Character · Parasyte
Migi
The alien was supposed to eat a brain, missed, and now has to negotiate with the boy it landed on.
In Otakana the clue reads: The parasite living in the protagonist's hand
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Parasyte
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Migi burrowed into Shinichi Izumi's arm instead of his head, which is a failure by parasite standards and the reason both of them are still alive. It has taken over the right hand from the wrist down. It reads books at speed by flipping pages with its own fingers, grows an eye and a mouth when it wants to talk, and reshapes the hand into a blade in about a second.
Its personality is the point. Migi is not evil, only logical. It protects Shinichi because its own survival depends on his, and it is honestly puzzled by grief, by loyalty, and by the idea that killing a stranger is worse than swatting a fly. Hitoshi Iwaaki uses that flat curiosity to keep asking what human beings are actually for.
The name is 右, migi, the Japanese word for right, and Shinichi picks it because the hand is his right one and he is not feeling imaginative. Iwaaki serialised Parasyte from 1988 to 1995 and Madhouse animated it in 2014. The manga has sold in the millions and remains one of the most cleanly argued horror stories the medium has produced.
Spelling MIGI
MIGI is four letters with a hard G, and it means right in Japanese, which is the whole of the naming logic. An early English edition mirrored the artwork so the pages ran left to right, which moved the parasite to the other hand and got him renamed Lefty. Later translations put MIGI back. Two I's, one G, four letters.