The Formless World, Nuruba

The Formless World, Nuruba

Manga Chapter 2-9

TV Episode 11

Manga Chapter Summary:

The Conductor announces that the 999 will next be stopping at Nuruba, the planet without form. This surprises Tetsuro and Maetel explains to him that no one has been able to see the shape of the universe; perhaps it has no defined shape. Nuruba is like the universe, hard to describe and depict and a planet where many people commit suicide. As the 999 approaches Nuruba, it is revealed to be a amoeba like in appearance rather than being round. As the 999 get nearer it changes its shape several times. Maetel tells him the planet has no fixed shape and as such it is useless for people to draw maps of it. 

 

The 999 comes to a stop, although not at a station as there is no ground to land on. Maetel tells Tetsuro there may be passengers, surprising him as he hadn’t conceived that people could live here. Maetel heads off to the dining car and suddenly vanishes. Tetsuro looks out the window, seeing a blob-like form there. He heads over to the dining car, but Maetel is still nowhere to be found. Maetel eventually comes and sits down, but she just sits there silently, not responding to anything Tetsuro says to her. All of a sudden the entire table turns into a blob-like form and starts enveloping Tetsuro! 

 

Later, the Conductor sees Tetsuro and Maetel, both silent enter their car and sit down. All of a sudden, a buck naked Tetsuro runs in, claiming a monster stole his appearance. He jumps on the other Tetsuro sitting there, stretching out his skin. Maetel remains silent but her body melts. The real Maetel steps in; like Tetsuro her clothes were stolen and something else took her form. By this point Tetsuro has tied up in a complicated knot the 2 blob-like creatures that had taken their form. Suddenly another blob comes in, claiming the blobs are his son and daughter and begs forgiveness. 

 

The father blob claims that his children have become fans of humans and wanted to take human form and travel among the stars. The father claims that he isn’t interested in being something with a form. Over such time those beings with forms grow ugly and die, eventually becoming nothing but a pile of ashes. Being interested in physical appearances can lead to bad thoughts, and he thinks the formless existence his kind have is ideal. The father becomes quiet upon seeing Maetel and soon leaves the train car to be with his children. The children ask about Maetel as the train takes off. Tetsuro ponders if being formless is ideal, although admits he thinks that because he is not handsome himself.

TV Episode Summary:

This episode doesn’t cut any material from the manga, but does include some additional scenes or dialogue to help fill up the running time. The most notable of which is more of a focus on the fact that Nuruba is a suicide spot. Maetel and Tetsuro spend more time talking about it and we see a couple kill themselves by jumping off the train at the end of the episode. A flashback reveals that they did so because they didn’t want to grow old. 

 

The other most notable scene is more time with the blobs; we see the children (named Tsuru and Suru; they were unnamed in the manga) rushing to the 999 as it arrives with their father chasing after them. This, along with the fact that we see Suru attacking Maetel results in a loss of the surprise that we get later on. 

 

We get a few additional minor scenes that are essentially filler, including the 777 train passing by and the Conductor being woken up due to Tetsuro and Maetel going in the diner car. This episode also includes Tetsuro flashing back to footage from episodes 1, 4 and 5. The footage from episode 4 was a flashback itself, so we now have a flashback of a flashback!

TV Episode Cast:

Tetsuro Hoshino – Masako Nozawa

Maetel – Masako Ikeda

Conductor – Kaneta Kimotsuki

Nuru – Shunji Yamada (Keaton Yamada)

Tsuru – Noriko Tsukase

Suru – Fuyumi Shiraishi

Narrator – Hitoshi Takagi

Nuru, the father blob, is named only in the credits. The couple that commit suicide are uncredited.

Non-Spoiler Analysis:

A rather interesting planet in this episode, Nuruba, which is formless. The planet looks a bit like an amoeba, constantly changing its shape, and appears to have no solid surface to it. A tired trope, especially at the time this manga came out was always having aliens take some sort of humanoid appearance, with perhaps only slight modifications. So the concept of having an alien world here that truly is alien, where its inhabitants don’t have a form whatsoever is an interesting thing for Matsumoto to show us. 

 

Nuru asks whether it is worth really having a physical form, and that those of us with physical forms will eventually grow old, die and decompose. He prefers the formless existence that he has, thinking that physical forms can cause people to have opinions on what is beautiful or what is ugly and that can lead to bad thoughts. I can’t say I agree with his take. When you peel back all the layers, ultimately, the argument of beautiful vs. ugly or young vs. old comes down to reproduction. We are biologically wired to consider someone beautiful because we want to reproduce with them. Over time people age and aren’t considered beautiful anymore, because their reproductive function has mostly diminished. Can nature be cruel at times? Sure. But it serves a purpose, the continuation of the species. How do the beings of Nuruba reproduce? I wonder if it is asexually. That view point does make more sense for such a being. In any case, rather than just being a comedic chapter, what the father is saying does bring some interesting things into the mix. 

 

The father seems to know something about Maetel, or at the very least she worries him. Why that is the case, who knows. It is becoming a running theme now as we had her reveal something to Yoi last chapter that caused him to back off on demanding her to stay with him.