Bathing Suit Bandit (水着ドロボウ, "Mizugi Dorobō"?), known as "Swimsuit Thief'" in the first Viz translation, is the 43rd chapter of the Urusei Yatsura manga.
Summary[]
Cherry has never been the best Buddhist monk around, but could he really have started stealing girl's swimsuits?!
Plot Overview[]
Mendo invites Lum to his personal vacation home, but is less than pleased when Ataru, Shinobu, several friends of the other teens, Sakura and Cherry invite themselves along as well. Cherry in particular attracts the most hostility from the others, with even Sakura lacking a kind word for her mooching uncle. That evening, the girls show off their newest swimsuits to each other, but come dawn the next day, they are horrified to find them gone. They do, however, spot what looks like a shiny bald head running from them. They bring this up with Sakura, but she is skeptical that her uncle would stoop to stealing girl's swimsuits instead of food. That skepticism vanishes when she is attacked by something that pulls her underwater and strips off her swimsuit - something that, in the brief glimpse she gets, looks like Cherry. That evening, the girls lay a trap and catch "Cherry" in the act... or, rather, they catch the perverted octopus that they think is Cherry.
Characters in Order of Appearance[]
Trivia[]
- The 1981 animated adaptation fused the plot of this episode with the opening of Chapter 42 to create the first half of Episode 13.
- When Cherry justifies his stowing away in Sakura's suitcase by pointing out that Mendō's beach house is filled with men, three of Mendō's bodyguards are shown to have turned into human wolves. This is a gag to indicate their lustful and distrustful nature, and may have been inspired by American Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons.
- When Sakura and Mendo go for a walk on the beach, Mendo can be seen wearing a shirt with the words "Ehime Orange" written on it; this is a shout-out to a real-life Japanese basketball team, the Ehime Orange Vikings, from the Ehime prefecture of Matsuyama.
- In the final panel, Ataru offers to buy Sakura's swimsuit from "Cherry" the octopus for 30,000 yen; this would be $300 in American money, and is quite an expensive purchase for somebody from Ataru's background!
- The swimsuit-stealing octopus being mistaken for Cherry is obviously a pun on Cherry's homely features, but it may also reference any of three things. Firstly, calling somebody "an octopus" or literally "octopus face" is a common insult in Japanese, with the meaning that the person so insulted is very ugly - elderly bald men are particularly favored targets for this insult. Secondly, there is actually a youkai called the Tako nyūdō/tako bōzu (蛸入道, たこにゅうどう), which is very literally an octopus priest - however, it's an extremely obscure creature, largely known from its depiction in an ancient art scroll called the Bakemono Emaki, which was painted in 1666 by Kanō Munenobu. Finally, the octopus' perverted taste for women's swimsuits may be a G-rated homage to that most infamous of ancient Japanese ukiyo-e erotica, "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife"; a series of erotic paintings that depict a human woman in the lustful embrace of a perverted octopus.