List of Samurai Champloo characters

This is a list of characters from the anime and manga series Samurai Champloo.

Voiced by: Kazuya Nakai (Japanese); Steven Blum (anime), Liam O'Brien (PS2 video game dub) (English)

Mugen (ムゲン（無限）^?) is a 19-year-old man who is one of the main protagonists of the series. He was born in a penal colony on the Ryukyu Islands which in the Edo period was a separate kingdom with close ties to Japan's Satsuma domain. Incidentally, Mugen writes his name using the infinity symbol (∞), a pun on his name, 無幻 which is a homophone of the Japanese word for infinite. His Japanese is quite rough and "Yankī"; and he is illiterate until later in the show. Little is known about Mugen's childhood and he states that it has been a long time since he can remember what it is like to have parents in episode 20, "Elegy of Entrapment, Verse 1." The blue tattoos on his wrists and ankles indicate that he was once in prison. The circumstances of his imprisonment are initially unclear, but it is later verified that he was to be executed for engaging in piracy.

As a boorish antihero, Mugen is fond of fighting and has a tendency to pick fights for petty reasons. It is implied in a few episodes, that he is a womanizer, with his libido getting the better of him sometimes. In spite of it all, he is shown to have some redeeming qualities throughout the show. Character designer Kazuto Nakazawa stated in an interview: "When I was doing character design, the most difficult one was Mugen, as I expected. I'm pretty sure that as far as the director's image went, he probably was thinking of someone like a 'rapper who acts like a bad guy.' But the way Mugen acts is relatively based on his core conviction."

...
Wikipedia