Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 4: The Bell Warden by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

There is nothing particularly special about this fourth volume of the Lone Wolf and Cub series: no new revelations about our hero, Ogami Ittō, or his enemies the Yagyū clan, no flashbacks, nothing unexpected. There are four long stories here - each one seventy or eighty pages - in which our hero meets someone and then kills them, often with some Buddhist philosophizing along the way.

I expect most of the volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub will be like this: fine storytelling; intricate, dynamic art; deep psychological insight; inventive fighting implements used in interesting ways; glimpses into a distinct, particular historical world seen clearly and unsentimentally; stories of sudden violence about a man seeking vengeance in a dark and corrupt world. Those are all excellent things; the series is known as a masterpiece for a reason. But they won't be new things.

In the first, title story of Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol 4: The Bell Warden, Ogami Ittō is hired to "test" the three sons of the current bell warden of Edo - the man responsible for the network of towers that toll the hours and tell everyone what time it is. In typical fashion for this era and this people - or maybe just in this series; I don't have a separate deep knowledge of 18th-century Japan - the warden takes his role very, very seriously. (In this series, there are the good people, who think that what they do is the most important thing on earth and are willing, even happy, to die in the commission of their duties, and the bad people, who do absolutely anything and are driven by their desires.) So he is basically making a bet: at least one of my sons will be skilled enough to beat and kill one of the premier swordsmen in the entire country, and thus be worthy to continue the family line.

Spoiler! He loses that bet. Of course. The premise of the series is that Ogami Ittō wins. Every time, one way or another, up until the final battle with his ultimate enemy. And "winning" in this context always means killing the other guy. A samurai adventure series could hardly operate differently.

The three other stories have similar depth, and are similarly entangled in that Edo-era conception of propriety and right action and inevitable glorious death. It is, of course, a very dark, gloomy series at its core, set among men who dedicated their lives to slaughtering each other mostly for the benefit of a few feudal leaders. I'm finding reading one of these books about every six weeks to be about right: going much faster than that would be too much, a flood of stories too similar in tone to stand out from each other at that pace.