Digression: Who’s who in Torikae baya? Part 2

I’m stepping away briefly from my summaries of volumes 8-12 to unveil a new addition to the Extras page! The new page is for a kind of character relationship chart (something I realise I first hinted at doing over a year ago…) and you can find it here.

Each tankobon volume of Torikae baya, beginning with the second, kicks off with a diagram of the most important characters in the story and their relationships to one another, with short introductions of each character and a plot synopsis to bring readers up to speed. These are very handy, but there are a couple of downsides: they only include certain characters at one time, thereby leaving out some of the relationships, and there are plenty of characters who are never deemed important enough to appear. And so I thought that for followers of this project, it would be nice to have a bigger version of one of these.

The character relationship chart included at the beginning of the fifth volume.

From volume 5, page 3. ©Chiho Saito／Shogakukan

I fantasised about showing off the true madness of Torikae baya’s web of relationships via a big, unwieldy chart in the same format as those ones, like mapping out a wild conspiracy theory. In the end, I just didn’t have the technical skills (or the patience to gain the technical skills) to assemble something like that and have it actually work, so I settled on a different format. In my chart, each character has a profile card with their name, picture and introduction noting their main relationships, and you can click on the related characters to jump to their card. It even works reasonably well on mobile!

Here, I want to just say a bit more about some aspects of the chart. First, it doesn’t include absolutely everyone. 31 characters are included at this point in time, which covers just about every recurring character referred to by a name or title. There are others I might include later, like Suiren’s male attendants. The problem with them is that only two (maybe three?) are clearly referred to by name. To make things easier to follow in the translation, I have plans to assign nicknames to nameless recurring characters – this will probably also happen with “Umetsubo’s maid” – so perhaps those guys will be included on the list once I’ve done that. On the other hand, two past emperors are mentioned in the manga, and their connections to known characters are obviously important in the story, but we never see their faces – should they be added too?

There is a system of icons for easy indication of common relationship types. Some types of relationship (for example “political supporter”) just don’t come up often enough to get an icon, so those go in the little introduction instead. Meanwhile, some relationships are one-way, which is why Sara is “🤝💖” in Tsuwabuki’s eyes and Tsuwabuki is “🤝” in Sara’s (awkward). Also, characters like Sara, who have some kind of connection to just about everyone, don’t have every single one of those relationships listed in their profile. Kakumitsu is just as closely related to Suiren as to Sara, but Kakumitsu and Suiren don’t have very much to do with each other, so I left out that link.

Similarly, I don’t get too much into the nitty gritty of how relationships change and when. The “>” shows that it doesn’t happen right when the character first appears, but what is “late” in one character’s story could be early in another’s. And even though there are some spoilers in there, I omit some of the final developments, especially if the general direction of change is already indicated.

Anyway, I hope this new addition is a useful resource! In other news, I’ve also made a few updates to the map (with a few more yet to come) and brought the timeline up to date as of the end of Volume 8. And actually, I spotted a mistake in the timeline while I was working on this: the kidnapping incident doesn’t take place six years into the story, but six years after Sara and Suiren first meet. I now estimate that they’re probably about ten years old when they go to Kurama. This might not matter an awful lot, but who knows?