I’d have to rewatch the Europe arc to see if people are picking up on contradictions I haven’t noticed. That being said, I didn’t find Chiyo’s arc confusing on first watch, which may make me a minority. XD

When Will first meets Chiyo, she’s loyal to her original prisoner-keeping mission – for Mischa’s sake, not Hannibal’s (she states this several times over the course of the arc). In their conversation over tea, she tells Will that she knows about Hannibal’s cannibalism – my sense is that she didn’t always know; she found out with the rest of the newspaper-reading world – but rationalizes that he was reenacting the originating trauma of Mischa’s death. Will rejects this explanation, and his presence and the events of the episode force Chiyo to confront the fact that Hannibal is a worse and less explicable monster than she’d been willing to admit to herself (”On some level, you knew,” Will tells her), and that he probably manipulated her into the prisoner situation in hope that she would kill. At which point, she 1) decides to confront Hannibal in Florence, to find out what actually did happen to Mischa, and whether her entire caged life had been a lie, and 2) is equally pissed off at Will, who acted as Hannibal’s stand-in and put her in a kill-or-be-killed scenario. Since she doesn’t trust Will, she plays her cards close to the vest and doesn’t explain herself to him. After talking to Will some more on the train, she determines that he’s going to try to kill Hannibal. This is not what Chiyo wants: she wants an explanation from Hannibal, and then she wants to be the one to determine what happens to him. So she pushes Will off the train.

In Florence, Chiyo turns up at Hannibal’s last known address, meets Bedelia, and observes that she has also been “caged” by Hannibal. At this point, knowing the broad lines of what Hannibal did to herself, Will, and Bedelia, Chiyo tells Bedelia that she wants to “cage” him in return. Bedelia dismisses her; Chiyo hangs around to see Jack and Will arrive; then tails Will to the Uffizi and observes his meeting with Hannibal. Remember that she expects Will to try to kill Hannibal. Lo and behold, Will pulls a knife on Hannibal in the piazza, so a bullet goes in Will’s shoulder, because Chiyo still hasn’t had the chance to confront Hannibal about Mischa.

Chiyo then follows Hannibal and Will to Sogliato’s apartment, where she meets Jack in the elevator and is forced to duck out. She takes up a sniper position in the next building and watches the rest go down, including when the crooked police bust in, drag Will and Hannibal off, and try to kill Jack. So bullets go in the crooked police, not even because Good and Bad are obvious in this setup, but because she needs to get an address out of Jack. They cut a deal, she frees him, he tells her where Hannibal is being taken and doesn’t get in her way.

Cue Muskrat Farm: it’s not certain when Chiyo arrives on the scene, but once she realizes Hannibal and Will have broken out, she aids in their escape and accompanies them to Wolf Trap. It’s only there, with Hannibal’s capture close at hand, that they have the chance to talk.

Chiyo wants to “cage” Hannibal, but what that means hinges on what happened to Mischa. If he admitted he had killed Mischa, then she would have personally ensured he stayed in a cage, because that’s her mission and her geis: to cage or kill Mischa’s murderer (her decision as to which). Given that he ate Mischa in commemoration but didn’t kill her, Chiyo is freed and has no personal responsibility to be anyone’s jailer anymore, even though Hannibal still deserves to go to jail. She sees Hannibal into capture by the FBI, and then she walks away.

Chiyo is the most CLAMPesque of all the CLAMPesque characters on this show, because she knows exactly what her Wish™ is, what its boundaries are, and every action she takes is to further that singular goal. She doesn’t get distracted by broader questions of ethics or justice, or side missions. This is why Hannibal admires and praises her steadfastness, and she takes the compliment in the spirit in which it’s given. I think it’s a shallow reading to say that Chiyo is a stereotype of Asian inscrutability – she has excellent reasons to be inscrutable! – but her character actually does feel profoundly Japanese. A Western model of character motivation would determine whether Chiyo was admirable based on what actually happened to motivate her, and I think this is what trips people up: you are intentionally never told what past events or Chiyo’s personal values commit her to avenging Mischa, whom she may never have met. But in the Japanese model, what is admirable is the strength and purity of the motivation itself – the length to which the person is willing to go without turning aside from their path. This is why a lot of the stories modelling ideal samurai behaviour strike Western readers as… quietly insane, is maybe the best way to put it.



I don’t know whether this is just an accident, though, or indicative of deeply-held weeabooism on someone’s part. It’s certainly more subtle than what Harris managed in Hannibal Rising.

TL;DR – Chiyo was never intended to be a rounded, naturalistic, progressing character like eg. Alana Bloom. She’s mission personified, a one-woman Noh play, a bullet flying in a straight line out of Hannibal’s past, across the lighted stage, and back into the dark forest. Will freed her physically, Hannibal freed her metaphysically, but she belongs to the fairytale.