Hiroaki Samura
9The Closing · 63沙村 広明
Born 1970
The creator of Blade of the Immortal, known for drawing that moves between rough pencil and fine ink.
9A 9 by its name: humanitarian & sage, and therefore the closing.
Career
Hiroaki Samura was born in Chiba Prefecture in 1970. A prize-winning story about an immortal swordsman, submitted to Kodansha's Afternoon, became Blade of the Immortal, which began there in 1993.
The work
Blade of the Immortal (1993–2012) is his major work. He has since drawn Wave, Listen to Me!, a comedy about a woman who becomes a late-night radio host, and other series and short stories, some of them dark and experimental.
The style
Samura is admired as a draughtsman. He uses pencil as well as ink, leaving sketch lines visible, and his fights have a raw, improvised energy. He mixes period settings with modern fashion and attitude.
Why he matters
His art has been influential among artists in Japan and abroad, and Blade of the Immortal is a landmark of the samurai manga.
The name by its numbers
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 63 across 2 words, reducing to 9. The weight sits in “Hiroaki”, which carries 44 on its own and reduces to 8.
What the 9 brings is reckoning. The reference files it as a completion. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 9's sense of a cycle closing and something being released.
Heart's Desire 3, Personality 33: expression underneath, service on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
Counted another way the answer holds. 人格 core is 12, a 3, 総格 total is 27, a 9 and born is 1970, an 8, and 総格 total reduces to the same 9. Two systems, one figure.
The 9 asks you to work out what survived the ending. The 9 sentimentalises. An ending is not automatically a meaning, and the reference tries not to pretend otherwise. The other entries that reduce to 9 are collected on The Closing.