Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 6: Lanterns for the Dead by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

This is the sixth collection of the 1970s Lone Wolf and Cub manga series, originally serialized in a magazine for adult men, or seinen - manga then, and (as I understand it) still now, have and had a mania for categorizing their audience as tightly as possible. There are five long stories here, like most of the volumes. Those stories are separate, with usually only minor elements flowing from one into the next (though this book has its last story based on the consequences for our hero from the previous story), and a larger overall plot that doesn't come up much at all in this volume but does occasionally surface in some of the stories.

I've been re-reading the series for about the past year: I thought I would be going through it more quickly, but a volume about every two months seems to be my pace. I warned up front that I thought what I had to say about individual volumes or stories could dwindle quickly; these stories are brilliantly told and masterpieces of their kind, but they are all very much of a kind.

So I'm afraid the thing that was most striking about Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 6: Lanterns for the Dead is that the title story's name was translated two different ways here. For the book title, and the table of contents, it's "Lanterns for the Dead." But the half-title for the story itself, which leads off this collection, is "Floating Spirits," which I suspect is a more precise translation of the original Japanese term. It's about floating lanterns, toro nagashi, which mark the end of the Obon festival, and, traditionally, light the way back to the otherworld for spirits that visit their families during that festival.

As I understand it, the lanterns are inscribed with the name of a specific dead person, usually a beloved ancestor (parents, grandparents, etc.). But the two lanterns in question here are the ones our hero, former executioner and current ronin Ogami Ittō, commissioned for himself and his young son Daigorō. That connects to one of the core ideas of the series: that Ittō and Daigorō are as good as dead already, on their path of vengeance - not "cursed" or "doomed," exactly, but on a path that leads inevitably to the otherworld.

The whole series is steeped in the mindset of Edo-period Japan like that, told from the point of view of characters who absolutely believe in the way of the samurai, who have lived their lives and will die following very specific precepts and enforcing the narrow boundaries of that world, for themselves and for everyone else, all of whom must fit into very tight boxes of allowed actions.

It's an alien world for American readers in the 21st century. But I think even for the original 1970s Japanese audience it was strange: hugely old-fashioned in every detail, and focused on the concerns of what was a small segment of society to begin with - for Americans, if the Founding Fathers were also a knightly order who believed intensely in chivalry, it might be something similar.

That's the central joy of Lone Wolf and Cub: being immersed in a long-ago, long-past world, dropping into the concerns and obsessions of those people, all organized into action-packed plots of violence and vengeance and treachery. This volume does that well; they all do.