The Nature of Killer Children in Anime: In the case of Now and Then, Here and There – Nabuca

Within the setting of Now and Then, Here and There, Nabuca is an unwilling antagonist.

He has been taken away from his home and family at an extremely young age, and forced to fight for a cause he does not believe in. Of course, this is the situation of nearly all of the child soldiers in Hamdo’s army, but what makes Nabuca unique is that he is, when we meet him, the most skilled and efficient of his regime. He has become as good a soldier as he can be simply because of the promise that Hamdo gave them all when they were naive children: At the end of this war, you can go home. He hinges everything on this assured fact, staking his life and future on it as his home is essentially representative of all of the good things that were in his life; you could call it nostaliga, only you must remove the notion that being nostalgic also means romantiscising one’s past, as in this case Nabuca is completely right to think that his birthplace is better compared to what he is living through now. “Home” is where there is no war, no killing, no horrific deaths, no serving of a mad dictator, a true place of freedom and, most importantly, where his family are.

In his eyes, to go home he must obey orders and, as a soldier, he must kill. He sees nothing wrong with this as it’s the way he’s been living his life for the past few years. He even maintains this belief with the arrival of Shu, thinking that the fact Shu isn’t doing what he’s told is strange; should Shu not wish to go back to where he came from as well and therefore follow Hamdo’s orders? However, gradually, we see a change in Nabuca’s character. As a result of Shu’s nature and the way of thinking he had due to the world he came from, Nabuca’s inherent disagreement with what he is doing is slowly brought to the surface. He protects Shu from he dangers of disobedience multiple times, doing this not because he wants to stop Shu from causing trouble, but because he realizes, even on a subconscious level, that this person has a better idea about the way the world should be. Be it from the fact he was ripped away from his home, or even the little things he may have learnt in his few years there, he has always had a sense that something is simply wrong, but he kept those feelings long buried to accomplish the task of surviving this war, and Shu’s appearance has caused an emergence of those feelings.

Boo’s death then causes him to finally realise that he no longer wishes to kill people; what is the point of killing others in order to obtain his wish if he truly knows that it is the wrong thing to do. As such, we perceive him as a pitiable character, forced to become a soldier unwillingly in order to fulfil his own, unfortunately futile, wishes. What is the most hard-hitting is that, though the notion has always been subtly hinted at, it is confirmed by Tabool that the home which Nabuca wishes to return to is long gone; Hamdo’s paranoia led him to destroy every town he took children from, in fear of revenge from those he had wronged (although, in retrospect, it was the best thing to do for a man in his position and he was correct to do so). Nabuca’s hope to return to his childhood life, though already naive, is now completely destroyed, as he is at the same time stabbed (literally) and discarded by his former comrade, Tabool. As such, the only thing he is able to do is pin his hopes upon Shu; he tells Shu to return to the place where he belongs, which was something he could never do.

In my opinion, Nabuca is the killer child who is the most understandable of them all. His circumstances meant he could not do anything but become a soldier subject to the will of the army and had to put his morals aside for the sake of his dreams and his friend, Boo. It is less because we fear his actions and more because we understand them that makes his nature in relation to his world all the more disturbing.