Usagi Yojimbo, Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death by Stan Sakai

This tenth collection of the long-running Usagi Yojimbo series gathers eight full issues - the last two of the short Mirage second volume and the first six of the much longer Dark Horse run - along with one last backup story from an earlier Mirage issue. It originally appeared in 1998, soon after the stories were in floppy form, and was updated somehow or somewhat for the current 2010 edition. (The book doesn't say what changed - it doesn't list the 1998 date anywhere but in the byline of Kurt Busiek's introduction - but I suspect it was only a new cover and trade dress.)

If you didn't know these stories were published in that way, you wouldn't be able to tell, although creator Stan Sakai did make a four-page all-splash-page story for the first DH issue, which comes first in this book. (But that's the kind of thing a reader might assume is first in every book - and, frankly, something like it probably should be, especially in a series that now runs more than forty volumes.)

It's called Usagi Yojimbo, Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death - that's not the title of any of the individual stories here, so I think it's just a general "hey! find the hot samurai action you love here!" signpost.

As before, I enjoy these stories a lot - Sakai is a fine storyteller, with a precise clean line, compelling but unfussy layouts, naturalistic dialogue and a knack for ringing small changes on genre furniture to tell stories that work well and seem familiar - while finding the whole package just a bit lesser than I was hoping for. One part of that, which I've written about for previous books, is the all-ages nature of Sakai's stories: he's writing for tweens and up, which means sex is all offstage (and not a driver of plots) and violence is the usual stylized flashing swords and falling bodies.

But another piece of it, which just came into focus for me with this book, is Usagi's role in the story. I won't say that he never changes, since I'm only a quarter of the way into a four-decade series. But the whole thing is like an '80s TV show - think The Hulk or The A-Team - where a well-defined character comes into town, fixes something wrong, and moves on as the theme music plays at the end of the episode. Usagi is important, but he's unstoppable in battle, unflappable in conversation, and unerring in his judgement. He's more of an icon than a person: the perfect ronin, always friendly to peasants and children, always ready to fight bandits or help out a friend, always able to escape any danger.

That's pleasant, but it's not really a person.

That figure runs through the nine stories here, meeting some new people and some old friends, having some vaguely tragic things happen to other people which he can help mitigate later or just nod grimly in his perfect-samurai manner. But, most of the time, he's able to stop the vaguely tragic things from happening, for those peasants and children and friends, and then walk on towards the next story.

I can wish for more, but that's what Usagi Yojimbo is. And there's a word for doing the same thing repeatedly - e.g. reading Usagi Yojimbo stories - and expecting something different. What's here is just fine, especially if you want to share them with smaller, shorter, younger people infesting your home.