The Western Continent has many monsters and ruined dungeons, and the land has been deeply scarred by the ancient cataclysm and wars between the long-lived races. Most of the inhabitants are short-lived races and demi-humans, but there are pockets of elves, dwarves and gnomes as well. The culture is strongly influenced by the elves. Kabru comes from the Western Continent.
We don’t know where Asivia and Werntz come from, but based on their names, physical appearances, and the fact that the majority of the people who go into the dungeon seem to come from someplace nearby, they are most likely from the Northern or Eastern Continents.
(Japanese Pronunciation: Ashibia)
Asivia (アシビア) is a female magic user that was in the Touden party before Marcille. She’s a pretty woman who tries to take advantage of Laios’ trusting nature, and is referred to at one point as a “marriage-seeker”, implying that she is a gold-digger, looking to find a man who has recently struck it rich in the dungeon and marry them now that they have money. Laios seems oblivious to the fact that she’s using him. When Laios, under pressure from the rest of the party, tells Asivia that he can no longer give her special treatment, she immediately leaves.
Asivia is a name that comes from the precursor to Ancient Greek, Linear B. Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest known form of the Greek language.
Asivia (𐀀𐀯𐀹𐀊/Ασίfια/a-si-wi-ja) is identified as an “ethnic name” on a chart I found online about names and words in Linear B, but it doesn’t specify what ethnicity. It most likely comes from the Hittite word Assuwa (𒀸𒋗𒉿, aš-šu-wa).
I found that asivia/asiwija was a word used to refer to a portion of northwestern Anatolia called Lydia. Later this word came to mean the world east of Greece in general, and eventually evolved into the English word Asia, so Asivia means a person from Lydia/east of Greece/Asia.
Lydia was an Iron Age kingdom located in modern day Turkey, and the name comes from Ancient Greek Λυδία (Ludía, “the region of Lydia”), from λυδία (ludía, “beautiful one, noble one”). The given name Lydia originally indicated ancestry or residence in the region of Lydia.
So Asivia’s name may be telling us where she’s from. In Dungeon Meshi’s case, it could mean she is from “Asia” meaning the Eastern Archipelago, or it could mean she is from the “East”, as in the Eastern Continent, where the story takes place. Since she looks like she has brown or red hair, I think she’s probably from the Eastern Continent. Her name could also be a joke about how she’s a pretty girl and Asivia means someone from Lydia, since Lydia/Ludia means “beautiful one” in Greek.
Asivia/Asiwija also has a connection to the Ancient Greek word potina (𐀡𐀴𐀛𐀊/πότνια/po-ti-ni-ja), which means "Mistress, Lady", and is an honorific title used both for mortal women and goddesses. In the case of goddesses, it’s a euphemism used in place of their actual names, and Asivia/Asiwija is one of the descriptive words that has been found frequently accompanying potina. “Potina Asivia” means “Mistress/Goddess from the East.”
Despoina, another euphemistic title used the same way, means mistress of the house, and a famous use is a mysterious, nameless, "Mistress of the labyrinth", who was worshiped in Minoan Crete, the place where the Minotaur was supposedly imprisoned. The tale of the Minotaur and the labyrinth has deep connections to the world and plot of Dungeon Meshi, which I go into more in Chapter 12 (Elven Culture).
Asivia was not Laios’ mistress, obviously, but she wanted to be! And if she hadn’t left, and had become Laios’ lover, then maybe she would have been called the Mistress of the Dungeon (labyrinth) at the end of the story…
(Japanese Pronunciation: Wantsu)
Warntz (ワーンツ) is a former Touden party member who left before the main story started. He’s a slightly heavy blonde tall-man with facial hair.
Warntz is a common family name of Germanic origin. I found the following information online, but was unable to ascertain if it was true or not.
Derived from the Old High German word "warnats," meaning "watchman." The name is believed to have originated as a professional name for a town watchman. It has also been suggested that the name Warntz may derive from a personal name, as in "Warinaz," which means "guardian warrior."
Maybe this name is a joke about the fact that Warntz appears to be somewhat useless in the Touden party, and quits it very early on. He stands back and watches, instead of doing anything useful, perhaps!
(Japanese pronunciation: Kaburu)
Kabru (カブル) is the leader of his own party of adventurers who are an inverted version of Laios’ party. Just like Rin and Marcille, the magic users of the parties, Kabru and Laios have opposing worldviews, interests, skills and appearances.
When Kabru was born with blue eyes, his father and his family tried to kill Kabru and his mother, and so she took Kabru and ran away. She was from a good family, but apparently had no one else who could help her, so she was forced to raise Kabru all by herself.
When Kabru was seven years old, monsters spilled out of the dungeon near his village, and he watched as all the villagers, including his mother, were eaten alive. Because of this, Kabru hates monsters with a visceral passion, and experiences PTSD-like symptoms when he gets too close to them or forced to eat monster food. This includes freezing, panicking, and experiencing flashbacks to his childhood trauma. He doesn’t understand how anyone could like monsters, and wishes all monsters could be destroyed.
After his mother’s death, Kabru was raised among the western elves and was given a high level noble education and elite military training. He speaks many languages, and is familiar with social customs from all around the globe. He’s fascinated by people and loves solving puzzles, and he wants to both understand why dungeons sometimes collapse and spill monsters out onto the surface, and also prevent any future dungeon collapses from happening.
Kabru doesn’t care about fame, recognition or rewards, and he has devoted his entire life to understanding dungeons and protecting the world from them. He lives a monk-like existence in the basement of a tavern on Merini island, and he is great at taking care of and helping other people, but terrible at taking care of himself. He is an insomniac that drinks alcohol to combat it, and often forgets to eat.
The Adventurer's Bible tells us Kabru’s real name is unknown. There are some other characters whose real names weren’t in the manga, and Kui tells us what they are in the Adventurer's Bible, but this isn’t the case with Kabru, Thistle or Izutsumi. The implication is that their real names are unknown because the characters themselves don’t know what their names are.
In Izutsumi and Thistle’s cases, it’s implied that they were separated from their parents at such a young age that either they hadn’t been named yet, or that they can’t remember what their name was.
In Kabru’s case, he was seven years old when he lost his mother, so he should know his own name. I think the most likely explanation is that the trauma of his mother’s death made him forget his name, and that Kabru is something Milsiril or other elves named him. Because of how and where he was found, I can imagine “kabru” is the name of the region where Utaya was, a mountain nearby, or possibly a local word.
It’s also possible that Kabru is hiding his true name and has simply never told it to any other characters, but I think Kui wouldn’t have said it was unknown in that case, and instead told us what it was, or at least told us that it was a secret Kabru was keeping.
Some fans have mistakenly identified a dark-skinned, dark-haired woman with light brown eyes who wears fur and armor as Kabru’s birth mother. She shows up on Kabru’s conspiracy theory board on the title page of Chapter 76 (Lord of the Dungeon II) labeled as “witch”, and on the chart in the Daydream Hour that shows us many different tall-men from around the world.
She is alive, and currently on Merini Island during the manga. She was shown in a crowd scene during Chapter 96 (Falin IV), and is identifiable due to her unique hairstyle and large shoulder pauldron. So since she is alive, she cannot be Kabru’s birth mother.
Some fans refer to Kabru this way, but it isn’t a title that Kui ever uses for him in the manga or the extra materials. “Of Utaya” would be a logical title for Kabru to use, if he has no other name to identify himself with, but considering the bad way the people of Utaya most likely treated him, I think it’s unlikely that he would adopt the name “Kabru of Utaya.”
Post-manga, “Kabru of Merini” would be much more likely, or perhaps he would invent a name for himself that describes how he wants to present himself, a common first step in establishing one's status as new nobility.
Although Kabru is said to be adopted by Milsiril of the House of Tol, he does not appear to use her house name, or any last name at all. This suggests that because Kabru is a tall-man, not an elf, his adoption may not be legally binding, probably because the Western elves don’t consider him a person on the same level as an elf.
We know that the elven Queen won’t accept half-elves in her royal court, and that this viewpoint is considered conservative and traditional for elves. Flamela, a noble elf and member of the Canaries, refers to an 11 year old tall-man Rin as “evidence” and “an impounded article.” Rin is treated like an animal by the elves who take care of her after that, and it is so bad that it leaves her traumatized even as an adult.
If Kabru’s adoption isn’t legally binding, that probably means that he is considered Milsiril’s property before anything else. Milsiril might face no consequences if she mistreats him, and Kabru probably cannot inherit anything from Milsiril or her family, even if he manages to outlive them.
Kabru refers to Milsiril as his “foster mother” and “a person who took care of me for a while.” He says, very diplomatically, in the way that an adult who was abused as a child would, that parts of his childhood weren’t good, but he is grateful to Milsiril for the opportunities she’s given him with her wealth and social position as an elven noble.
Kabru doesn’t hate Milsiril, or elves in general, but the relationship is strained, and at the beginning of the manga, Kabru believes that the long-lived and short-lived races cannot reach mutual understanding. It’s unknown if his opinion has changed at the end of the manga.
Kabru, a tall-man adopted by an elf, is one of four characters (Thistle, Kiki & Kaka) in Dungeon Meshi that are involved in an interracial adoption.
Milsiril, Kabru’s foster mother, is a hikikomori (hermit, shut-in) and lives in an isolated house “in the mountains”. Like many hikikomori, she has a social phobia. She seems incapable of interacting with other elves, specifically adults of the same social status as her. She is shown talking to adult elves who are servants, inmates, or comatose without any difficulty, but she runs away crying from people who are her equals or superiors.
Milsiril also has an obsession with dolls, which she takes with her everywhere she goes, even inappropriate places like the dungeon, or while visiting a sick comrade.
Kui repeatedly tells us, with the exact same wording, that Milsiril adopts children from other races as a “hobby,” which implies that she is doing it for her own pleasure and amusement, not the welfare of the children. We know that many elves do not think of the shorter-lived races as being people, and tend to treat them like perpetual infants, objects, or animals instead.
Milsiril no doubt thinks of her adoptees as cherished pets, and she loves them the same way that she loves her collection of dolls. She tries hard to give her children a good home, a stellar education, and to pamper and spoil them in every way she can. Kabru (and presumably the other children) had a soft bed, a big room, could learn about anything in the world he wanted, and all the toys and cake he could ever want… But at what cost?
Milsiril doesn’t want to allow Kabru to leave home at all, hoping that she can keep him in her house, where he’ll be her baby doll forever, safe from the dangers of the outside world. It’s implied that while he was growing up, she very rarely let Kabru out of the house because of her own social phobias.
Milsiril also tries to keep Kabru from his birth culture, forcing him to embrace elven culture instead. This is a common issue interracial adoptees in the real world face.
Kabru narrates to himself (meaning that there is no reason for this to be a lie or exaggerated) that even though it’s a comfortable and safe place to live, he would rather die than return to Milsiril’s house, and also that if he ever went back, he’s afraid Milsiril would never let him leave again.
I believe Kui means to parallel Kabru’s foster mother, Milsiril, against well-meaning, wealthy interracial adopters who want to save children from impoverished countries, but that are not emotionally or psychologically prepared to actually take care of these children.
These people often collect children for social clout, or to satisfy their desire to be loved by something small and cute. Once the children grow up they stop being cute, and start having independent needs and desires. They begin to resent their adopted parents, and the relationship often breaks down into something very ugly, since the adoptive parent doesn’t want the burden of dealing with a troublesome teen or adult. They just want a cute child. There are many examples of this happening in the real world.
Kabru (काब्रु) is the name of a mountain on the border of Nepal and India, and part of the Himalayan range. It’s the 65th tallest mountain in the world and it is very snowy and icy, with frequent avalanches. Because of this, even though it’s not the tallest mountain in the world, climbing it is challenging, and is not often attempted. Those few that have managed to climb it consider it a major achievement.
“This prohibitively fearful icefall… had thwarted numerous expeditions, perhaps even the 'thought' of attempting the mountain… Unstable seracs of the icefall, a complex maze of chasms, and delicate snow bridges spanning seemingly never ending, near bottomless crevasses… Each time the members [of the party] stepped into the icefall, they stood a good chance of never returning.” (Kabru: Mountain of the Gods, Major A. Abbey, Himalayan Journal 52, 1996)
Kabru is a character that is known for being very good at charming people, but who doesn’t express himself honestly, because he’s trying to control the people and situations around him. I think nobody really knows who Kabru is deep inside, maybe not even Kabru himself, so a remote, hostile, icy mountain that’s hard to climb seems like an extremely appropriate name.
Information on the name Kabru is hard to find in the English language, probably due to the lack of major Nepali and Tibetian presence on the internet. Some of the oldest English sources I found regarding Kabru suggest that Kabru isn’t even the correct local name for the mountain (a common problem in early Himalayan exploration by Europeans) and might just be a descriptor, or a misspelling.
"All the people near the Kabru massif call it 'Kaboor'." (The Alpine Journal, 1921-22 Volume 34, Edited by George Yeld and J. P. Farrar)
“It is also said that the name applies to a peak close to Kinchinjunga on the southeast, and not to the peak known to Europeans as Kabru… [The real name is] Pahung Ri [Pauhunri].” (Appendix I: Place Names in Darjeeling. Compiled from an article by Colonel Waddell in The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Vol. LX, part I, 1891))
“Kangchen is a Tibetan name… the Sikkhimese use it as the name for the peak called Kabru by Europeans.” (Himalaya, Günter Dyhrenfurth (Berlin, 1930))
“...Kyabru or the horn of protection. The name is… Kabur… possibly a corruption of Kangbur or the swelling of snow; it might also mean the white swelling (kar-bur).” (Appendix I: Place Names in Darjeeling)
“Kabru literally means the 'White Avalanche' peak (Ka means 'white' and bru means 'avalanche').” (Kabru - Mountain of the Gods, Major A. Abbey, Himalayan Journal 52, 1996, editor Harish Kapadia)
This makes the name seem even more appropriate for his character, since Kabru’s true name is unknown, and his foster mother may have cluelessly renamed him “Kabru” the same way colonial powers like the elves sometimes name landmarks in their conquered territories incorrectly due to a lack of understanding of the local culture and language. Then there is also the running gag where Laios repeatedly forgets who Kabru is, forgets his name, and then says his name wrong once he does remember him.
I’ve seen one other mountaineering article cite the “white avalanche” meaning, and I think it’s plausible since the Appendix says it can mean “white swelling” or “swelling of snow”, which may very well be a literal translation for “white avalanche”. Mt. Kabru is well-known for its frequent, snowy avalanches.
Kabru also appears to be a word across several Middle Eastern languages, which is another region that Utaya resembles.
In Akkadian and Neo-Assyrian kabru means "(to be) thick; (to be) big, to feel big", “large” or “heavy.” Examples given were thick walls or cloth. Similarly, there is an Arabic root word ك ب ر (k-b-r), which means to be big, large, old, great, and comes from the same linguistic source as the Hebrew כבר (k-b-r), which means to be great or many.
Kabru (كَبْرُ) may be the declension of the Arabic word kabura (كَبُرَ) as a singular, nominative, basic singular triptote construct.
Kabura means to be or become big, to grow, to grow up, to become famous, to become too great (for something), to disdain, to become too oppressive, to appear intolerable, to become too difficult. Deciphering how the declension changes the meaning is beyond my linguistic abilities, but I think that the Arabic and Hebrew k-b-r are likely related to the Akkadian and Neo-Assyrian version, since the definitions overlap so thoroughly.
It could be that Kabru, who was found buried in rubble, was just repeating the word “kabru” (big, heavy, bad, the weight is becoming unbearable) over and over again, and so Milsiril started calling him that, not knowing what it meant, and it became his new name.
The name itself could be interpreted to mean that Kabru is or will become an important person, that he is arrogant (or appears to be arrogant), or even just that he has grown up, and is no longer the small child that was orphaned in Utaya.
However, it took me a lot of digging to find all of this, and Kabru’s name meaning a mountain while Laios’ means mountain-dweller makes a lot of sense (more on this later), so I think it’s much more likely that Kui was thinking of the mountain in the Himalayas… But like many other names in Dungeon Meshi, there’s no reason Kabru’s name can’t reference multiple things at once. Kui may have picked the name because it fits so well in so many different ways.
We don’t know! However, the Lepcha people, who are indigenous to the Himalayan region, call Kabru mountain Nan-tam Chu, which means Nan (level) tam (cut away, truncated, a plain) chu (snowy, rocky mountain). Supposedly this describes the truncated appearance of the mountain as seen from the rest of the Sikkhim region.
So Nantam could be a possible “true” name for Kabru the character… Though another possibility is Varun, or Varuna, which I’ll explain later in Chapter 15, Mithrun’s section.
Though these are educated guesses, based on what Kui’s told us, they are still only guesses.
Utaya (ウタヤ) is the name of the village that Kabru lived in until his mother’s death. It’s located in the southeastern part of the Western Continent, in an area that seems to be made up of arid red mountains and cliffs, based on images in the manga and anime, and a terrain map shown in the anime only.
Utaya (pronounced “uthaaya”) could be Hindi (उठाया) or Urdu (اٹھایا), but it’s also the name of a village in Northeastern Asia.
Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the national language of Pakistan and also several Indian states. Hindi is the standardized version of the Hindustani language used as the official language of India alongside English. Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible as spoken languages, to the extent that they are sometimes considered to be dialects or registers of a single spoken language together referred to as Hindi-Urdu, or the Hindustani language.
Historically Urdu and Hindi have both been used throughout many parts of South Asia, and especially in the Indian cultural sphere.
Utaya’s meaning in Hindi and Urdu overlaps. They are both conjugations of the base word uṭhānā. In Urdu, utaya is the masculine singular perfective adjectival form. In Hindi, it is either a direct masculine singular perfective participle, or a masculine singular perfect indicative. As best as I can decipher, this means that “utaya” is something that was done in the past, ie: he ran, he ate, etc.
In Urdu, uṭhānā means to lift up, to raise, to pick up and remove. So utaya would mean something (the city) was lifted up or removed.
In Hindi, uṭhānā also means to lift up, raise, pick up and remove, but other interesting things it means are:
All of these meanings are fascinating and fit into Kabru and Utaya’s story very well. Kabru was raised in Utaya, but he was also “stolen” from Utaya by the elf Milsiril. Utaya itself was stolen from the world by the demon’s hunger. Kabru feels that he bears the burden and responsibility of preventing another Utaya massacre from happening. Kabru and Utaya both underwent extreme suffering. Utaya has disappeared from the world, it has been consumed by the dungeon and the demon.
From this we could conclude that Utaya might mean something like “the raised city”, because the dungeon “raised” or increased its wealth. Or it could mean “the devoured city”, a place that was destroyed by its own greed.
The “raised city” could even be a reference to Utaya being located at a high altitude, which is what the other evidence suggests.
Utaya (Утайа) is located in the Sakha Republic, which is in the Northeastern part of Asia in the Russian Federation. Utaya is in an extremely rural and isolated area with a population of less than a hundred people.
The Yakut/Sakha are a Siberian Turkic people. The Turkic peoples are a collection of diverse ethnic groups of West, Central, East, and North Asia as well as parts of Europe, who speak Turkic languages.
Early and medieval Turkic groups exhibited a wide range of both East Asian and West-Eurasian physical appearances and genetic origins, in part through long-term contact with neighboring peoples such as Iranian, Mongolic, Tocharian, Uralic/Yeniseian peoples, and others. Turkic peoples share, to varying degrees, non-linguistic characteristics like cultural traits, ancestry from a common gene pool, and historical experiences.
We can deduce that the Toudens come from a Scandinavian-like region, Marcille comes from someplace similar to Italy or France, and Toshiro comes from someplace like Japan, based on their social customs, names, the food they eat, the clothing they wear, and what their homes look like. So using that same type of information, where does Kabru come from?
Kabru is the name of a mountain in Nepal, and Utaya is a Hindi, Urdu or Yakut word or name. Kabru’s local cuisine appears to be a northeastern Indian sweet that is also commonly eaten in Nepal, and his favorite food is the tomato, which is a staple ingredient in a lot of Indian foods.
The Utaya area appears to be made up of arid red cliffs and mountains, and it was close to the western elven homeland, so its culture should be heavily influenced by the elves, whose culture appears to be dominated by Greco-Roman, Middle Eastern and Indian influences.
The houses and buildings we see in Utaya appear to be box-shaped with a combination of flat and slanted roofs. They resemble architecture from the Mediterranean, Egyptian, Middle Eastern, Nepali and Tibetian regions.
Kabru is also one of several characters in Dungeon Meshi with clearly non-Northern/Western/Central European features: he has dark brown skin and thick black curly hair. He has almond-shaped eyes with prominent eyelashes. He’s 5’7” (170cm) tall, which is short for a Northern European man (180cm), tall for a Nepali man (162cm), but close to the average height of Indian men (177cm).
Compared to the Northern, Western and Central European-looking tall-men in Dungeon Meshi, Kabru looks more like the other East Asian characters, with a slender build, and a rounder, more androgynous-looking face.
His blue eyes are unusual for his apparent ethnicity, but blue or green eyes are not unheard of in the Indian subcontinent or North/Central Asia, and they are historically a cause for extreme discrimination, something that Kui tells us Kabru experienced as a child.
Taking all of this information together, I think Kabru is meant to be from someplace similar to North India, Nepal, or Tibet, though there may be elements of other cultures, such as Turkic, mixed in as well.
Specifically, I think Kabru comes from a region like the Mustang District of Nepal, which I’ll describe more in a moment.
In the Daydream Hour book, there is a comic about various characters presenting sweets from their home regions. Kabru attempts to share a dessert from Utaya that looks like white oblong balls on a plate.
These are probably an Indian sweet called rasgulla (literally "syrup filled ball"). Rasgulla are a dessert popular in the eastern part of South Asia (an area that includes the Himalayas), made from ball-shaped dumplings of chhena dough, cooked in light sugar syrup. Rasgulla are also popular in Nepal, where they are called rasbari.
While it is near-universally agreed upon that the dessert originated in the eastern Indian subcontinent, the exact origin is disputed. Rasgulla are as culturally important to the Bengal and Odisha regions of India as Parmesan cheese is to the region of Parma in Italy.
What is the significance of Kabru coming from a place like Nepal?
The way Kui describes dungeons and the villages that grow up around them are similar to real world gold-rush or boom towns. The ability for people to make a lot of money in a hurry, with very little initial investment, attracts poor and desperate people who use the dungeon as a way to lift themselves out of poverty. This transforms the local areas from whatever their normal lifestyle was into a service economy that is completely dependent on the unstable dungeon.
In the real world, a huge amount of Nepal’s economy depends on tourism in the Himalayan mountain range. Nepal is a very poor country, and working as a porter at Mt. Everest, a Nepali can make nearly double the nation's average wage.
The Himalayas are an extremely popular tourist destination, and the amount of people who want to visit and attempt to climb the mountains far outpaces the local ability to support it. This makes me think of the dungeon of Utaya, and the dungeon of Merini, and how people have overcrowded it in their desire to conquer and exploit it for economic gain and glory.
Dungeons as an unsustainable way for locals to make a living, that leads to the destruction of their homes when the dungeon inevitably collapses, is a major plot point in Dungeon Meshi, so I think the parallel is likely intentional. Characters often talk about someone “conquering” the dungeon, and “conquer” is also the terminology commonly used for climbing a mountain.
This phrasing obviously has a hostile, imperialist subtext in the real world, since it’s most commonly used by outsiders talking about proving their strength by climbing a mountain in some exotic, foreign place.
Mustang (मुस्ताङ) District straddles the Himalayas and extends northward onto the Tibetan Plateau. It is bordered by the Tibet Autonomous Region in Southwest China to the north, and Bihar of India to the south. The district is one of the remotest areas in Nepal and is second in terms of the sparsity of population.
Upper Mustang (the northern part of the district) was once part of the Kingdom of Lo-Manthang, isolated from the rest of the world by some of the tallest peaks on earth, including 8000-meter tall Annapurna and Dhaulagiri. From the 15th to the 17th century, its strategic location granted the Kingdom of Lo-Manthang control over the trade between the Himalayas and India.
Lo Manthang is the only walled city of Nepal and it is also known as the cultural capital of this area. The village is noted for its tall white washed mud brick walls, monasteries, and the King's Palace, a nine-cornered, five story structure built around 1400. There are four major temples, and many other smaller ones.
Geographically, Mustang is a cold, high-altitude steppe that is a part of the Tibetan highlands. It exists in the rain shadow of Dhaulagiri to the south and west and Annapurna to the north and east, which also makes it very dry.
The average elevation of Mustang is 13,200 ft (4,023m), coming to a peak at 8,167m — the summit of Dhaulagiri. It is a vast and arid valley, distinguished by eroded canyons, vividly coloured stratified rock formations and barren high-altitude deserts.
The mean minimum monthly air temperature falls to -2.7 °C in winter while the maximum monthly air temperature reaches 23.1 °C in summer. Only about 40.3 square kilometers, about 1% of the total land area, is cultivated while 1,477 square kilometers, about 40%, is pasture land.
The vividly colored canyons and cliffs of the Mustang District look very similar to the landscapes that Kui has shown us in the manga, and what we’ve seen in the anime.
We also know that in Dungeon Meshi, dungeons only grow large and dangerous if a lot of humans visit them, and dungeons that don’t have a lot of traffic tend to wither away. If Utaya was a trade hub that saw a lot of people and goods moving through it (lots of desire), it would make sense for a man-made dungeon to grow out of control there.
Being major trade hubs might even be something that Utaya and Merini have in common, and part of why both of them grew such catastrophically dangerous dungeons.
When Kabru was born, his father and his family wanted to kill him and his mother because Kabru had blue eyes, something that they thought was proof that he was the child of a demon (or that Kabru’s mother had been unfaithful). This is a real belief that people in many cultures throughout history have held, and that is still prevalent today.
The “evil eye” is a supernatural belief in a curse brought about by a person looking at you. The belief in the evil eye has existed since prehistory, as long as 5,000 years ago. It is estimated that around 40% of the modern world's population believes in the evil eye. This concept is most common across the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia, areas where light-colored eyes are uncommon.
In areas where light-colored eyes are rare, people with green eyes, and especially blue eyes, are thought to bestow the curse, intentionally or unintentionally. Just one look from a blue-eyed person is often considered enough to inflict a curse. One of the most famous and widespread talismans against the evil eye is the nazar, a glass amulet featuring concentric circles in dark blue, white, light blue and black. It’s supposed to “bounce” the curse away from the wearer.
Imagine Kabru growing up in a village surrounded by people wearing and hanging talismans that look like his eyes, because the people around him think blue eyes are evil. They call his mother a witch for birthing him, and a whore because she doesn’t have a husband. Imagine parents forbidding their children from playing with or even talking to Kabru. People crossing the street to get away from him, or chasing him away by throwing rocks.
This childhood trauma, combined with Kabru’s experience of the dungeon collapse in Utaya, and being raised by an elf that treated him more like a pet than a human being, set Kabru up as a character who has never had a home where he belongs.
He has been an outsider from the instant he was born, and every place he has lived treats him as an “other.” To his father’s family, he was a curse. To his mother, although she loved him, he was a burden. To the people of Utaya, he was a monster. To the elves, he’s a tall-man baby (no matter how old he gets) with unusual but pretty eyes, to the people on Merini Island, he’s a dangerous foreigner from the West with elven ways and education.
Kabru speaks many languages, but the most unusual one is undoubtedly the kobold language of the Western Continent.
Kobold languages are different from other human languages due to the unique structures of kobold mouths and faces. Because of this, kobolds have difficulty speaking the Common language, and based on the extra comic about Kabru tutoring Kuro in Common, non-kobolds have the same sort of difficulty when trying to speak kobold.
The Adventuer’s Bible says that Kabru may have learned how to speak kobold because there was a kobold village near Utaya, but we also know that kobolds are hostile and unfriendly to outsiders, and tall-men and kobolds frequently compete for resources in the Western Continent.
So how did Kabru end up learning kobold, if kobolds are so dangerous?
Kabru and his mother were outcasts in Utaya because of Kabru’s blue eyes, which made life very hard for them. It’s also very likely that because they had been rejected by Kabru’s father, she would be seen as an unmarried mother, and Kabru as a bastard child, which would make them even more untouchable to the Utaya community.
I think that because Kabru was so heavily ostracized by the other tall-men around him, the only children he could sometimes interact with in Utaya were kobolds, who might not have the same cultural superstitions and norms that the tall-man do. The kobolds might not care about Kabru’s mother being unmarried, and not perceive Kabru’s blue eyes as something dangerous, possibly because of a cultural difference or because they can’t see colors well. Because of all this, they may have been willing to interact with Kabru.
Kabru, being an extremely charming and friendly person, was possibly able to win over the local kobolds and became a special exception to their mistrust of tall-men, but it wouldn’t have been easy, and that may be why he tries to warn Laios and Falin away from trying it, because as an adult he’s now aware of how reckless and dangerous what he did as a child was.
In Chapter 4, Tall-men: Northern Continent, I mentioned that Laios asks to have his body disposed of in something resembling a sky burial. Marcille, Yaad, and especially Kabru seem upset by the suggestion. Kabru hides his face in his hands and Yaad puts a comforting hand on his shoulder as the three of them rush out of the throne room in order to end the conversation.
This could be interpreted in many ways, but if Kabru comes from a North Indian/Nepali/Tibetian culture, sky burial is an ancient practice in those regions. He may see Laios as an outsider tastelessly requesting to be buried in a style that Kabru associates with his homeland.
However, it could also be that Kabru is simply disgusted by the idea of any human body being eaten by monsters, due to his trauma, and since Yaad and Marcille are his coworkers, they probably know this about him, so they try to get Kabru away from Laios as quickly as possible to prevent any more discomfort.
Like Marcille and Rin, Laios and Kabru’s names have a connection. Kabru is named after a deadly mountain, and Laios is the Greek name for the blue rock thrush, whose scientific name is Monticola solitarius, which translates to “solitary mountain dweller.”
Kabru, a mountain that cannot be understood due to the extreme danger of getting close to it, and Laios, a solitary mountain dweller. They are both isolated from society: Kabru by choice, he can connect to people easily but doesn’t allow anyone to truly know him; Laios by his nature, he wishes he could connect, but he doesn’t know how.
As king and advisor, Laios can live beside Kabru in a symbiotic relationship, sheltered from the difficulties of ruling a country by Kabru’s strong social defenses, like a bird protected from predators (politicians, other rulers) by living in a hostile environment (a dangerous mountain).
Though Laios is king, Kabru is the one who will probably do most of the difficult social maneuvering that will create a kingdom where people like Laios (strange, eccentric) can feel at home.
Throughout Dungeon Meshi, Kui has associated certain colors with certain characters. Laios is red, and Kabru is blue. These two colors are often seen as opposites, and there is a famous Japanese story called “The Red Oni Who Cried”, which is the origin of a lot of this red and blue theming in Japanese pop culture.
Once there was a red oni and a blue oni. The red oni wanted to befriend humankind, but because of the oni’s terrifying nature, humanity was afraid of it. The red oni cried because of this.
Knowing about the red oni’s desires, the blue oni devises a plan to make the red oni a hero, by making himself a villain: he attacks the humans and allows the red oni to pretend to defeat him in battle. This works perfectly, and the red oni is happy now that humanity has accepted him, however the blue oni, knowing that the humans would stop trusting the red oni if they realized that the two of them were friends, chooses to leave forever.
When the red oni eventually realizes that the blue oni has left him, he cries because of what a wonderful friend the blue oni is, because of his thoughtful and selfless nature.
This story fits well with the nature of Laios and Kabru’s post-canon situation as king and advisor, and may be what Kui was thinking of when she decided to dress them in red and blue, it certainly would be a familiar trope for Japanese readers.
It’s very likely that people who have to deal with Merini’s royal court see Laios as the soft, agreeable side of the government that can be fooled, while Kabru is the harsh taskmaster that cannot be tricked or swayed. This allows Laios to be well-loved by the people and makes the burden of being king less difficult, at the expense of Kabru being liked by everyone, something which we know is normally important to him. Like the blue oni, he sacrifices his own comfort for the sake of his friend.
I’ll go into this in Chapter 15, Mithrun, but many, many, many elements of Mitra and Varuna’s dynamic in Hindu mythology could be easily applied to Mithrun and Kabru’s storyline together.
For Kabru, this suggests that Mithrun is someone who his life and destiny are tied to, and no matter what happens, he and Mithrun will find themselves drawn to each other. Now that they have met and become friends, they can help each other heal, overcome depression, guilt, and anxiety, and learn how to live and be happy again.