Lone Wolf and Cub 3

Kazuo Koike / Goseki Kojima – Dark Horse – 2001 – 28 volumes

After the thoroughly… sobering experience of reading Wounded Man 1, I had to remember if Lone Wolf and Cub was really as crazy as Wounded Man was making me think. It’s all kinds of hardcore, but Koike isn’t going off the deep end in this series quite like he does in Wounded Man and Offered.

I was a little disappointed when the book started with a heavily history/politics-themed story, which I don’t have much patience for. It quickly recovered, and other stories in the volume included one about a master swordsman selling his head on the streets, one where Ogami helps a woman who’s been sold into prostitution, a lengthy look at Ogami’s life as the Shogun’s Executioner, and a final story where Ogami is hired to mediate a conflict between two forces who are for and against cutting down the sacred woods in a particular han.

Surprisingly, as much as I disliked the first story (which went through a lot of trouble explaining a witness protection program, how it was tied to the shogun, and why the witnesses needed protection), I really liked learning about Ogami’s days as an executioner. The story was also a lot of politics and history, with some of the framing devices being the supposedly unjust execution of a young lord and the Yagyu clan’s power struggles. But seeing Ogami and his personal involvement with everything that was going on made it a lot more interesting.

My favorite story, by far, was the story about the ronin who was taking money from people who tried to behead him at a table, in a sort of brutal whack-a-mole game. The ronin objects to the samurai’s “right” to kill peasants, saying that his street games are the only way he feels justified in using his skills to make money. Thus, he also objects to Ogami’s assassin life, and the two of them have a duel. The duel is one of those amazing scenes that only Lone Wolf and Cub can pull off. Wordlessly, for pages at a time, Ogami and the ronin go over the battle in their heads again and again, running through scenario after scenario where Ogami dies, or both men die. The real duel is nothing compared to the mind games the two play with each other as they stare and prepare themselves. It’s really something to see.

Daigoro is still around, of course, but he doesn’t really have a prominent role in these stories, not even as a decoy. He sympathizes with the prostitute in that story, and the ronin begs Ogami to consider his son when the two of them are arguing about ways of life, but for the most part, Daigoro just watches. Even so, I like him a lot, and am looking forward to the volumes where he takes a more active role in the story.

This volume wasn’t nearly as extreme or nutty as Wounded Man, nor did it have stories that were as bizarre as some of the ones in the first two volumes. It is pretty hardcore samurai action, which is exactly what it promises, and some of the visuals it pulls off are quite stunning, especially given its age. Stoic action like this isn’t really my thing, and I don’t think I can read a lot of volumes of this together, but I do like and respect this series for what it can do. And it’s important to keep that in mind when I read other books by Koike.