Characters
Samurai Champloo tells the story of three strangers in the Tokugawa era (also known as the Edo Period) who come together on a journey across Japan.
- Mugen: A brash vagabond from the Ryukyu Islands, Mugen is a 19 year old wanderer with a wildly unconventional fighting style. He wears metal-soled geta and carries an exotic sword on his back. In Japanese, the word mugen means "infinite" (literally, "without limit" or "limitless").
- Jin: Jin is a 20 year old reserved ronin who carries himself in the conventionally stoic manner of a samurai of the Tokugawa era. Using his waist-strung daishÅ, he fights in the traditional kenjutsu style of a samurai trained in a prominent, sanctioned dojo. Jin wears glasses, an available but uncommon accessory in Edo era Japan. Spectacles, called "Dutch glass merchandise" ("Oranda gyoku shinajina" in Japanese) at the time, were imported from Holland early in the Tokugawa period and became more widely available as the 17th century progressed. Although pictured in advertisements as smoking a kiseru, he was never depicted with one in the series. He is named after one of the seven virtues of the samurai in Bushido, "Jin" (Benevolence).
- Fuu: A feisty 15-year-old girl, Fuu asks Mugen and Jin to help her find a sparsely described man she calls "the samurai who smells of sunflowers." A flying squirrel named "Momo" (short for momonga, "flying squirrel") accompanies her, inhabiting her kimono and frequently leaping out to her rescue. Her name, Fuu, is short for fuukinchou, which is Japanese for "tanagers".
Apart from this trio, other characters tend to appear only once or twice throughout the series.
Read more about this topic: Samurai Champloo
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)