[Mason Proulx]

Regarding the events at the end of volume 15

Spoiler:

People here were asking about how Friend could come back to life at the end of volume 15. I just assumed that he faked his own death. He's been proven time and time again to be full of nothing but lies and deceit. So his death was probably staged by himself. Remember when he was laying there as a cadaver and that child tried to touch his face, he moved his arm to make the child stop. It seemed that just like what he did in the science room, fake his death and ressurrection to inspire fealty in his followers (at the time, just Sadakiyo and Yamane). Apart from his common trickery, he also seems able to put himself in a state of suspended animation. In other words, play dead. That's what it seemed he was doing at his wake, although it would take a lot of willpower to be able to keep it up for days like that.

This is what I had assumed. But reading volume 16 made me question this assumption.

Spoiler:

We see that same flashback to the science room and once again Fukubei fakes his death by hanging. Donkey is chased off like before. But what happens after, Fukubei's trick backfires and slips, the noose seems to choke the life out of him for real. So are we saying Friend has been a ghost all that time? Or is the answer something more realistic? I feel I finally understand the mysteries surrounding Friend after reading vol. 16, but that part I still don't get.

Either way, Friend aggravates me so much. Apart from continually doing unfathomably evil things, Urasawa made him into such a liar that you can never believe anything says or does. Likewise you have to always question whether things that seemed to happen in the book actually happened or not.