Character · Dorohedoro
Caiman
He has the head of a lizard, no memory of his own face, and a man living inside his mouth.
In Otakana the clue reads: Man with a reptile head looking for his face
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Dorohedoro
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Caiman wakes up in the Hole, a slum where sorcerers from another world come to practise on people, with a reptile's skull where his head should be and no idea who he used to be. Somewhere inside that mouth is a second face, a man who surfaces when a sorcerer's head goes in there and says whether this is the one who did it. Caiman keeps checking.
The search is grim and the manga treats it as ordinary life. Between killings he eats gyoza with Nikaido, who runs a restaurant, spars with him, and is by some distance the most capable person in the district. Q Hayashida draws the Hole as damp concrete and hand-lettered signage, densely crosshatched, and the violence lands somewhere between horrifying and slapstick.
Hayashida serialised Dorohedoro from 2000 in Monthly Ikki, running twenty-three volumes over eighteen years, and MAPPA animated the opening stretch in 2020 with computer graphics that suit the character designs better than anyone expected. The world runs on smoke. Sorcerers exhale it, and what it does depends entirely on the person breathing out.
Spelling CAIMAN
CAIMAN is the English name of the South American crocodilian, and the localisation picked it because カイマン is that same animal, Kaiman with a K. Six letters, and the AI in the middle is a vowel pair rather than a sound you can pick apart by ear. Type it from the sound alone and you reach for KAIMAN and lose a row.