Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 5: Black Wind by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

In a long-running series, it can be easy to forget that some things weren't there from the beginning. Lone Wolf and Cub ran for twenty-eight volumes, but this is the one where that famous baby-cart first gets guns. (It's also armored on the bottom at a significant moment here, which might have been shown earlier - I don't remember.)

The guns get more baroque later on, as I recall, but here we see our hero, former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō, meet a master gunsmith, learn a few things about that man's craft, and get plans that he can incorporate in his own death-dealing. We see him and his son working on the cart, but not the full murderous effect of those modifications - creators Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima have to save something for later.

Black Wind is the fifth of those twenty-eight collections of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, which originally ran in a Japanese magazine in the early '70s and was translated about twenty-five years ago by Dana Lewis for this American reprinting, with the iconic covers by Frank Miller with Lynn Varley.

Like most of the books, it collects mostly independent stories - there was a long, loose plot to the whole of Lone Wolf and Cub, but that was "Ittō wanders around Japan, working as an assassin-for-hire, to gather up enough money to force an investigation of the Yagyu clan who betrayed him, destroyed his family honor, and killed his wife. Meanwhile, the Yagyu intermittently search for Ittō and try to kill him, with no luck." Most of the stories were about a specific assassination contract, or - as in the case of the title story here - the aftermath of one of those.

The five stories here do have a bit of Yagyu intrigue - "Decapitator Asaemon" is about a man manipulated into chasing Ittō because the Yagyu will be happy whichever one of them kills the other - but they're mostly separate. Well, the last story here, "The Guns of Sakai," I've already alluded to - it's somewhat important later because it shows another way Ittō has added to his formidable armament. But, more importantly, it showcases one of the core themes of the series: violent people are divided into two groups, those driven by expedience and greed, and those driven by a purer love for the work itself. The greedy ones are evil, and will die badly. Those who care deeply about doing their jobs well may come in conflict with Ittō - the gunsmith certainly does - but are seen to be noble and get good deaths. (Normal people, those who are no good at violence to begin with, get to keep their heads down and hope they make it out the other end, just like real life.)

I've written about the previous books in this series; I'm in the middle of what I think will be a re-read of the whole series over two or three years. I'm trying not to repeat myself, and trying not to do the book-report thing: in the first story, Ittō kills this guy for that guy, and it is sad because reasons. So I think this is what I want to say about this book: maybe not completely finished, but neither is the series, is it? This is a bit of middle, of a series that had a very long middle. These stories are much like the ones that came before and after them: evocative, muscular, steeped in a worldview that was outdated and alien, even in Japan fifty years ago, told precisely and  well, each long enough to be a mini-epic of its own.