Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 12
Episode 12: Bruschetta (エピソード#12 ブルスケッタ, Episōdo #12 Burusuketta) is a one-shot manga written and illustrated by Hirohiko Araki as part of the Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan series, featuring Rohan Kishibe. The one-shot was published in Ultra Jump on April 18, 2025 in the May 2025 issue.[1]
While on vacation in Hawaii, Rohan begins hearing noises repeating themselves. As he struggles to discover the cause and find a remedy, the noises only intensify in volume. What follows is a battle for and against evolution itself.
Summary
Via video call, Kyoka Izumi questions Rohan Kishibe's apparent sudden interest in baseball, as she never saw him as someone interested in it and that Rohan once said to her that he could not write a manga about sports as the rules are someone else's ideas. Rohan interjects, clarifying that he is interested in the fact that athletes are constantly improving year after year by breaking new records and having a drastically different physique, believing that it is a form of Darwinian evolution that drives it. He reminds her that evolution is the topic he is researching for his next manga, and is surprised Kyoka forgot so quickly.
Rohan's attention is then drawn to a little girl walking in front of his car, soaking wet and with an innertube under her arms, suggesting she just came from the water. He warns the child about a nearby cliff and that she is about to trespass onto his property, asking her where her parents are. The mention of the cliff alerts Kyoka to the fact that Rohan is in an unusual car, leading her to ask him where he is at the moment. When Rohan reveals that he is at his villa on the Big Island of Hawaii, Kyoka becomes upset as the reason she called in the first place was to remind him that deadline for his manuscripts, which he still draws on paper, is the next day. Rohan in turn responds that the reason he is in Hawaii is for work to study isolated bird populations on Hualalai to see how they are evolving and that if Kyoka is so desperate to get the manuscripts before the deadline she can just take a roundtrip flight to pick them up in person, which she says is out of the question. As the little girl from earlier wanders into the trees on his property, Rohan ends the call to get back to work. Before heading back inside his villa, Rohan notices a coconut fall from a nearby palm tree; as it rolls towards his car, the palm tree creaks in the wind.
Shortly after Rohan gets inside, he decides to make himself a tomato bruschetta with avocado before returning to work on the manuscripts. While preparing the dish, he hears a strange tapping coming from inside his kitchen island, but upon opening a drawer he finds nothing. He then goes to pick a bottle of wine to go with the bruschetta, but again hears weird noises from his wine cooler. Worried that someone disguised as a contractor may have planted a listening device in his house, noting that he was the victim of a robbery during his vacation the previous year, he begins to look through the cooler, only to begin hearing noises coming from the nearby wall instead. He begins to wonder if there is an animal trapped in the walls, noticing that it seems to be repeating the sounds he makes to try to narrow down its location. However, he soon realizes that all sounds he makes are being repeated, including bumping his elbow into a chair, leading him to wonder if he is instead dealing with a ghost. But as he heads outside to his backyard, he begins to notice that even the leaves' rustling seems to be echoing as well.
Rohan then spots the little girl from earlier in his backyard. As he asks her where her parents are, she approaches him, and he notices a strange discharge from her ears. When she reaches for his phone, he hears echoes of her tapping and realizes the sounds he has been hearing are coming from within his own body. Just as Rohan's own ears begin to have the same discharge, the little girl spots some nearby snails and becomes distraught. Realizing he is beginning to suffer from the same malady as the little girl is, Rohan uses Heaven's Door to turn her into a book to investigate what is happening to the two of them. He learns that the girl is named Soa, she is only 4 years old, and she and her parents have been plagued by these deafening sounds for the past nine days. However, he notices he cannot find mention of any illness, confusing him. He then uses Heaven's Door on himself, which again says that he is perfectly healthy, but it does reveal that there is an unknown foreign substance in his own body.
Rohan calls 911 but as soon as the call goes through, a nearby snail's movements become unbearably loud, causing him to lose his grip on his phone. As it hits the ground, the sound of the impact becomes excruciatingly painful, causing Rohan to begin to become nauseous while the 911 operator asks if anyone is on the other end of the phone. Rohan tries to focus on what may have caused all of this to begin and what has been different with his routine since the girl's arrival, knowing that it could not have been anything he ate as all he had that day was the bruschetta and some bottled water. As he begins to feel empathy for Soa and her parents being incapacitated like this, Rohan spots a strange looking moth preying upon one of the snails in his yard and notices more arriving. He then remembers seeing something about snails in Soa's book and goes back to her, finding a list of rules about what to do when she finds a snail: get back inside the house, try to keep still and make no noise, and avoid looking outside at all costs. The list remarks that you will be safe and may feel nauseous, but so long as you do not see any snails you will recover, but it then remarks that this condition is uncurable and not a disease, facts that worry Rohan.
As more and more moths descend upon the property, Rohan remembers that Hawaii has species of carnivorous moths and realizes that these moths have been surrounding his doors and windows to ensure that he breathes in a dust that they are shedding. He deduces that this dust must somehow make the human body amplify all sounds so the moths can track down their slow-moving and otherwise silent snail prey, while also not killing the human victims to ensure that the moths have a sort of living sonar relay in order to hunt over long distances. Rohan slowly tries to get back into his villa while every sound he makes, including opening up the glass patio door and accidentally knocking over the wine bottle he took out earlier, makes him become more nauseous and nearly makes him pass out from the pain. Saving up his strength, he manages to get one of his dining room chairs outside so he can reach up to the ceiling of his patio to grab one of the moths. As soon as he catches one, they all begin to scatter, and in the painful amplified din of their wings' flapping he manages to use Heaven's Door on the one he caught. He looks through the moth's book, searching for any sort of natural predator or weakness, and discovers that they are repelled by cineole, the primary component of eucalyptus oil. Knowing he has a Eucalyptus tree in his backyard, Rohan resolves to make a tea from the leaves to extract the oil to cure himself and Soa.
Having recovered sometime later, Rohan looks across the water and spots Soa and her family's home surrounded by a small jungle. He surmises that the moths must have evolved in the jungle surrounding the other property, particularly noting that the island is filled with "life energy". After assuring himself that the girl's parents will be cured of the condition now that he has discovered the antidote and has alerted authorities to the incident, Rohan turns his thoughts to Soa who is sat behind him eating some of the bruschetta he prepared earlier. He remarks on her resilience in managing to swim across the sea to his villa despite her age and the effect of the moths' dust on her, making her another one of the "new species" he came to Hawai'i to study. He then wonders just how she managed to reach his villa, considering that the only way to his property from the sea is by scaling a sheer 30-meter-tall cliff.
Appearances
Author's Note
Author's Note
Author's Comments
Author's CommentGallery
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Announcement for Bruschetta in Ultra Jump April 2025 -
Ultra Jump April 2025 Next Issue Preview -
Ultra Jump May 2025 Cover -
Online Preview
Trivia
- While trying to identify the source of the sound in his villa Rohan remarks that on his last vacation to Hawai'i he was robbed, alluding to the events experienced by Rohan Kishibe during the story arc "The Villa on Hawaii Island" in The JOJOLands.
References
- ↑ Vish (March 17, 2025), "Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan: Episode 12, JOJO magazine, and More Releasing", JoJo's Bizarre Encyclopedia.
