behaviors of his son.
“Maybe he was a member of an acting troupe, perhaps they’re doing a period drama.”
“It hasn’t been long enough since I was Richard for period dramas, has it?”
“It’s been a while, what, four incarnations?”
“Four?” Father repeated with disbelief. “The time flies.”
Yato didn’t participate in the discussion, he was too busy grinding his teeth and considering shirking out of his clothes and making a break for it naked. It’s not like any of these people could see him, but the idea of running into Bishamon while fully nude kept him suffering through this terrible conversation with his family.
“Now that assassination, the one that was stolen right out from under us, that happened when I was Steven?”
“No,” Hiiro said pointedly, “You were Kyle.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes I’m sure, Father.”
“And I was Garett when Yato lost his first tooth?”
“Yato doesn’t lose teeth, he’s a god.”
“He doesn’t lose them to regrow adult teeth, I’m talking about the first time he was clocked so hard a tooth fell out.” Hiiro laughed at the memory and Yato growled under his breath.
“Yeah, I do remember that, he spoke with a lisp for three days before the tooth grew back!” She laughed. “Oh those were good times.”
“I fucking hate you guys.”
“Well that’s certainly not something I haven’t heard since my name was Earl.”
“I am literally BEGGING you to buy a fucking calander oh my GOD!” Yato shouted, so loudly that some people nearby actually caught sight of them and gave him funny looks. “Why are you so weird?!”
“When you’ve lived as long as I have it’s hard to keep track of things,” Father whined, sneaking an amused look at Hiiro when Yato scowled.
Quick TW: this post contains sensitive content so please proceed with caution.
So, while reading the raws for this chapter, I found this line of Father’s quite particular.
坊主と寝た事もあります。
What piqued my - and some others’ - attention was the と 寝た, which translates roughly with “sleeping with a monk”, rather than just sleeping among monks. There is a subtle suggestiveness surrounding this line - it’s very vague probably for this reason.
![NrM [ノラガミ]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/avatar_6a9c9626ecbe_30.png){kind=avatar}
