Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.7: Cloud Dragon, Wind Tiger by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

There are twenty-eight volumes collecting the whole Lone Wolf and Cub series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, so this is the one-quarter mark. When it was published in English translation, back in 2001, we knew that. I don't know if the original Japanese book audience would have known that,  or how soon this book first appeared after the stories were originally published in a Japanese magazine in the 1970s.

In any case, it is largely middle - muscular middle, full of strong stories, but still middle - and writing about middle means either being vague or getting into great detail. I'm thinking, as I putter slowly through Lone Wolf and Cub this time, I'm going to be vague.

Cloud Dragon, Wind Tiger collects five stories - as is fairly typical, one of them is part of the overall larger story, with the Yagyu ninjas trying once again to kill former executioner and current ronin Ogami Ittō, and of course failing. The other four stories are standalone pieces, each a case where Ittō is either hired for an assassination or just happens to be somewhere when other violence is happening.

The stories are atmospheric and grounded, each one featuring specifics of life in this chaotic period of Japanese history - stories that only work because of those details, of the allowable punishments for children or how a dragnet for "undesirables" actually operated. I still wonder how strange and foreign this world seemed to the initial Japanese audience - they were separated from this phase of their history by a few hundred years and a lot of urbanization and other changes, but it still was their history, and that can resonate in a culture even when it's not current.

So this is still as good as the previous books - let me throw in links for the first volume and the previous one - and, although there is, to some degree, a longer overall story, that is a fairly thin thread most of the time. Nearly all of the books, aside from the first and the last, can be read as standalones. I don't know if I'd recommend that, but it is possible.