Thermae Romae

5Five — change. That is the reduction of this title, and the shelf it is read from.

What it is

Mari Yamazaki's Thermae Romae ran in Enterbrain's Comic Beam from 2008 to 2013 and was collected in 6 volumes. Lucius Quintus Modestus is an architect in Rome in the time of the emperor Hadrian, who designs public baths and worries that his ideas are out of date. One day, while bathing, he is sucked down a drain and emerges in a public bathhouse in modern Japan.

How it works

Each episode follows the same pattern. Lucius is transported to Japan, sees an ordinary bathing invention, such as a bottled drink after a bath, a home bathtub or a hot spring resort, believes it is the work of a remarkable slave people he calls the "flat-faced tribe", and takes the idea back to Rome, where it makes him famous.

The comedy

The joke is the collision of two bath cultures, ancient Roman and modern Japanese, and of Lucius's serious amazement at things the reader takes for granted. Yamazaki, who studied in Italy, draws Roman history and architecture in detail, and the series is full of real information about both cultures.

Why it matters

It won the Manga Taishō and the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Short Story Award in 2010. Its live-action films starring Hiroshi Abe (2012, 2014) were hits, and it is one of the best-known examples of time-slip comedy in manga.

The title by its numbers

Thermae34Romae25total59 → 5

総画 strokes18 → 9volumes6years serialised6debut year2008 → 1

The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 59 across 2 words, reducing to 5. The weight sits in “Thermae”, which carries 34 on its own and reduces to 7.

Five is freedom seeker — freedom, disruption, and restless movement. The reference files it as a turn. Read that way, what the entry is really recording is the 5's restlessness and hunger for change.

Heart's Desire 5, Personality 9: the presentation folds back into the want: reckoning in service of change.

The letters give 5; the subject's own figures do not agree. 総画 strokes is 18, a 9, volumes is 6, years serialised is 6 and debut year is 2008, 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 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. What the 5 still asks is that you ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The other entries that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.