Outside of video games, the Legend of Zelda series has branched out into other fiction mediums, including that of manga. Probably some of the best known, at least where I am in the United States, are the volumes written by Akira Himekawa. They have written a manga volume for almost every Zelda game entry. I love both manga and Zelda, so it does pain me to say that I am not a huge fan of the Zelda manga I have read thus far. However, the Majora’s Mask volume included a bonus side story at the end that really stuck with me and I actually loved it. Akira Himekawa described it as an original story for Majora’s Mask, a myth about the origins of the mask itself and how it was created. In this piece, I want to talk about the mysterious, unnamed realm that this story takes place in.
The manga side story feels like a folktale, which tells the story of a man-eating monster who rules an empty domain. He is very defensive of his magical armor and eats any humans who come and try and take it from him. One traveler manages to make the monster realize his own loneliness and helps the monster to break out of this solitude. The traveler plays music with his magical conga drum and the monster dances until he falls down and dies, the realm collapsing around him. With only the monster’s armor left, the traveler whittles it into Majora’s Mask, with the monster’s power sealed inside.
This mysterious realm is not really defined or given a name. At the beginning of the chapter we are presented with a blank landscape of random, thin monoliths. Two of these pillars seem to be more intentional, symmetrical to one another and each with a grotesque in front. Almost as of this is intended to be some sort of gate. This flat land creates an endless, empty landscape for this man-eating monster to wander. We are not able to gather that much information about this place from the panel art alone. However, we are able to gather some more from the character dialogue. The man-eating monster explains how he has been trapped in this world, “Bound by space, bound by time, for thousands of years…” After coming to the realization that he’s lonely and ready to escape this realm, the man-eating monster begs the traveler to grant him his wish. “Make time flow for me!” he says, implying that he has been frozen in this dimension all this time. The traveler grants the monster his wish, playing him a song that would allowed time to be born. So the monster danced until he fell. Upon his death, the realm he was in crumbled and disappeared with him, leaving only his armor which he yearned to protect.
Ironically, I really like the imagery of this blank world. It represents the empty world that this man-eating monster has trapped himself in. He spends his days, waiting to defend himself against humans who never come. The world is only empty because the monster made it so. This lonely landscape only exists because he allows it. I also love how after he dies, the entire world dies with him. Almost like he didn’t only create his own lonely prison metaphorically, but maybe even literally.
Much like the Majora’s Mask game, this manga story has some neat psychological subtleties that I really love. Comics and manga are so cool because they are able to tell compelling stories in only a couple dozen pages (in this case twenty-two pages) and still images. Akira Himekawa took it a step further and told a compelling story with an empty background and was able to use it to add more depth to this short, original story.
