Bleach - Is Death Permanent?
For those of you that are not aware, in the Anime “Bleach” a lot of attention is payed to the relationship between the living, the dead, and beings from the afterlife, called “Death Gods” or “Soul Reapers”. In fact the series revolves around a Soul Reaper Rukia Kuchiki, and a young man, who’s family has long cared for the living, with incredible spiritual powers named Ichigo Kurosaki. In the current arc, Ichigo and his friends Yasutora “Chad” Sado, Orihime Inoue, Uryu Ishida, and a cat named Yoruichi Shihouin have traveled to the afterlife, which is called the Soul Society to attempt to save Rukia from being executed.
In the next episode we will find out more about the pasts of Rukia and Renji.
There’s a lot that we do and don’t currently know about the soul reapers and the soul society. First of all, there is kind of reincarnation cycle. Souls come from soul society to be born into the world. Those that die are then eventually returned to the soul society by Soul Reapers, who’s job it is to guide those souls to the afterlife. Souls that are not guided to the afterlife eventually become a kind of supernatural monster called a hallow.
Ichigo himself has become a soul reaper. He initially took his powers from Rukia when she was to badly wounded to fight a Hollow after taking the blow for Ichigo. Her giving him her powers is actually a potentially capitol offense in the afterlife. Since then, his power was shattered, but he was able to regain it, as well as his soul reaper abilities.
Ichigo has been trained by Kuzkie Orahara A.k.a. “Mr. Hat and Clogs”, who has some sort of very strong relationship to the soul society, and has soul reaper abilities as well, as evidenced by the fact that he has a Zanbakto, a sword wielded by all soul reapers, and thus only by those with soul reaper powers.
Now that you’ve got the backstory summary on some of what we do know, here is what we don’t.
We don’t know where Soul Reapers come from in the soul society. I speculate that they are chosen from and trained up from the spirits in the soul society, but that isn’t necessarily the case. We do know that Rukia and Renji (someone Ichigo fought in the last few episodes) grew up together, and then Rukia was adopted into a powerful Soul Reaper family. (Read: Samurai Caste system seems to still exist in the afterlife), but not why, or the details about how one normally becomes a soul reaper, which is why the next episode will be so telling.
We also don’t know why giving your powers to another in an emergency is a capitol offense, though it may be because of the exclusivity of the Caste system.
We also don’t know if the execution of a soul reaper is permanent, or if it is the equivalent of banishment, as something odd happened with Mr. Hat and Clogs, and now he is physically unable to return to the soul society. That could be what the execution does to Rukia. Or it could be permanent.
A bit more background. Rukia was captured by Renji, the Lieutenant of Squad 6, and the Captain of squad six, her brother Byakuya Kuchiki. At one point Rukia tried to protect Ichigo from her capturers, and Renji shouted at her, saying she had just added years to her sentence. Yet when they got back, Rukia was sentenced to death. Still, Renji thought that she would have a prison sentence, not a death sentance, due to her Brother going to argue in front of those sentencing her… yet her brother actually argued -for- the death penalty.
Later, when battling Ichigio, Renji kept shouting that Rukia’s powers could not return until Ichigo was dead, and that Ichigo “stealing” her powers was why she “has to go through all this.”
There are two interpretations of all of this that my friends and I have bandied back and forth. First, the execution will not be a permanent cessation of her being, but rather will result in rebirth, or banishment, or being sent among the living, or some other result, and Renji’s attitudes suggesting that Rukia is not going to be gone permanently are evidence of this, are Mr. Hat and Clogs.
The other interpretation is that while Hat and Clogs was banished, it wasn’t through execution, and that Renji’s spouting about the sentence being increased showed that he believed Rukia would be shown lenience, and simply be put in prison for a long time, and that Renji’s main reason for fighting Ichigo rather than helping him was to try to restore Rukia’s powers in an attempt to get her brother to argue for lenience and to get her sentence reduced, thus saving her life.
What do you think?
April 29th, 2007 at 12:57 am
I think we don’t know enough.
And there’s another theory tangential to it all. I think this could all be a test to recruit Ichigo. The cuts to his training all point to an emotional conditioning for bloodthirsty combat; that kind of initiation would explain all the bad attitudes among Reapers. But this is a debate for another time.
We know from…Hanaku? The squad 4 guy and Rukia that Soul Reapers know crap about human society. This suggests that, if they did use to be human, it was so very long ago that the human world is alien to them. Yet the “soul candy” pez dispenser and that one clown of a Reaper back in the Grand Fisher episodes suggest that some Reapers are actually in touch with the right century. And so a key question to the nature of Reapers — their humanity — is up for grabs.
If we assume that they were once human, then they will be reborn into the human world, for this preserves the balance. Death is as permanent for them as for anyone, but their perspective allows them to see resurrection and rebirth as a continuance of life rather than a new start entirely.
If we assume that they were not, then we got nothing. A creature outside the definition of alive cannot end life in death, but it might still be possible to end that existance in an approximation of death.
April 29th, 2007 at 1:20 am
And if it is a test to recruit Ichigo, perhaps his agreeing to join will be the only way to rescue Rukia.
However this doesn’t seem heroic or as ’shocking’ a development as they might want to pull on the audience.