Speaking of...
What is Wrong with "The Nameless Boy"/Johan Sommers"?The name Johan Sommers invokes the images of three different people in this story, for at different points, two of them took the name and all it represented for themselves. We are specifically going to be discussing the most prominent character with that name, The Nameless Boy. His life is a long-winded tale of misery, deceit, nihilism, and seemingly duplicitous motives. He is an enigma unbound by human morality, emotion, and the restrictive concept of fate. Like Osamu, he believes entirely in his own freedom and uses it to take the freedom of all around him.
This one boy grew into a young man, and that young man sparked violent revolutions across Europe with words alone. He killed thousands and parasitized nationswithout ever drawing a weapon, without ever firing a shot. Despite his vampiric lineage, he has no special powers or combat prowess. He doesn't need them. When he opens his mouth, cities burn and good men are twisted into monsters.
The (Abridged) Story of The Nameless Boy
"The Nameless Boy" was born in the Steplag in 1936, one of many Soviet gulags across the continent. Steplag was situated adjacent to the village of Kengir in Kazakhstan. He was born to the grandmother of Lucrezia (the real Lucrezia, not Taeko), Luna, and fathered by a vampire named Johan Sommers. After the boy's birth, Johan arranged for the mother to be safely transferred out of the Steplag and brought back to Japan, which she would raise her other two children also fathered by Johan.
With his mother abandoning him and Johan staying at a distance, the boy was essentially raised by the men and women of the Steplag, as well as the Soviet authorities guarding over them. Like the other children, he was taught since an early age to respect and idealize the Soviet Union and its leaders, and though he parroted the messages he was taught, the boy's only true goal in his life was to learn who he was and be freed from the labor camp.
The boy showed remarkable literacy and intelligence at a young age, and before he was twelve, he began to work the mines outside the camp with the other male prisoners. The treatment of prisoners at the hands of the guards was beyond abusive. Beatings, shootings, and humiliation were the wages paid for the prisoners' hard work, often occurring for either the slightest of mistakes or for no reason at all.
One incident encouraged the nameless boy to act. A young girl he liked very much left her wet socks to dry on the camp fence. Dyatlov, the camp's head of security, caught her retrieving her socks from the fence. He gave them back to her and ordered her to return to the female camp, only to shoot the young girl in the head as she walked away.
The nameless boy spoke to one of the male prisoners who shared the same surname as Dyatlov. The two were having what seemed to be a regular conversation when the boy specifically mentioned there was a guard with that surname working at that very camp. The prisoner's shock was plain to see, but he deflected from the subject and bid the boy goodnight. The next morning, the prisoner went to confront Dyatlov, revealing he was Dyatlov's father.
Dyatlov realized his father now knew what a monster he had become. He was no longer a valiant protector of the Soviet Union, but a murderous bully who shot a young girl for no reason and abused countless others. Ashamed of all he had done, Dyatlov shot himself that morning. The camp's most abusive guard had died, just as the nameless boy wanted.
It was this incident that made Johan confront his son and reveal the truth to him. He told the boy that he was his father and his birth was the result of Project Nirvana, a collaborative effort between Germany, Italy, and Japan to use Johan to produce a Sommerist leader capable of deteriorating and disarming enemy nations from the inside out. Luna's two other children were daughters, but the project's overseers were looking for a male leader who could work his way up any political and economic ladder. The boy was left behind in the Steplag for this very reason.
Learning he was part of a eugenics project meant to produce a certain leader filled the boy with a terrible mess of emotions. But the one emotion that would prevail was hatred. Hatred for Johan and Luna. Hatred for the people overseeing the project, for the Soviets making his everyday life a living hell. The boy once yearned for a true name and a purpose in life, but knowing that he already had a purpose assigned to his existence, that he was never free to make his own choices and live his own life even if he got out of the labor camp, fueled his rage for years to come.
Over the years, Johan and the boy worked together on the next step of Project Nirvana; getting the boy out of the Steplag and set up in Hungary under a new identity. Johan was in league with a clandestine group of Soviet officials, officers, and secret police agents intent on dismantling the Soviet Union to make this happen.
After the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union underwent a brief period "de-Stalinization", an effort by the collective leadership to ease some of the laws Stalin's regime put in place. One such change was the relaxing of camp administrations guarding over the gulags across the union. This meant that the Steplag's administration were faced with the danger of losing their pay and positions. The boy saw a perfect opportunity. He began working with the camp administration to flush out reformist and revolutionary elements within the camp, primarily among those that were former members of the Organization of Ukranian Nationalists. Unjustified shootings were reported to Soviet officers as attempts at sedition, thus making it appear that the administration's presence at the camp was needed to prevent an uprising from Ukranian nationalists.
What the administration didn't know was that the boy was acting as a double agent, playing both the camp guards and the seditionists. He encouraged continued protests and uprisings from the inside, which then led to more killings at the hands of the guards, which helped the administration stay and place while also fueling resentment within the prison population. The situation reached a boiling point in May of 1954 when the strife broke out into the Kengir Uprising. The boy used the chaos to escape from the camp, then volunteered himself as an informant to the Soviet Army, watching from afar as the military crushed the rebellion and retook control of the camp.
Standing amongst the ruins and the dead, Johan confronted his son about what he had done. The boy chided Johan as a failure and an enslaver worse than that of the Soviets. Though they shared the same goals, the boy had no faith that Johan would have the strength and fortitude necessary to achieve them. Gambling with his own life, the boy allowed his father to shoot him in the head before Johan turned the gun on himself.
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