‘Dorohedoro’ Helped Me Through—and Reconsider—Isolation in the Pandemic

The first episode of Dorohedoro begins in darkness. Specifically, inside the mouth of a towering, lizard-headed man named Caiman, whose jaws are clamped around a sorcerer’s head. Nearby, Caiman’s friend Nikaido restrains a gangly second sorcerer, who squirms against her grasp.

“There’s someone in here!” the sorcerer shouts to his friend, his voice muffled from within Caiman’s mouth. At the back of Caiman’s throat, a bleached-blond spectral figure slowly rises, leaning over Caiman’s tongue to appraise the sorcerer. Caiman spits the sorcerer out.

“What did the guy inside say?” Caiman asks him.

“That I wasn’t it,’” the sorcerer says, uncertainly.

“So you’re useless,” Caiman says, slashing the sorcerer’s body into stylized pieces that fly apart in a slow-motion mist of blood. As one dismembered hand spins through the air, its finger releases a blast of smoke, creating a trapdoor in the pavement that drops the living sorcerer safely into another dimension.

Dismayed, Caiman buries his scaly head in his hands, while Nikaido comforts him. It’s no big deal, she tells him. They’ll find “the one” someday.

In May 2020, when Dorohedoro premiered on Netflix, I was quickly drawn into its surreal world, a welcome distraction from waiting for delayed unemployment checks. I was intrigued by Caiman’s amnesia, which blocked out his memories of life before someone turned him into a half-lizard mutant. I wanted to see where Caiman’s quest to recover the truth about his identity would take him, and how many sorcerers he’d have to chomp—allowing the specter trapped in his head to identify who cursed him.

By then, my husband Jack and I had spent three months confined to our small apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, where we were quarantining during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. I’d paced miles in a nervous triangle between our bedroom, kitchen, and living room. Masks still felt unfamiliar, and on infrequent trips to the grocery store, my glasses fogged with every panicky breath. Headlines about overflowing hospitals and shuttered public spaces reinforced my sense of claustrophobia. Our surroundings had shrunk suffocatingly and, like much of the world, I couldn’t see a clear way out.

Just a few months earlier, in the distant past of January 2020, Jack and I stood in his parents’ sunlit home near the Potomac, surrounded by our immediate family. My parents didn’t approve of our civil ceremony, but they forced smiles as Jack’s parents and our officiant gamely bustled around, smoothing over the tension. We pledged to love each other in sickness and health, not realizing that the last days of prepandemic life were already leaving us. The World Health Organization dispatched its first delegation to Wuhan that same day.

Our vows felt hard-won, even then, given the way sickness had shaped our lives. Jack and I first met as colleagues at a haphazard start-up in Dupont Circle. I always looked forward to the ping of his Slack messages—and noticed when he was absent for half days, showing up late and pale with a neon band of medical tape wound around his elbow. I didn’t pry, but one night he told me the reason: a severe form of Crohn’s disease that requires regular IV infusions to suppress his overactive immune system.

As the virus spread, the very air around us began to feel threatening. One night when the fire alarm woke us, we stayed on the couch waiting for the clanging to end instead of evacuating. The unlikely possibility of an inferno in our apartment building felt safer than crowding into the stairwell with neighbors who regularly gathered for maskless klatches.

The months ticked by, and our optimism wilted. Jobless and lacking concrete leads, our days lost their structure, yielding to stretches of anxiety-filled free time. Jack, always the more patient one, found ways to stay busy. From my desk in the corner, I occasionally heard him laughing as he paged through manga he was reading.

“Dorohedoro is being adapted by Netflix,” he mentioned one night, and though the premise sounded bizarre, I joined him. After all, I had nowhere else to be.

The show immediately grabbed me. I found Caiman and Nikaido’s intimate friendship—told through oddball events like an annual zombie extermination contest—every bit as compelling as their quest for answers. After exhausting the only available season, I plunged into the manga it was based on, which first appeared in a Japanese magazine called Monthly Ikki in 1999. These serialized installments ran for eighteen years, before being collected into twenty-three book-length volumes.

Pseudonymous author Q Hayashida’s worldbuilding is steeped in originality, sending Caiman and Nikaido on a winding journey from their home in the crumbling, human-occupied slum of Hole through magical doors that open into the sorcerers’ glittering cityscapes. Though Dorohedoro is often gory, Hayashida’s goofy sense of humor treads a careful path between playful banter and darker themes—providing an escape from reality, where the capacity for injustice seems bottomless.

While I caught up on Dorohedoro, my sense of time began to slip. I worked in a frenzy of freelance deadlines, the days blurring together in a revolving series of Google docs. Rare trips outside made our Covid-induced isolation painfully clear. Even sensory experiences I hadn’t noticed before were suddenly overwhelming. A simple breeze felt stunningly alive with motion. When Jack went to treatment, his mask was no match for the hospital parking garage’s potent bouquet of engine exhaust and cold fast food.

Amid this haze—or maybe in spite of it—I could read Dorohedoro for hours and still barely make a dent in the series’ four thousand or so pages. I pored over the manga where I could find it online. Hayashida’s boundless imagination bewitched me; her devils indulged whimsical passions for fried shrimp and deejaying radio shows, while her sorcerers were styled in flawless Nike Airs. Each sorcerer has a unique brand of magic, like creating smoke that transforms anything it touches into gregarious bursts of mushrooms. The manga’s central pleasure lies in watching these characters collide and unraveling the mysteries that connect them.

Fiction has always been a natural exit when my reality becomes a little too painful. As an adoptee, I often feel as if I’ve woken up in the midst of a narrative that isn’t quite familiar or entirely my own—not unlike Dorohedoro’s Caiman, who must puzzle out his origin story. Growing up, I learned to not ask questions about my adoption, instead seeking refuge in the fragmented families I encountered in novels and TV shows. On vacations with my adoptive parents, I thought of the stories while studying the faces of passing strangers. If I could be anyone’s child, then imagining myself into fantastic stories about witches and dragons, or devils and lizard-headed amnesiacs, was nothing more than a tantalizingly short leap.

Fiction has always been a natural exit when my reality becomes a little too painful.

Dorohedoro’s odd characters helped me cope with the surreal feeling of life during the pandemic. One of Hayashida’s most peculiar creations is the Black House, a sentient, floating building where devils conduct official business. Though it looks like an unassuming shack—albeit one adorned with an upside-down cross—the Black House has the ability to expand, contract, and rearrange its interior rooms as the situation requires. It first appears as a simple network of rooms where sorcerers sign or renew their partnership contracts. But in later chapters, the Black House stretches to a vast, warehouse-like space to accommodate a terrifying creature who must dismember a heap of devils. Politely, the Black House conjures up dainty tea sets as offerings to its guests.

The more Jack and I adapted to self-isolation, the more our little apartment seemed to take on similar qualities. When the world first locked down, it seemed inconceivable that our three small rooms could contain the entirety of our lives. But as the weeks dragged on, we began to view our apartment less as a static set of rooms and more as a series of overlapping zones governed by intricate, unspoken rules. A strip of the bedroom floor next to the window became the site of difficult phone calls. A corner of the love seat became my designated reading place. My side of the bed could be for sleeping, relaxing, or therapy appointments—but each situation required its own unique arrangement of pillows.

Meanwhile, we caught glimpses of how other people viewed our hypervigilance—not all of them pleasant. In conversations with well-meaning friends and colleagues, we fielded questions about why we wouldn’t escape to an Airbnb, or gather with family for Thanksgiving. “Jack is immunocompromised, so we’re being extra careful,” I repeated on a thousand separate phone calls. Privately, I wondered why it was so hard for others to grasp our anxiety. I wanted our marriage to last a lifetime—and I wanted our lifetimes to last long after the pandemic. I would stay inside for years if that was what it took to keep both of us safe.

By the time the weather grew colder, my obsession with Dorohedoro had petered out, replaced by new distractions. In particular, holiday shopping brought an unexpected relief.

“You’ll never guess what I got you,” Jack and I teased each other throughout December, our secretive ritual of gift buying breaking open some room to breathe. We never bother with wrapping paper, so on Christmas morning I closed my eyes and recognized the weight of a book in my outstretched hands. I was stunned to discover that Jack had spent weeks tracking down a gorgeous art book that collected Hayashida’s original sketches, paintings, and collages for Dorohedoro.

I began flipping the pages, diving into a sensory feast of multimedia artwork on glossy photo paper and soft matte textures. The captions were in Japanese, a language I don’t speak, but Jack was prepared for that too. Together, we bent over his phone, allowing an app to generate shaky translations. I was thrilled by the prospect of pleasantly disassociating for a few more hours, savoring a last chance to soak up a first look at Dorohedoro.

I hadn’t really noticed Hayashida’s book covers before, as I’d raced to devour the story and because I’d been reading the manga online. But now, I discovered cover art that was playfully collaged from mundane household items. The first volume was clothed in an assemblage of plastic baggies and cut-out drawings; the tenth was upholstered in raggedy patches of purple linen and felt. My favorite cover is a hot-pink collage of metal and plastic chains neatly laid atop vinyl mesh and scattered with a flock of hand-drawn birds—all built on recycled cardboard stamped “Amazon.co.jp.”

Hayashida doesn’t give many interviews. But in the only one I was able to dig up online—a blog post republishing an interview conducted in 2006—she shared some details about her process. The post included a grainy photo of one of Hayashida’s Dorohedoro book covers, splayed on a table like a spatchcocked chicken.

“When I put together the first volume, I made it a little too bumpy and they told me they couldn’t print it,” she said. “They also told me that I had to stop making it so glossy because it doesn’t photograph properly, but I just kept on doing it anyway.” The interviewer explained that manga artists—who typically work on grueling monthly deadlines—rarely churn out such elaborate offerings. “This work is important for me,” Hayashida said. “Only doing the manga would be too monotonous.”

For months, Dorohedoro’s chaotic, creative world captivated me and helped me reframe quarantine’s isolation.

For months, Dorohedoro’s chaotic, creative world captivated me and helped me reframe quarantine’s isolation. While the art book gave me a deeper glimpse into Hayashida’s mind, her perspective solidified my appreciation for her resistance to monotony. Hayashida’s insistence on doing things her own way had resulted in a spectacular work of art that became more ambitious, more playful, and more compelling with each passing year. Her resoluteness energized me, after over a year of disappointing and frustrating people, as Jack and I set boundaries and said no to activities that would have been unsafe for us.

Today, fully vaccinated, Jack and I can finally begin to imagine a future beyond our apartment. I can feel a hunger waking up, a craving for variety that will shock my senses out of their quarantine stupor. But in Hayashida’s wild, imaginative artwork, I found the freedom to see beyond my surroundings, all on my own.

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