Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 9: Echo of the Assassin by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

This is the ninth book of a twenty-eight book series; three hundred pages of stories that fall in the early-middle of a much longer arc. The premise was set up at the beginning: former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō is wandering through Edo-period Japan, taking various murderous jobs as he finds them, while he works on his longer-term goal of getting vengeance on the ninja Yagyū clan who killed his wife and ruined his life. Oh, and he has his toddler son in tow - hence the title.

There are two kinds of stories in Lone Wolf and Cub. We can call them mythology stories and episode-of-the-week stories, if we want. The mythology ones are part of the central spine, and see Ittō interacting - generally at the point of his sword - with the Yagyū. But they are a minority; most of the stories are about Ittō in this town, or wandering through this bit of countryside, and the people he meets (and often kills) along the way.

Echo of the Assassin is almost entirely episode-of-the week stories. It has four long, separate stories, all set somewhere fairly bucolic and rural, with Ittō passing through or doing something to further an assassination job. At the end, there's a shorter piece called "The Yagyū Letter: Prologue," which I gather leads right into the next volume. In it, we learn that the somewhat obscure actions Ittō took during the previous story were directly related to that central plot, and that the Yagyū will be retaliating, probably in massive force and with sneaky, weird ninja devices that artist Goseki Kojima will have fun drawing.

The joys of this series are still that odd mixture, partially the closely-observed, low-key depiction of life and nature in this now-long-gone era of Japan, with odd facts and quirky sidebar notes and lots of gorgeous panels of the world Ittō wanders through. And then the sudden explosions of violence, from Ittō and other men like him - mostly directed at each other, but not always.

The rules of the stories are always the same: Ittō will win in any contest of violence. Not necessarily easily, and not always against men (and rarely women) we want to see killed, but he will win. He will be more devoted to his mission than anyone else he meets is devoted to anything, and we could construct a ladder of righteousness based on that principle: Ittō at the top, of course, with the occasional nearly-as-driven characters slightly below, and then all of the ninjas and schemes and bullies and corrupt officials and crude rustics just trying to get through their days without being cut in half by a dōtanuki.

This book felt a bit more rural to me than most. I don't know Japanese geography, particularly that of several hundred years ago, but Ittō is traveling through small places in these four stories, far from big cities. He's been other places in the series, of course, and will travel more before it's done. But this one is mostly out in the countryside, leading to plenty of lovely scenery from Kojima. Pity about all the blood splattered all of it, I suppose.