Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

Just to set expectations: I expect to read all twenty-eight volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub, which will probably take more than two years at the current pace. (Not promising that, though: so much can derail plans over that stretch of time.) And I will write posts about them here as I read them, since I do that for everything I read and I am a creature of habit.

But I also expect those posts get shorter and more desultory as I go along, because I don't think I'm going to have a lot of say about "here's three hundred more pages of pulse-pounding samurai action in the '70s style, as you like it!" But I'm still in early days here, so we'll see how it actually goes.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier collects five more stories about the vengeance-driven former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō and his toddler son Daigorō, written by Kazuo Koike and drawn by Goseki Kojima. At this point, Koike and Kojima are still exploring this world, still setting up.

The title story here is the most important: Ogami is hired to kill a "living Buddha," the elderly leader of a religious community, who is pushing the local samurai leadership to cut taxes for a few years to spare the people. The samurai, though, know that failing to pay their crushing debts - here, unlike many stories, mostly reasonable debts; this is a very poor community, not a mismanaged one - will ruin their reputations, and reputation is vastly more important than anyone's life...particularly the lives of peasants. Ogami can't just kill such a saintly man: all of his training is in meeting violence with violence. So, on the one hand, this is the story of how Ogami can transform his thinking, to turn himself into an almost inhuman spirit of destruction - very specifically in a Buddhist way, very particularly in the way the living Buddha tells him to - so that he can finish this job, and, by extension, continue on the road for his final revenge.

But the other side of the story is also central. Ogami is hired mostly by samurai to solve samurai problems throughout the series: he is a sword, and they are the users of swords; they have the money, and he is paid in money. His employers here are a complex mixture of high-minded and hide-bound, honorable and treacherous, understandable and foreign. At the core of Lone Wolf and Cub is a complex view of this society and the role of the ronin: not that any of this is "good" or "bad," but a deeper understanding of the religious and social underpinnings of the world, the places where those are weak or undermined or ignored or broken, and the ways that this world is an engine that systematically destroys people.

As all societies do, in their own ways. But Lone Wolf and Cub will focus on how this society works, by threading its hero through various situations in that world and seeing what's left when his sudden violence shattered them.

And, along the way, the storytelling will be measured and careful, in that seemingly-slow pace that was a revelation to so many Western readers when we first saw it. Lone Wolf and Cub has the luxury of space, and takes advantage of that at all times: not just in the length of the whole series, since no one knew at the time it would run that long. More important is the length of each story: they run around sixty pages here, and, as I recall, can get even longer than that later in the series. Each story has enough space not just for the action, but for a quiet frame around the action, a view of what else is going on in the world at the time, a wider experience of this world so that we can see what is shattered when Ogami Ittō comes to town.