Okamisama
Okamisama (オカミサマ) is the main antagonist of the short story "Okamisama", part of the Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan: Short Story Collection.
Okamisama is the collective name of infant creatures that appear to collect one's debt when they use the name "Okamisama" on a financial document to avoid having to pay for their transaction.
Appearance
The Okamisama creatures appear as wriggling babies with bald heads, half-open eyelids, and flattened noses. They are the size of a human thumb at most. Instead of legs, they have six arms. Their body resembles an insect's, and their skin shimmers with an emerald-green sheen, similar to a scarab beetle. Humans would naturally find their appearance repulsive.[1]
Personality
Okamisama operates with a mechanical and impartial sense of duty, functioning as enforcers of an immutable financial system. If one invokes their name to manipulate fate to avoid paying for something, Okamisama treats the transaction and debt as absolute laws that must always be balanced. They will relentlessly pursue their target until the target's debt is collected.
Okamisama speaks with a tone of absolute authority when demanding that balance is upheld. They do not engage in negotiations, refusing to make compromises with Rohan Kishibe. Human value standards are irrelevant for them, as they reduce time and money to interchangeable commodities without regard for individual worth or effort. Similar to how rights and debts are inherited in society, if a debt cannot be paid by one individual, Okamisama simply transfers the obligation to their victim's parents and relatives, showing no concern for the consequences of their debt collection.
If they are attacked and fall to the ground, they let out an ear-piercing shriek that sounds like "Ogyah!" (オギャア). Although each infant speaks individually, they speak in short, fragmented phrases. They complete each other's thoughts in a synchronized manner, as if they are a single entity. They don't typically show emotions, but even they are bewildered when Rohan is suddenly beaten up by his taxi driver. If their target's debt is successfully paid off, they hop away and vanish.[1]
Abilities
Fate Manipulation
When Okamisama is handwritten in katakana (オカミサマ) as the recipient on a receipt, contract, or any document that records a financial transaction, Okamisama manipulates fate for that payment to be negated.[2] The way fate is manipulated differs depending on the situation. For example, when Rohan uses the method at a bookstore, the cashier suddenly tells him that he is the 10,000th customer and won't need to pay for his books. Rohan considers the skill absurdly powerful, fitting for a main villain in a manga to have.[3]
The fate manipulation continues after its first use, even if the user didn't use it again. Future transactions will be automatically added to the user's initial receipt or financial document with Okamisama's name on it. When Rohan pays for an orange juice using e-money on his smartphone, the payment gets negated without his knowledge and added to his receipt. Additionally, when he wants to pay for a dinner course he eats at his hotel's restaurant, he is told that he would only be billed when he checks out from the hotel, but that fee is then added to his Okamisama receipt. The effect only stops once the debt on the receipt is paid off to Okamisama, either with money or time.[1]
Debt Collection
Once Okamisama is used, the repayment deadline is the end of the day. At that time, hordes of the infant creatures swarm their target to balance the transaction. There is no escape from the infants, and they are only visible to the debtor. Although they crawl, they move quickly at about 8 to 9 kilometers per hour, matching the speed of a running person. Even when Rohan gets into a taxi and drives far away from them onto the highway, the infants pour out from the receipt printer of the taximeter.[1]
Okamisama collects payment either through money or through time itself, extracting days, months, or even years from the debtor's lifespan. They latch onto their target's body, sucking out their body's time like a leech. The more money a person avoids paying through Okamisama, the more time is taken from their body, at a rate of one day of lifespan for every one yen spent. For example, if the debt is 80,000 yen, the victim owes 80,000 days, which is approximately 220 years of their life. Victims rapidly de-age, regressing physically as their biological clock is reversed. When the effect happens, the victim's nails constantly regrow and shrink, while various wounds may also appear and vanish on their body. The process is continuous and proportional to the debt owed. If the debt exceeds the amount of time the debtor has and they become bankrupt, they will cease to exist entirely, effectively erasing them from history. If that happens, then the debt is transferred to the one who gave birth to them, as well as their other relatives.[1]
Okamisama can sense how much money its target has. It knows when Rohan does not have enough money in his bank account to pay off the debt when he tries negotiating.[1] Nonetheless, Okamisama's debt can be paid off through definite future earnings. If its victim can guarantee a future where they would earn money, Okamisama will accept that as payment and vanish, giving back any time they drained from their target. However, just as the victim erased the fact that they owed money, they would lose the fact that they were ever going to make money from those future earnings. For example, Seiko Sakanoue suggests that Rohan calls his publisher and secures a job which would enable him to earn at least 100,000 yen in the future, but if he were to do that, then his manga would get scrapped and Okamisama would never let him publish the same work again.[1]
Damage Redirection
The infants possess a strict sense of balance, preventing their target from committing fraud to escape their debt. If a victim attempts to destroy the Okamisama receipt or otherwise cheat the system, the consequence is instant and severe. Any damage done to the receipt is redirected back onto the debtor's body, making it impossible to escape their grasp. When Rohan tries tearing the receipt, he gets a deep wound in his forehead.[1]
History
Background
It is unknown how old Okamisama is or what kind of creatures they are. The phenomenon is not mentioned in any bookkeeping textbooks nor written in the law, but among people in financial professions like Seiko Sakanoue's, there are a select few who know about the "loophole." Seiko's father used it to bribe judges in an art competition, leading to his bankruptcy.[2]
Okamisama
After learning about Okamisama from Seiko, Rohan Kishibe experiments with it by using its name to purchase three books at a bookstore. Including tax, his purchase is 12,960 yen. Later, Okamisama manipulates fate and adds all of Rohan's unrelated expenses onto the same receipt, such as an orange juice for 130 yen and a dinner course for 5,616 yen. Without realizing it, Rohan accumulates a growing debt, which the infants arrive to collect at the end of the day. They latch onto his back when he is in an elevator and begin extracting time from his body, causing unnatural physical changes such as rapid nail growth and healing wounds. As he struggles to remove them, they continue their collection, crawling toward him even after being knocked off. More of them even drop in from the inspector hatch on the elevator ceiling above and fill the space, giving Rohan claustrophobia inside the confined elevator. As they hit the ground, they let out an ear-piercing shriek. Rohan manages to escape into the hotel lobby. Despite his efforts, they pursue him outside, moving at high speeds to ensure he cannot outrun them. Rohan then flees into a taxi, believing he escaped them.
Soon, Okamisama reappears from the taximeter, emerging in response to the fare increasing. Rohan checks his receipt and notices the automatically increasing debt, with new charges added to it: the taxi fare for 710 yen, a late night surcharge of x20%, additional fare charges, an ETC toll fee, and an interest rate of x30%. Rohan attempts to tear the receipt, but the damage is redirected onto his forehead, causing his blood to spill out onto the car seat. The taxi driver demands that he pays 50,000 yen to replace the seat, which Okamisama adds to Rohan's receipt, erasing the driver's anger. The creatures then begin speaking to Rohan in synchronized phrases, declaring that since he manipulated fate with his financial transactions, he must pay with his body's time to balance the books. They reject any negotiation and reveal that if his lifespan is insufficient, the debt transfers to his mother and other relatives. As they begin their debt collection again, Rohan attempts to use Heaven's Door on them. Some of them transform into books, but their pages contain nothing but copies of Rohan's own expense records. Rohan rapidly regresses into a child as they drain his body's time.
With no other options, Rohan devises a way to counter Okamisama by securing a future payment through a financial agreement from another person. He gets the taxi driver to stop at a service area on the highway and manipulates the driver using Heaven's Door to severely beat him up. The infants are bewildered watching Rohan get punched. Rohan tells the driver that if he were to take legal action, the driver could be liable for a massive settlement fee, potentially exceeding 500,000 yen. Rather than suing him, Rohan convinces the driver that they could settle the matter if the driver pays for his Okamisama receipt, which currently shows 100,000 yen. After Rohan tells the infants that he secured a future in which he would earn money, the infants blink in confusion, but then look at each other once they understand what Rohan meant. The infants acknowledge the payment and stop their collection, hopping away and vanishing as the debt on Rohan's receipt is cleared.[1]
Chapters
Novel AppearancesTrivia
- When Rohan cleared his debt, the amount on his receipt read zero yen and Okamisama's name was erased on the recipient field. However, Rohan previously found a receipt in Seiko's office with Okamisama's name on it, implying that Seiko might still be paying off her father's debt or that she uses Okamisama for her own purposes.
