Character · Gintama
Kagura
She fights with an umbrella, eats like a siege, and is the most dangerous member of a failing odd-jobs business.
In Otakana the clue reads: Umbrella-carrying girl of the Yato clan
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Gintama
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Kagura belongs to the Yato, an alien clan bred for war and cursed with skin that burns in sunlight. The umbrella she carries is both parasol and firearm. She turned up at the Yorozuya office looking for work, decided she lived there, and has been eating the profits ever since, mostly in the form of vinegared kelp that she chews through entire conversations.
The joke Sorachi keeps running is the distance between how she looks and what she can do. A round-faced teenager in a Chinese-style dress lifts a motorcycle, insults a gorilla-shaped police officer, and goes back to her snack. When the story turns serious her family does the damage: a father who left, a brother who went considerably further than leaving, and a clan that treats gentleness as a defect.
Gintama's cast is one small permanent household and Kagura is the child of it without ever being written as harmless. Her dog Sadaharu is the size of a car and bites Gintoki's head roughly once a season. She reads as a deliberate counterweight to the shonen habit of putting the girl in the group behind everybody else.
Spelling KAGURA
KAGURA is six letters and three even beats, ka-gu-ra, with an A opening and closing the word. Nothing here is trapped: no long vowel, no doubled consonant, no R and L confusion, since that R sits in a syllable English keeps intact. The word itself is kagura, the sacred dance performed at Shinto shrines, which is a quietly odd name for an alien brawler.