Locacaca

The Locacaca is a rare botanical species that sits at the heart of the mysteries in JoJolion. It grows on a squat, pole-shaped trunk marked with rings and topped by a flower, from which thin, thorned spokes branch outward, each carrying a single fruit that points upward. The fruit itself resembles a peach studded with bumps, and the colored manga renders it a deep magenta, its overall shape drawing on the lychee.

Norisuke IV notes that it carries the scent of a fig and, using King Nothing, reconstructs fig-like leaves along its stem; the taste proves similarly figgy, though bitter rather than sweet. Yasuho's later research traces the plant to New Guinea, where locals still gathered it in the mountains as late as the 1930s. Rather than a tree, it is a perennial that yields only one to three fruits, and even the Papuan peoples who had lived there for tens of thousands of years found one only rarely. Local legend held that barren women who ate it conceived yet gave sand in place of milk, while toothless elders grew back teeth of stone. Every account of the plant vanished once the Japanese military occupied the island in 1942.

The plant runs on the same law of equivalent exchange that governs the Higashikata grounds: it returns something to whoever consumes it only by seizing something else in return. When an elderly man regrew a lost leg after eating a fruit, both of his eyes hardened into stone and shattered soon after, and the cycle can repeat so long as fruit remains, each pass claiming another random piece of the body. Dr. Wu Tomoki established that 125 grams are required for one exchange; the active substance is absorbed from the lips down through the small intestine and carried by the blood, then takes three minutes and twenty-one seconds to mend the gravest injury while converting cells from some unpredictable region into rock. To keep the effect away from the brain and other vital areas, Wu paired it with his own ability, Doctor Wu.

Urban Guerrilla observes that the fruit suits the silicon-based Rock Humans far better than ordinary people, whose carbon-based cells clash with it. Its most story-critical use is curing the petrifying stone sickness that grips the Higashikata and Joestar lines, first seen when Yotsuyu healed the dog Iwasuke with a slice of it. Two engineered forms also emerge. The grafted branch that Josefumi Kujo cultivated became the New Locacaca, which lets one person pay the toll using another body as collateral; feeding it to Kira turned Josefumi, not Kira, to stone. The other is Locacaca 6251, a refined liquid drug unveiled by Satoru Akefu, which Holy hands to Josuke to close his wounds at the cost of part of his face.

The fruit draws in nearly every faction of the story. Yoshikage Kira pursued it to treat his ailing mother, Holy Joestar-Kira, destroying several trees while hiding one in his apartment, and Holy herself built a concealed research lab inside T.G. University Hospital before the Rock Humans of the Locacaca Organization overwhelmed her. Those Rock Humans had been smuggling and selling the fruit in Japan until Kira and Josefumi stole a branch from them. Tsurugi Higashikata, Yasuho Hirose, and the amnesiac Josuke chase its trail across Morioh, while the antagonist Toru gathers the plants for himself, walking off with three of them after a Guard Rail enemy shielded them from Lucy Steel. By the story's end every version of the plant has been wiped out in Morioh.