Kenji Endo

Overview

Kenji Endo is Naoki Urasawa’s most fully realized version of the ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances. He is not exceptional. He did not become a rock star. He did not do anything important with his life. He runs a convenience store. He is kind to his customers and reliable about inventory and has, at the series’ start, completely given up on the version of himself that had ambitions.

The specific cruelty of the series’ premise is that his failure to become anything — his drift into an undistinguished adulthood — is precisely what positions him to save the world. Nobody else was there for that specific summer in 1969. Nobody else sat in the secret hideout and contributed to the Book of Prophecy. Nobody else has the childhood knowledge required to understand what Friend is doing and why.

The Book of Prophecy

The Book of Prophecy is a child’s fantasy — a story Kenji and his friends wrote about a secret society of kids defeating a villain who was trying to destroy the world. It has specific scenarios: a robot attacks a city, a plague is released, landmarks are destroyed. It was the imagination of a group of children, specific to their world and their references, and it should have been meaningless.

Someone took it and made it real.

The series’ mystery — who is Friend, what do they want, why use this specific document — is inseparable from what the document represents: the inner life of a particular group of children at a particular moment. Using it means knowing it. Knowing it means having been there.

The Guitar

Kenji wanted to be a musician. He had the band. He had the ambition. He stopped. The guitar he set aside when he became a convenience store clerk becomes the series’ recurring symbol for everything he gave up and everything the series is trying to recover — not just for Kenji personally, but for a generation that was young in the 1960s and had to become ordinary adults.

When he plays in the series it is always meaningful. The T. Rex song “20th Century Boy” that anchors the series’ title is the specific sound of that youthful ambition, preserved and still capable of meaning something, even if the person playing it has spent thirty years not being the person he meant to be.

What He Has to Become

Kenji’s arc is about finding out what someone who is not special has available to them when the situation requires something. He is not transformed into a hero with special skills. He remains himself — the guy from the neighborhood, the childhood memories, the guitar he never stopped knowing how to play. He uses what he has.

The series’ answer to “what does an ordinary person have?” is: their history. Their specific knowledge. Their particular relationships. The things that made them who they are that no one else has because no one else is them. Kenji cannot save the world as a remarkable person. He can save it as the person who was in that hideout in 1969.