Nanny

* Manga
* Anime

## Name

**Nanny** (おばば, *Obaba*) is a major character of Mermaid Saga, appearing in the story “A Mermaid Never Smiles”.

## Biography

She’s an old lady who became immortal by eating mermaid flesh and leads a coven of mermaids who can assume human form and live in a village completely surrounded by the mountains. Once every few decades, they get hold of a baby human girl whom she’d raise and feed mermaid flesh at a certain young age, so the mermaids would eat her flesh to have their youth restored. When the time comes to have that young girl eat mermaid flesh, she selects the mermaid that lived the longest to be sacrificed and have her flesh given to the young girl, and any girl who becomes a deformed one would be dumped in the caves under the village.

The latest young girl serving as the mermaids’ “youth” would be Mana who had her feet bound in wooden shackles from the very start, and she’d carry her outdoors while being a child and then has her remain in bed in a hut where she would serve her meals, since she grew too big to be carried.

As Mana turns fifteen, she sacrifices a mermaid named Ayu and makes Mana eat her flesh which successfully turns her into an immortal, but just as she gets Mana to be carried on a palanquin to be eaten by the mermaids, she is surprised by the arrival of Yuta who takes Mana.

The next day, Yuta shows up on his own demanding explanations so she reveals everything about the village and Mana to him believing that he will nevertheless trade her for his desperate desire to know a way to become mortal again but as soon as Mana is found and brought back, she shatters his dream to become mortal again by telling him that there is no way to do so and that “a mermaid should help you somehow” meant that other than cutting his own head off, he can die using mermaid poison made by rotting a mermaid carcass into poisonous herbs, which she applied in a harpoon she stabs him with.

However, Yuta escapes with Mana once more but they follow the trail of Yuta’s blood until an entrance to the caves where they hid themselves, so she decides to flood the caves by opening up the floodgate of a lake not minding the village getting sunk underwater to drive them out to the ocean through the only outlet where the mermaids would wait to devour Mana.

But as Yuta gets Mana unconscious out to the shore and fends the mermaids off, she approaches Mana and aims a harpoon at her throat only for Mana to awake and throw her off. She says Mana has no idea what kind of unbearable pain comes with eternal life, that death right now would be a blessing compared to living forever, doomed to wander without end and be cut off from all human contact, but it doesn’t convince Mana who wants to live and she sighs in defeat saying it’s too late anyway, as the mermaids reverted to their original forms and won’t turn back to human form even if they eat Mana. While shedding tears, she confesses being an immortal to Yuta and Mana and that she believed the only place she could live was among the mermaids deprived of joy and sadness, and she lets Yuta take Mana while she stays with the mermaids until the end of time.

## Trivia

* Her seiyu would also voice Ukai from In Lieu of Thanks and a neighboring housewife from The Executive's Dog in the *Rumiko Takahashi Anthology*.