Kurokoma

The manga itself never shows Kurokoma. Concept drawings render him with a lengthy pointed nose and unruly dark hair swept up into a large topknot. A scar traces down the right side of his face from eye to cheek, and he is shown holding a cigar.

An intensely ambitious man, Kurokoma aimed to seize control over the capital's rival yakuza.

No fewer than forty-two years before the present, Kurokoma resolved to topple Hyougoro and schemed to bait the Mountain God against him by using the beast's cub, posting a bounty on a white boar to obtain it. Material from Road To Laugh Tale preserves a deleted sequence that names him in full as Kurokoma Kihei, casting him as a kyokaku of the Capital and a self-declared rival of Hyougoro. In that scrapped scene the cub's abductors hand him a captured Tsurujo as a hostage to pressure Kin'emon and Denjiro into surrendering the cub, and he spells out his plan to draw the cub's parent into striking Hyougoro, a motive that the finished manga left as merely Denjiro's guess. The published chapters instead have the Mountain God devour the kidnappers and Tsurujo before they ever arrive at the Flower Capital.