I believe that many people have seen "InuYasha" it -
It is a classic anime in the hearts of many people, and everyone has known its author Rumiko Takahashi because of this anime.
However, what few people know is that before Rumiko Takahashi created InuYasha, she created a special manga, which was also adapted into an anime and a theatrical version.
Some people say that anime is The highest masterpiece of Rumiko Takahashi.
That's what I'm going to tell you today—
<h1>Forest of Mermaids</h1>
(Old rules, anime resources have been collected, see the bottom of the article for details)
The "Mermaid Forest" comic scored as high as 8.8 points on Douban -
The adapted animation and theatrical version also reached 8.4 points -
In 1984, Rumiko Takahashi unveiled her work "Mermaid No Mori" in Weekly Shonen Sunday.
Many people believe that this anime is the highest masterpiece of Rumiko Takahashi's manga narrative, and its gloomy and pessimistic ideas are in stark contrast to the "Fukusho Kid" serialized in the same period.
The manga is believed to represent the two extremes of Rumiko Takahashi's work, one extremely joyful and the other extremely gloomy, respectively.
The story begins with a mysterious man.
The man is looking for a place.
The locals told him that the place was deep in the mountains and asked why they were going there, and the man said that he was going to find a mermaid—
meanwhile.
In that village deep in the mountains, the heroine lives with many villagers.
The heroine has not taken a step out of the village since she was a child, has not even left her bed, and cannot walk on the ground, so she is very grumpy -
That night, the villagers of the village held a secret meeting, saying that the heroine had reached the age of fifteen, so one of them must be sacrificed.
So he pushed one out, took her to a cave behind the mountain, and killed her, but the corpses on the ground showed that these people did not seem to be human—
The next day, the heroine tasted a kind of meat that she had never eaten before.
At this moment, the male protagonist finally arrived at this village.
A villager saw the male protagonist and ran to tell the others, so several people went over there together to stop the male protagonist and inquire about the purpose of the male protagonist.
After knowing that the male protagonist came here alone, he killed the male protagonist mercilessly, and threw the male protagonist into the cave before him——
Unexpectedly, the male protagonist who was thrown into the hole came back to life like no one else, and found the body of the mermaid he was looking for in the hole.
The perspective turned, and the villagers were helping the heroine to sit on the palanquin and telling her that she could go out.
At this moment, the male protagonist also broke in, hoping to ask about the mermaid, but was attacked mercilessly.
In order to avoid the pursuit and killing of these villagers, he had to first kidnap the heroine who seemed to be an important person, and after he lifted the quilt on the heroine's bed, he found that the heroine's feet were handcuffed by ankle chains.
The male protagonist had to flee on his back and threaten the villagers not to approach, otherwise they would kill the female protagonist.
But the villagers heard the words and did not hesitate to throw their weapons out -
The weapon scratched the heroine's cheek, and the hero realized that they planned to kill the heroine together, so he jumped into the cave to hide.
He helped the heroine take off the ankle chain in the cave, but because he had worn it for a long time, the part of the heroine's foot had long been blurred with blood and flesh and could not walk.
The male protagonist confessed to the female protagonist that he wanted to find a mermaid because he had eaten mermaid meat before.
The man recalled that it was hundreds of years ago.
The man was a fisherman at the time, and one day, one of his friends picked up a strange piece of meat.
Out of curiosity, the friends all ate a little, and what they didn't expect was that the rest of the people died, and only the male protagonist survived——
After twenty years like this, the male protagonist has maintained a young appearance, and he feels afraid of himself.
At this moment, an old woman told him to go looking for the mermaid, who might have a way to help him.
So in this way, the male protagonist left the village and traveled for hundreds of years.
As they were talking, they were suddenly attacked by a mysterious creature in the cave.
In a hurry, the male protagonist can only fight hard, but finds that the physical attack is completely ineffective against this monster.
The heroine said that the only way to deal with this monster is poison.
Just then, the villagers guarding the top of the cave heard a strange sound, suspecting that the centaur had run out.
The villager even jumped into the cave to save them, but he was seriously injured.
The male protagonist noticed that the appearance of these monsters was exactly the same as the appearance of the monsters that his companions had turned into after eating mermaid flesh.
The male protagonist decided to take the villager to the village to save people first, and let the female protagonist stay there.
The heroine finally tried to stand up on her own, although there was only a moment-
Entering the village again, the man noticed that the village was full of women, and most of them looked like old people.
The male protagonist saw the old man who had been serving the maid again, and the old man guessed that the male protagonist had eaten mermaid meat.
The man asked the old man who the heroine was.
The old man replied that the heroine was the youth of all of them—
All the people in this village are eating the humans who have eaten the flesh of the mermaid.
Every few decades, they go to human villages to look for baby girls and let them eat mermaid meat.
But many people can't withstand the toxicity of mermaid flesh and become "half-mermaids", which is the origin of that half-mermaid cave.
Only the heroine can still maintain her human body after eating mermaid meat.
These villagers raise the heroine in order to eat her—
Those villagers could not let go of the heroine, what cruel things would they do for eternal life?
After the story, I will not say more for everyone, and friends who like it can slowly read in the story (resources I put at the bottom of the article).
This is a manga that thinks about "immortality", and it also pays tribute to Osamu Tezuka's "Fire Bird"——
"Eternal life" or "death", which is more painful.
There has been debate about whether eternal life is happiness or not, but at least for the protagonist of this game, eternal life is painful.
Because of that piece of mermaid meat, he lost all his friends.
Because he had gained eternal life, he was not allowed to leave his hometown, leave his wife, leave his relatives, and embark on a journey alone, searching alone for that little bit of hope in the long years, looking for hundreds of years.
After attaining eternal life, the male protagonist's desire is not to become a god in the new world, nor is it to use this infinite life to do something great.
He just wanted to be back into an ordinary person, to grow, to age, and then to die.
In the male protagonist, some of them may be the epitome of us ordinary people, eternal life is too heavy, and it may be a beauty to try to live out in a limited life.
PS: As the old rule goes, in order to facilitate everyone, I have collected all the resources, including the manga version and the animated version.
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