Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.8: Chains of Death by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

About a year and a half ago, I decided to re-read the Lone Wolf and Cub series, a masterpiece and towering achievement of gekiga manga, created by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima in the 1970s. I figured I could get through the the twenty-eight volumes at least one a month, so it would take a couple of years.

Well, I'm now up to volume 8, so I think it will take a bit longer than that. And, as I keep saying for each book in turn, I doubt I'll have much to say: each book is very much like the one before; their strengths are their strengths; these are amazing works but what has to be said about them has been said, many times, over the past fifty years.

So I just read Chains of Death. It contains six stories. As throughout the series, they're all sequentially numbered - these are 39 through 44.

My sense is that this series went through phases or clusters - some groupings were more concerned with the central plot, some with one-off stories. They also take place in different parts of Japan, not that I'll be any good at explicating that. This book has a group of stories that take place during winter: snow and cold is important in several of them. It's also closer to the main plot; we see Yagyū Retsudō scheming in several stories, and get a flashback of his son's duel against our series hero, Ogami Ittō, for the position of the Shōgun's executioner.

The pleasures of this series, as always, is that odd mixture of the quiet moments of beauty - Kojima is masterful at depicting natural and everyday life - and the sudden interruptions of that life by extreme violence, which is what the audience, then as now, is here for. Otherwise, see what I - and many other commentators - have said about Lone Wolf and Cub earlier; it is what it is.