Kurama Quotes

Kurama has known Hiei for one heist and a brief betrayal at this point, which the 2018 OVA later expands into a whole origin story, and he already speaks about him like a long-suffering translator. The line commits Kurama to a role he keeps for the rest of the series: the person who explains Hiei to everyone else, and whom Hiei will tolerate explaining him. It also quietly commits the show. From here on the team has an interpreter, which is why Hiei can stay as unpleasant as he is without the story ever having to soften him. Kurama does the softening on his behalf, and the cost is that Kurama is rarely allowed to be the difficult one himself.

This is the weakest sentence the show gives its best-spoken character, and it is quoted more than anything else he says. It is a poster. What saves it in the episode is not the wording but who is saying it: a thousand-year-old thief who fled into a human womb to escape death, then chose to stay human because of the woman who raised him. Kurama is the one member of the cast who has actually reformed, at real cost, so from him it is testimony rather than advice. But the line does none of that work itself, and lifted onto a graphic it is indistinguishable from a fortune cookie. The material is in Kurama's history, not in the sentence.

The reason he has no time is the point of his whole introduction, and the show withholds it for an episode. Kurama stole the Forlorn Hope, a mirror that grants a wish in exchange for the wisher's life, because his human mother is dying and he intends to spend himself to save her. So his first words to the detective sent to arrest him are polite, unhurried and a lie of omission, and the writers have him deliver them in a school uniform. The structure is deliberate: Yusuke's first case has to teach him that the crime and the criminal are different questions, and Kurama is built to be the demon whose theft is the most human act in the arc.