Part 278: The Will to Act Alone: Ranking of Kings and a Destiny 1 Who Cannot Speak

The numerological scheme this series has used for two hundred and seventy-seven parts assigns to the number 1 the following vibration: beginnings, leadership, and the will to act alone. It is the number of the Leader and the Pioneer. It is, in the shorthand this series has leaned on since its first essay, the number of the one who goes first and does not wait to be followed. It belongs, in the ordinary run of things, to conquerors.

It also belongs to Bojji, the protagonist of Sosuke Toka's Ranking of Kings (王様ランキング, Ousama Ranking), who is deaf, cannot speak, is physically too weak to lift a sword, and is introduced to us as a figure of open contempt in his own court — a prince whose subjects assume, without much cruelty and with total confidence, that he is an idiot. He is the eldest son of an enormous king. He is the size of a small child. He cries constantly. And his name reduces to the number of the will to act alone.

Two Ways to Be Alone

Here is the thing the lens is good for, and it is a narrow thing, but it is real: it produces a question. Why does a story about the least autonomous person in his kingdom keep insisting on his autonomy?

Because Toka has spotted something the fantasy genre almost always fumbles. The standard underdog narrative gives the weak hero a compensating gift — a hidden power, a prophecy, a dead mentor's technique — and the weakness turns out to have been a disguise. Bojji gets none of that. He is not secretly strong. Across the whole manga he remains someone who cannot win a straight fight against a competent adult, and Toka never revokes it. What Bojji has instead is an almost unbearable attentiveness: because he cannot hear, he watches, and because he watches, he sees what everyone else in the room is too busy talking to notice. He reads intention off a shoulder. He knows who is lying. He is the only character in his own court who is actually paying attention.

And this is where the number stops being a coincidence and becomes a genuinely useful piece of misdirection. The 1 means the will to act alone. Bojji acts alone — but not because he is a pioneer striding out ahead of lesser men. He acts alone because nobody can hear him. His isolation is not chosen; it is imposed, by a disability and by a court that has decided in advance what he is. The number arrives at exactly the right answer for entirely the wrong reason, and noticing that gap is more interesting than any tidy correspondence would have been.

The 11 Over the Whole Thing

Ranking of Kings itself carries a Destiny 11 — a master number, the Visionary, whose vibration is inspiration, tension, and heightened awareness. Its Heart's Desire is a 7, the Analyst and Seeker: the number of watching, of secrecy, of the search for what is actually true.

Heightened awareness. For a manga whose entire dramatic engine is a boy who perceives more than anyone around him because he has been cut off from the ordinary channel of information, that is about as apt as this series has managed. And it extends past Bojji. Ranking of Kings is a story in which nearly every character is misread by nearly every other, and in which the misreadings are the plot: the terrifying giant king who is gentle, the loyal retainer who is scheming, the monstrous stepmother who — in one of the manga's genuinely excellent reversals — is not what she has been arranged to look like. Toka's method is to present a fairy-tale surface, with the flat, rounded, almost picture-book art of a children's story, and then make the reader do the work of seeing through it. The art is not naive. The art is bait.

Toka's own number is the same 11, with an 8 — the Achiever — in the Personality. He came to this from an unusual direction: Ousama Ranking began as a webcomic, self-published, outside the magazine apparatus entirely, and worked its way to a Wit Studio adaptation on the strength of readers finding it. The Serialization Machine essays on this site spend a good deal of time on the narrow gate every mangaka has to pass through. Here is one who went round it.

The Shadow Who Talks

The formal problem of a mute protagonist is that manga is a medium of speech balloons, and Toka's solution is the best thing in the work. Bojji is given a companion, Kage — a living shadow, a survivor of an assassin clan, a thief with no loyalty to anyone — who can understand him. Kage becomes the mouth. He translates, and in translating, he editorialises, and the reader receives Bojji's interior life filtered through the sarcasm of a creature who started out intending to rob him.

This is not just a workaround. It is the emotional architecture of the whole manga. Bojji cannot be known directly; he can only be known through someone who chose to bother learning how. The friendship is not sentimental — Kage is greedy and cowardly and says so — but it is the mechanism by which a person the world has written off is finally rendered legible. If you want to know what the manga is about, it is about that: the difference between being unable to speak and being unable to be heard, and the fact that only the second one is anybody's fault.

Where I Should Stop

The usual caveat, and I will keep it short because this series has now made it many times. Ranking of Kings is an English rendering of Ousama Ranking, and the number 11 is attached to the English. Bojji, at least, is a romanized name rather than a translated phrase, which makes it the sturdier of the two readings — but a Pythagorean scheme built for the Latin alphabet has no jurisdiction over ボッジ, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What survives the caveat is the question the number asked. Two hundred and seventy-eight essays in, I have read a great many 1s: Luffy, and the founders, and the pioneers who act alone because acting alone is what greatness looks like. Bojji is the same number attached to the opposite condition, and holding the two together tells you something the medium does not often say out loud — that the solitary hero and the excluded child are, structurally, the same figure seen from different sides of the door. One of them chose it. The number cannot tell them apart. That is the lens failing, and the failure is more instructive than a success would have been.