As much as I admire the mythic tropes informing Daisuke Moriyama’s CHRONO CRUSADE, I’ve determined that they don’t cohere well enough to bring about the complexity and concrescence of a full-fledged mythcomic. I’ve occasionally identified some long serials, like HELLSING and DANCE IN THE VAMPIREBUND, as episodic novels that possess such concrescence. But CRUSADE never feels as unified as these works. Structurally I label it as a “basic serial,” often an assemblage of short stories, vignettes, short arcs and long arcs, having a closer resemblance to works like MAYO CHIKI and NISEKOI. And just as I was able to rate one arc within NISEKOI as a mythcomic, CRUSADE does have one long arc that proves sufficiently concrescent.
I’ve chosen to label this concluding arc the title of its first chapter, “The One Clear Way,” because these nine chapters embody the central heroine’s quest to find her way in a chaotic universe. I’ve already written a summary of the manga’s concept for my review of the anime TV collection, and so won’t repeat the details here. All I need mention is that early chapters establish that heroine Rosette Christopher has made a demon-pact in order to rescue her beloved brother Joshua, and that her will to use the services of “good demon” Chrono has the effect of shortening her life. At the commencement of the arc, Chrono and Rosette have mounted an attack on the demon-lord Aion, both in order to liberate Joshua and to foil Aion’s plans to destroy Earth. Chrono warns Rosette not to call upon his power, since she’ll drain her own life force. Rosette then states her credo (at least, according to the authorized English translation):
I’d rather go forward together, getting bloodied and bruised along the way, than be unharmed but have to do it all alone. And if I can make that happen—I have no problem offering my soul to a demon.
I should note that, even though the Magdalene Order is nominally religious, its main purpose is that of fighting literal demons who imperil the physical world, not the inner demons that plague human souls as Christianity imagines that struggle. It would be impossible for a Christian nun to offer her soul to a demon, given that there are no “good demons” in orthodox Christianity. In essence, Rosette’s real religion is her familial devotion to her brother, and so everything she does has the purpose of bonding with him once more—though arguably she forms an even deeper bond with her “demon lover” Chrono. Yet her struggle also reflects the need of all human beings for reciprocity, for acknowledgment from the significant others in one’s life. In that same first chapter, Chrono echoes that need, thinking, “Together, we can share our sadness and our pain. Even so, people keep on struggling, without complaint—searching for that one clear way.”
Fittingly enough, Rosette is separated from Chrono when she has her climactic face-down with Joshua, who has become an unthinking demon due to having had Chrono’s horns grafted to his head. When Rosette seeks to make him realize who he is, Joshua repudiates her, claiming she’s not his true sister. The two of them fight, and Rosette’s last resort is to use her pistol to shoot off one of Joshua’s transplanted horns. This gambit re-acquaints Joshua with the world of pain and loss, i.e., humanity, and he completes her task by ripping the other horn off his head by main strength.
Despite casting off his demonic personality, Joshua still has supernatural powers, and he joins Rosette in fighting the minions of Aion. But just as Chrono finds Rosette again, she seemingly succumbs to her contract, and her body shuts down. Aion appears on the scene to gloat at his enemy’s demise, and he compares Rosette’s sacrifice to that of the founder of the Magdalene Order, Mary Magdalene. (There’s no direct relation to the Biblical figure, though Moriyama may be linking her name, and that of Joshua—a variant of Jesus—to evoke not a sibling relationship but the maternal one of Mary to Jesus.) Aion departs to pursue his world-destroying scheme, but Azmaria, another of Rosette’s allies, arrives and states that it may still be possible to bring back Rosette’s wandering soul.
We then see Rosette on a locomotive train, implicitly transporting her soul, and those of the other passengers, to the land of death. She feels herself drained, of “all passion spent” in the words of Milton, and she reflects that her life was filled with running all the time, so that now she feels reconciled to her fate. However, one of the other passengers is Rosette’s ancestor Mary Magdalene, and she helps the young nun realize that she still has unfinished business with Chrono. In a moving scene, Rosette casts herself from the train as if falling backward into a pool—and she rejoins her body once more. She then prepares to join Chrono in an assault upon Aion.
However, Chrono has come to love her too much to let her waste her life in the final conflict, and he freezes her, denying her the chance to charge into battle. Chrono engages in solo battle with Aion, but artist Moriyama doesn’t allow the reader to see exactly what transpires, save that Aion is defeated and the world is allowed to return to peace. No one knows precisely what befell Chrono, but Rosette swears to wait until he returns, even if it takes fifty years.
Not surprisingly, even the dissolution of the demon-contract doesn’t allow Rosette that much time. She becomes less the hard-driving hero-nun, becoming pacific as she waits, though she avers that “waiting can be a kind of fighting, too.” She holds on longer than any of her friends expect, but ultimately, they aren’t with her when death takes her. But in her last moments, Chrono does indeed return to her, possibly because he too has crossed over. All that one can tell from his few panels is that he has a cloth wrapped over his eyes, which are presumably wounded or missing, while his horns—which he re-attached to his head during the fight with Aion— seem to be gone. Whatever the attachment of the two characters in life—and Moriyama is oblique about how much “eros” obtains between the two of them—apparently nun and demon enjoy a hieros gamos in the afterlife. And though it has nothing to do with the mythicity of the arc, I would remiss not to mention that “The One Clear Way” rates as one of the great sentimental conclusions to any literary work. A fair number of Japanese heroes and heroines may perish at the end of their stories, but it’s rare that their fates are so illustrative of both the perils and rewards of the mortality we all share.
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