What is Mokona?

The party’s pet, guide, provisioner, and, in the manga, God.

Mokona is the white, rabbit-like creature assigned to guide the Magic Knights through Cephiro: round as a manjū bun, with a red gem set in its forehead from which it produces whatever the journey needs, tents, food, and supplies. It does not speak. Its whole vocabulary is one sound: “Puu.” For most of two series, that is all it is allowed to be.

Then, near the end of CLAMP’s manga, Mokona explains itself. It is the creator of Cephiro, of Earth, and of the other planets, and the author of the laws of each, including the Pillar system; it created Cephiro’s order after watching what the people of its earlier creation, Earth, did with theirs. It summoned the Knights the second time itself. The mascot was the god of the world all along, riding in the party’s arms.

IN EACH VERSION

The creature changes with the telling

In the manga

Creator and lawgiver, hiding in plain sight as luggage. When Hikaru abolishes the Pillar system, Mokona accepts the decision and departs with the three Rune-Gods, leaving Cephiro to its people for the first time in its history.

In the television anime

The reveal is never made. The anime’s Mokona remains a guide and a mystery, and the summoning of the Knights is explained instead by the girls’ own will, above all Hikaru’s. Same creature, smaller secret.

In the OVA

Mokona arrives as a strange fairy appearing in Tokyo, the first emissary of Cephiro the girls meet, and stays behind on Earth when the others go home: the one citizen of the dying world who emigrates.

THE NAME

A member of CLAMP, in the cast

Mokona of CLAMP

Mokona shares its name with Mokona, one of the four members of CLAMP itself (with Satsuki Igarashi, Nanase Ohkawa, and Tsubaki Nekoi). The group put its own artist’s name on the creature who turns out to have drawn the world.

The later Mokonas

The white creature’s descendants appear across CLAMP’s later work: the Mokona Modoki of Tsubasa and xxxHOLiC are stated, in those stories, to have been modeled on Cephiro’s Mokona. The god of one small series became the template for the mascots of two bigger ones.

What is Mokona?

IN EACH VERSION

THE NAME

THE FIRST WORD