Part 285: The Triple Five: Vinland Saga and the Long Voyage Away From Vengeance

Three fives. Vinland Saga (ヴィンランド・サガ) reduces to a Destiny 5. Its author, Makoto Yukimura, reduces to a Destiny 5. Its protagonist, Thorfinn, reduces to a Destiny 5. The Freedom Seeker, three times — freedom, disruption, and restless movement — sitting on a Viking epic whose entire moral argument is a journey away from violence and toward a place where violence is not required.

This series found a triple nine on Real a few essays ago and was properly sceptical of it; a run of three identical numbers is what randomness produces when you sample enough names. So I will not pretend the arithmetic is doing anything but what arithmetic does. What I will say is that the 5 — the number of the voyage, of restless movement, of the search for a freedom that the present place cannot supply — is the most exact one-word description of Vinland Saga that I could give if I had never heard of numerology at all.

The Land That Gives the Saga Its Name

Vinland is real, or was. It is the name the Norse gave to the part of North America they reached around the year 1000, five centuries before Columbus, and abandoned. In Yukimura's manga, serialized first in Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine and then, tellingly, moved to the more adult Afternoon in 2005, Vinland is less a place than an idea: a land far to the west, warm and empty and free, where there are no slave-traders and no kings and no wars to be conscripted into. It is the thing Thorfinn eventually decides to sail toward. It is, in the numerological sense the manga could not have known it was invoking, a pure 5 — a freedom that exists only somewhere else, reachable only by movement.

And the structure of the saga is a voyage in two halves, hinged on the number's double meaning. The 5 is freedom, but it is also restlessness, disruption, the inability to stay — and the first half of Vinland Saga is the 5 in its destructive mode.

The First Voyage: Toward a Death

Thorfinn begins as a boy consumed by a single purpose: to kill Askeladd, the mercenary commander who murdered his father. He attaches himself to Askeladd's band, fighting in its wars, demanding duels as payment, sharpening himself into a weapon whose only function is one man's death. He is in constant motion — raiding across England, sailing, killing — and none of it is freedom. It is the restless, disruptive 5 with no destination, movement as a way of not having to feel the thing underneath the movement, which is grief.

Yukimura draws these early volumes as brutal, kinetic historical action, and they are magnificent, and they are a trap. Because the manga is setting up its actual argument, which is that this — the vengeance, the raiding, the boy who has made himself into a blade — is a dead end, spiritually and literally. When Askeladd's death finally comes, it does not come at Thorfinn's hands, and it leaves him with nothing. The purpose that organized his entire existence evaporates, and he is revealed as what he always was: a young man who has thrown his whole life into motion toward a point that turns out to be empty.

The Second Voyage: Toward a Life

"I have no enemies." The line that turns the saga is Thorfinn's, spoken after he has been broken down to nothing and sold into slavery on a farm, where the only work is clearing land and the only philosophy available is that of an old slave who has decided that no person is worth killing. The second half of Vinland Saga is the 5 redeemed — the same restless movement, the same voyaging, but now pointed at a destination worth reaching. Thorfinn resolves to found a settlement in Vinland where escaped slaves and the war-weary can live outside the reach of kings. The voyage continues. Its meaning inverts.

This is a genuinely radical thing for an action manga to do: to spend a hundred chapters making the reader love the fighting, and then to argue, patiently and without sentimentality, that the fighting was the disease. Thorfinn's Personality number is an 8 — money, authority, the machinery of ambition — the number of the warrior he was built into. His Heart's Desire is a 6, the Nurturer. The interior wants to build and protect; the exterior was forged into a weapon. The whole saga is the distance between those two numbers.

The Author Who Sailed the Other Way

Makoto Yukimura's own 5 is worth ending on, because his career is itself a voyage in an unexpected direction. He made his name with Planetes (プラネテス), a quiet, humane, scrupulously researched science-fiction manga about people who collect orbital debris — garbage men in space, essentially, and one of the most emotionally grounded hard-SF works the medium has produced. Then he turned from the near future to the eleventh century and wrote a Viking epic. From orbit to the longships; from the debris of tomorrow to the raiders of a thousand years ago.

What connects them, and what the Freedom Seeker's number quietly points at, is that both are about people trying to find a way to live decently inside systems built for other purposes — the corporation, the war-band — and both end up arguing that the only real freedom is the refusal to treat other people as material. Yukimura's Heart's Desire is an 11, the Visionary's master number. Whatever the alphabet did to produce it, it is not the wrong number for a man who followed a beloved space manga by spending two decades drawing the slow moral education of a killer, in order to say, across a thousand pages, that the boat is worth building only if you know why you are sailing it.