A Different Dracula (翔んだドラキュラ, "Tonda Dorakyura"?), known as "Not Your Ordinary Dracula" in the first Viz translation, is the 101st chapter of the Urusei Yatsura manga.
Summary[]
Count Dracula sets his sights on the supple neck of Lum, but he may be biting off more than he can chew.
Plot Overview[]
High on a chimney in Tomobiki Town, bungling vampire Count Dracula wakes to seek the blood of beautiful girls. His faithful servant bat leads him to his latest victim, who turns out to be none other than Lum. Unfortunately, the incompetent vampire arrives at the Moroboshi household after potsticker night, when Ataru is taunting his oni wife over her newly revealed aversion to garlic. Retreating to the rooftop, he has his bat convey a letter begging Lum to come up there so he can drink her blood, and whilst it is incredibly poorly spelled, it piques her and Ataru's curiosity, so they come up to see him. However, he botches his attempt to bite Lum's neck and leaves, deeply embarrassed, whilst the two are left wondering what his deal was.
Characters in Order of Appearance[]
Trivia[]
- Bram Stoker's vampire novel "Dracula" was first translated into Japanese in 1956 by Hirai Teiichi, and was Japan's first exposure to the Western concept of vampires. This is why some older manga and anime refer to vampires as "Draculas" (or "Draculinas", for females).
- Dracula's bat servant is named Kōmori, which literally means Bat. Viz Media's English translation renames him as "Batty", which also doubles as a pun, given that Komori is the sensible one and his master is the bumbling fool (or the "batty one").
- This chapter introduces the idea that Lum finds the smell of garlic repulsive. This is quite ironic, considering both Lum's love of far stronger spicy flavors and the ubiquity of garlic as a flavoring agent.
- In the extra-tall panel showing Dracula climbing up the tree to reach Ataru and Lum's room, Torajima can be seen hiding underneath the Moroboshi household.
- The horrible misspellings in Dracula's love letter is a complicated gag that doesn't quite translate well into English, though Viz Media does its best by showing the letter as being full of phonetic (spelled-as-pronounced) words and outright numbers. It stems from the three distinct Japanese writing systems - hiragana, katakana, and kanji - and the distinctly Japanese concept of Ateji, but the ultimate gag is that Dracula has writing skills on par with a very young child.
- Hiragana and katakana are both syllabaries -- written languages where one symbol corresponds to one sound in spoken Japanese. However, hiragana is used mainly for Japanese words, and katakana is used for words that were borrowed from other languages.
- Kanji is a pictogram language descended from the Chinese writing system. Not using kanji in one's writing is considered childish and unsophisticated. Not using kanji can also make a letter very hard to read; Japanese contains many homonyms, or specifically homophones - words with the same pronunciation but different meanings and different spellings - which means that kanji provide a clearer identification than hiragana do.
- Ateji is the practice of substituting kanji for ones of similar reading, either because the author doesn't know or can't remember the correct kanji, or because they want the reader to take away a specific reading that would not be the normal reading for those kanji. The series title Urusei Yatsura is itself an example of the latter usage of Ateji.
- In the original Japanese, Komori chides Dracula for not using kanji, with Dracula retorting that he can't write the word "date" with kanji - this is because "date" is an English loan-word and thus can only be written with katakana. This exchange is changed into Komori pointing out what a terrible speller Dracula is and Dracula chiding Komori as rude in the Viz Media English translation, as this exchange wouldn't work with the writing translated into English.
- Both when Dracula first arrives outside the Moroboshi house and in the final panel, in the original Japanese, Komori and Dracula respectively refer to that night being "tenchusatsu". This is a word stemming from the Chinese astrological concept of Ba-Zi (literally Eight Characters or Eight Words, but commonly translated as The Four Pillars of Destiny), the concept that a person's destiny or fate can be divined by the two sexagenary cycle characters assigned to their birth year, month, day, and hour. In the Ba-Zi system, tenchusatsu is a period of bad luck and misfortune, often specifically a day or even a year. The system made its way to Japan, and the term tenchusatsu passed into the casual vocabulary. Hence, Viz Media translates Dracula's final word bubble into English as "Tonight is an unlucky night!"
- The issue of Shonen Sunday in which this chapter debuted was one of the rare issues to be published on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday.