Fans of magnificent monsters dislike the fact that Asagi isn't one; but in Tamura's world, monsters of any description are few and far between. She's taken note of the fact that in reality people do the most atrocious things for fairly banal and disappointing reasons. I think it's to her credit that she undercuts Asagi's villainies with a dose of reality, and not a dose of High Romance. What fuels Asagi's nihilism is a pervading insecurity: a sense of nothingness attached to his own identity. There's a hole in the centre of himself. He has recurring nightmares of not knowing who he is. What he hates about Shuri is the fact that Shuri knows unshakeably who he is, and never stops saying so. Take all the trappings of power away from him- as Asagi does- reduce Shuri to a powerless wounded slave, and Shuri's ego barely registers the change. Shuri has a sense of self and Asagi doesn't. Asagi keeps trying to take Shuri's selfhood away from him and make it his own. Asagi can't do it, and it drives him crazy. If you like, you can see Sarasa as the symbol of that selfhood- the certainty that Shuri has and Asagi wants. Asagi isn't satisfied until Sarasa has insisted that, given a choice between Shuri and Asagi, she'll pick Asagi: because Shuri is the Red King but Asagi is her friend. And somehow in the course of knowing Sarasa, some of her certainty gets transplanted into Asagi. Near the series' end, when the same things happen to him as he did to the SK and Shuri, he finds that being himself is enough, after all.

But never mind Asagi/Sarasa. You know nothing can come between fated couplings in Tamura: if Ageha can't win the Sarasa sweepstakes, Asagi is a complete non-starter. Consider Asagi and Ageha instead. The two are connected in several basic ways, the most basic of which- in this series- is colour. (Colour is everything in Basara. It's the main subject of Tamura's second illustration collection, Daichi (the earth)). Asagi and Ageha share a colour, blue, and are often shown together in Tamura's fantasy illustrations. Western fans get the itch to slash them and are only stopped by an uncertainty as to which of them is seme and which uke. (Japanese fans, perverse as ever, won't touch the series with a bargepole.) It's a neat question, because this coupling turns yaoi conventions on their head.

You can argue that what makes Ageha attractive to Asagi is that Ageha too has a strong sense of self, in a more attractive packaging than Shuri. Ageha's selfhood is conscious and thinking, which makes him different from Shuri; and Ageha like Asagi is an unwilling idealist, which makes him different from Sarasa. Like them, though, Ageha knows who he is, or seems to. Of course you can also argue that Ageha is mistaken about who he is, as his friend Taro does: that he's deliberately taken the wrong role in life, defining himself as passive when he's more fitted to be active. It's true that for whatever reasons, Ageha finds it more congenial to be uke, speaking in general terms: but he's what I've heard called a 'sasoi-uke'- the enticing uke who makes the overtures, does the deciding about who and where and when, and who then lies back and tells his seme to get on with it. Put in non-sexual terms, Ageha brings Sarasa over and over again to a point of moral choice, and then stands back to see what choice she'll make. He's stunningly effective as her emissary (see the sidestory where he nearly gets himself and two other people electrocuted by lightning in order to provide a portent and convince an undecided village to join the rebellion), but he never acts to further his own goals. It takes a great upheaval to make Ageha change roles, and some of us rather wish he hadn't.

Beyond this point are *real* spoilers


Equally, of course, Asagi gives the impression of someone forced into the active seme role before he really knows what he's doing. He acts, but his actions have no real foundation. As the story unfolds through the post-Hideous Discovery chapters, hints about Asagi's past become clearer. He said before that when his mother found herself pregnant again, she took 'someone's' advice and switched her child for a slave's, and then had that someone bring her real child up. That someone is the White King, the high king's daughter and Shuri's full sister. She was married young, but the high king became suspicious of her husband, had him declared a traitor, and sent his army to destroy him. It was the WK's childhood friend Hiiragi who killed her husband and brought her away from the conflagration in the palace. He was badly scarred and she became paralyzed from the waist down. She lives on with the desire to destroy the family that brought her such misery, and he lives on to do her bidding. That includes finding the children whom she raises and he trains to be Asagi's four assassins.

Asagi's hatred of the royal family and his wish to bring them down is something he acquired from the White King. However much he insists it's his own desire, the real motivation is hers, not his. It's her advice and instructions he's been following throughout. She sent him first to the Blue King's court, then to Tatara's camp. She was behind his plot to disenthrone Shuri. But the WK is prepared to use anything and anyone to further her goal of destruction. The discovery that she'll join with Shuri as easily as with himself shakes Asagi's faith. (And in the past the WK constantly compared Asagi to Shuri, making it clear that Asagi never came first with her. Asagi's dislike of Shuri goes back to his childhood.) That early line about not wanting to be toyed with and manipulated comes back, because that's exactly what has been happening to Asagi all along.

When he finally turns on his sister, refusing the role she wants him to play, she tells him the truth. "Did you really think you were the Blue King? Did you ever meet your mother? Was there ever anything that proved you to be the king?" No. Asagi is just another foundling child whom Hiiragi picked off the street and the WK raised, like the four retainers, to be an instrument of destruction. Small wonder that he's never been certain who he is: even the WK doesn't know where he came from or what he was.

Asagi has picked up the WK's nihilism, but unlike her he's able to turn his back on it. He refuses to kill her, as she wants him to; but while he escapes in the company of the nicest (and most long-suffering) of his four retainers, his sister chooses to die in the conflagration she has started in the royal palace.

And in fact, in a side story after the main story's end, the whole question becomes unclear again. After her husband's murder, the WK returned to Kyoto where she was raped one night by her drunken father. She became pregnant by him, and when the child was born she told Hiiragi to kill it. But soon after she began to rave, saying that she could hear her child crying. 'He's dead,' Hiiragi tells her, 'dead and buried.' 'Then dig him up again and give him back to me.' Hiiragi produces a child, Asagi, but it's unclear from the dialogue whether the sin Hiiragi then accuses himself of is that of sacrificing an innocent child to the WK's mania, or that of having disobeyed the WK in the first place and letting her child live. Toss a coin. Asagi may still be Shuri's brother.

And from hints that get dropped here and there- and made practically crystal clear in one of the side-stories- Asagi's older brother, the talented prince who made his father nervous by his ability to see farther through a brick wall than most men, didn't die in the carefully staged hunting accident that was supposed to have killed him. He fell wounded into the river which washed him down country, and was taken in by a certain Master Basho whom we meet in the course of the manga. Whether it was the wound he suffered or a blow to the head in the river isn't certain, but he lost his sight. Yup- Nagi is Asagi's older brother.

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