Character · Yu Yu Hakusho
Koenma
The underworld is run by a toddler in a hat, and the pacifier is not a joke about his age.
In Otakana the clue reads: Toddler prince of the underworld with a pacifier
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Yu Yu Hakusho
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Koenma signs the paperwork for the dead. His father runs the underworld, and the son has been left in charge of case files, judgements and the sheer administrative weight of every soul arriving at once, which he handles from behind a desk stacked higher than he is. He looks like an infant, speaks like a middle manager, and hires Yusuke Urameshi as a detective because the alternative is filling in more forms.
He can take an adult form, a young man in the same hat and robe, and does so when a situation calls for authority rather than tantrums. The pacifier is a tool that stores his energy, not a comfort object, and there is a running comedy in how thoroughly nobody in the cast respects him until he removes it.
As a character he holds the middle of the series together. Yoshihiro Togashi needed someone to hand out missions, define the rules of the afterlife and occasionally refuse an order from above, and putting all of it on a child who is terrified of his father made the bureaucracy funny rather than dull.
Spelling KOENMA
KOENMA is six letters and the N is the trap. Older romanisation turns N into M before an M, so Koemma appears in older fan writing and in some subtitles, and it is wrong here. The name is 小閻魔, little Enma, after Enma the judge of the dead, whom Buddhism carried east from the Sanskrit Yama. Four beats, ko-e-n-ma, with the E sounded on its own.