Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

There's a difference between formula and genre. I don't know if I can explain it, clearly enough, but it's real. A formula is a cheap shortcut, a template for a kind of story to make it easier to knock off, while a genre is a territory, with clear boundaries and sometimes required landmarks, which a story is free to navigate in its own way.

The Lone Wolf and Cub stories, written by Kazuo Koike and drawn by Goseki Kojima (and translated by Dana Lewis with some production work to make them read left-to-right by Digital Chameleon for the English-language edition I'm reading), are deeply enmeshed in their genre, but they do not run to formula.

This third volume, The Flute of the Fallen Tiger, collects five more stories from the long-running series - there are twenty-eight books collecting Lone Wolf and Cub, each about three hundred pages long - and, as I often think happens with third volumes of long-running stories, is the point where a good work settles in, gets comfortable with its genre boundaries, and starts running some variations.

Lone Wolf and Cub is not just a genre work; it's a work that both defined a subgenre (the "Lone Wolf and Cub" story, in which a warrior travels with and protects a weaker, smaller person) and set the standard for its larger genre (the historical samurai tale). And, though there may be Americans who are deeply knowledgeable about that larger genre, I am definitely not one of them. (It's a very large genre, in a language I don't read, deeply connected with that nation's vision of itself and its history - I assume there are lots of subtleties and currents there.)

These are energetic but melancholy stories: our hero (Ogami Ittō) is declaredly on the road to hell, and just wants to get vengeance before the end. The stories all have that as background, though the central conflict only pops up here and there - in this volume, one of the stories is a flashback to the ambush and betrayal that killed his wife, while the other four are just things that happen to him on the road, times when he gets caught up in other people's troubles or one-off assassin jobs he's taking to make money.

The series is episodic by nature. I think the larger genre is largely episodic to begin with, but Lone Wolf and Cub leans strongly into the episode, with each story a separate bead on a long string, sitting next to the others and commenting each on each, in an ascending arc that will eventually culminate in that final battle.

I've rambled enough here, and I'm not going to detail the plots of the five stories collected in Flute. They're all good, all doom-laden, all full of sudden violence and intriguing details of a culture that is far removed from me (and that I think was at best a matter of historical interest even for contemporary Japanese readers in the 1970s), all full of gorgeous precise moments and psychological depth. If you have any interest in samurai stories at all, this is the series to read.