ポーの一族 · Pō no Ichizoku
Two boys who will never grow older drift through two centuries of European history as members of a clan of vampires. The title reduces to 9 — the closing.
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9Filed under 9. The Closing takes a completion, and this entry is hands on one.
Moto Hagio's The Poe Clan appeared in Shogakukan's Bessatsu Shōjo Comic from 1972 to 1976. Edgar, made a vampire as a boy in the eighteenth century, brings his friend Allan into the clan, and the two wander through Europe across the following two centuries, unable to age, settle or be known.
The series is not told in order. Its episodes jump between decades, and the same events are seen from different characters' points of view, so that the reader assembles Edgar's history in fragments. The structure suits a story about time passing around characters who cannot change.
The vampirism is less about horror than about loss: of family, of an ordinary life, of every human attachment Edgar forms. The story's melancholy, its beautiful boys and its intense friendships set a tone that shojo manga would return to for decades.
Together with They Were Eleven, it won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1976, and it is one of the founding works of the generation of women creators known as the Year 24 Group. Hagio returned to the series in 2016, more than forty years after it ended, to wide attention in Japan.
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 45 across 3 words, reducing to 9. The weight sits in “Poe”, which carries 18 on its own and reduces to 9.
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 8, Personality 1: power underneath, initiative on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The letters give 9; the subject's own figures do not agree. 総画 strokes is 19, a 1, years serialised is 5 and debut year is 1972, a 1. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because a title is a decision somebody made about the thing, and these are the thing.
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.