Andy’s Bookshelf: Lone Wolf and Cub
Aug. 4th, 2011 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_andy子連れ狼, by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, 28 volumes
Ok, so writing about one of the best known samurai manga is a little bit difficult. Lets start with the obligatory summary:
Ogami Itto is a master swordsman and the shogun’s executioner (this is sometime in the mid to late 1600’s, so third or forth Tokugawa shogun for those that care). The Yagyu clan want his position, so they murder his family and set up an elaborate ruse implying he’s wishing for the downfall of the shogunate. Rather than politely kill himself he abandons samurai morality and becomes an assassin for hire. Oh, and he’s got his surviving infant son Daigoro with him.
Don’t read this is you want to see the main character struggle in combat. In the beginning he’s already best swordsman in Japan and by the end he’s singlehandedly killed two clans, plus a ton of other people, sometimes when they’re coming at him as small armies. Do read this if you want to watch a guy cut down twenty ninjas while carrying a three year old, engage in elaborate plots to get into position to kill his target, hold to an impossibly strict and brutal code, and occasionally surprise you with something unexpectedly noble.
For all that, the stories about Daigoro are the best ones, showing how sometimes he’s a normal boy and other times how deeply influenced he is by all the killing and his father’s strict code. They’re usually pretty poignant and Diagoro is quite a bit more sympathetic than his hardass father. He “chooses” to come with when he’s barely able to crawl and I appreciate that some time is spent exploring what that might do to a kid (ok, here it just makes him badass in his own way much of the time).
This was, I believe, the first manga I ever read. First Comics was putting it out in the US in the late 80s and my dad was introduced to it by a girlfriend. For years afterwards I’d track down more copies for his birthday. As a 11 year old I ate it up and it probably contributed to my affections for noir: stoic, tough, morally gray, but still strictly moral, “heroes”. Dark Horse has released it all now, though I wish they'd re-release it in a larger size: their books are even smaller than tankoubon and I'm pretty sure the usual Japanese printing was a larger than normal size, to better show off the art.
Now the obligatory, “may not be for you” warning. The series ran from 1970-1976, so definitely in what I’d consider the exploitive period of chambara. Lots of splashing blood, occasional severed limbs. And there’s a fair amount of rape. It’s almost always shorthand for “this dude is super bad and is about to get gutted by Ogami”, but the amount of it makes me think it was at least partially there because some of the audience was getting off on naked subjugated women (and from what I’ve read there are definitely some issues in Koike and Kojima’s later series, Path of the Assassin).
Anyway, if you want a classic about a dude cutting up other lots of other dudes, here you go. It’s violent, manages to present some fairly unlikely martial arts realistically, and slowly builds to a final conflict that spans several volumes, involves ninja, dual poisoned swordfight in a snowstorm, a break to save the people of Edo from a flood, kind of a lame trick, all the nobles watching, and a heart wrenching end.
Ok, so writing about one of the best known samurai manga is a little bit difficult. Lets start with the obligatory summary:
Ogami Itto is a master swordsman and the shogun’s executioner (this is sometime in the mid to late 1600’s, so third or forth Tokugawa shogun for those that care). The Yagyu clan want his position, so they murder his family and set up an elaborate ruse implying he’s wishing for the downfall of the shogunate. Rather than politely kill himself he abandons samurai morality and becomes an assassin for hire. Oh, and he’s got his surviving infant son Daigoro with him.
Don’t read this is you want to see the main character struggle in combat. In the beginning he’s already best swordsman in Japan and by the end he’s singlehandedly killed two clans, plus a ton of other people, sometimes when they’re coming at him as small armies. Do read this if you want to watch a guy cut down twenty ninjas while carrying a three year old, engage in elaborate plots to get into position to kill his target, hold to an impossibly strict and brutal code, and occasionally surprise you with something unexpectedly noble.
For all that, the stories about Daigoro are the best ones, showing how sometimes he’s a normal boy and other times how deeply influenced he is by all the killing and his father’s strict code. They’re usually pretty poignant and Diagoro is quite a bit more sympathetic than his hardass father. He “chooses” to come with when he’s barely able to crawl and I appreciate that some time is spent exploring what that might do to a kid (ok, here it just makes him badass in his own way much of the time).
This was, I believe, the first manga I ever read. First Comics was putting it out in the US in the late 80s and my dad was introduced to it by a girlfriend. For years afterwards I’d track down more copies for his birthday. As a 11 year old I ate it up and it probably contributed to my affections for noir: stoic, tough, morally gray, but still strictly moral, “heroes”. Dark Horse has released it all now, though I wish they'd re-release it in a larger size: their books are even smaller than tankoubon and I'm pretty sure the usual Japanese printing was a larger than normal size, to better show off the art.
Now the obligatory, “may not be for you” warning. The series ran from 1970-1976, so definitely in what I’d consider the exploitive period of chambara. Lots of splashing blood, occasional severed limbs. And there’s a fair amount of rape. It’s almost always shorthand for “this dude is super bad and is about to get gutted by Ogami”, but the amount of it makes me think it was at least partially there because some of the audience was getting off on naked subjugated women (and from what I’ve read there are definitely some issues in Koike and Kojima’s later series, Path of the Assassin).
Anyway, if you want a classic about a dude cutting up other lots of other dudes, here you go. It’s violent, manages to present some fairly unlikely martial arts realistically, and slowly builds to a final conflict that spans several volumes, involves ninja, dual poisoned swordfight in a snowstorm, a break to save the people of Edo from a flood, kind of a lame trick, all the nobles watching, and a heart wrenching end.
