MW (Osamu Tezuka, Big Comic)
It seems that a lot of reviewers have noted the gekiga influence on this series but I don’t think that’s particularly important when it comes down to understanding what’s really going on. This felt like a needlessly coy response to the growing shoujo and boys’ love manga movement that began in the 70s. Most notably, The Heart of Thomas had begun serializing two years prior to this series’ debut. Though without having read any of the boys’ love stories from that time period I’m limited in what I can accurately deduce about this series but I’m going to give it a go ways.
The series revolves around the hateful/romantic tension between two men. Father Garai, a surprisingly muscular Catholic priest, and his enemy/romantic interest, a younger, more feminine man named Yuki. Yuki is a very promising banker by day and a psycho-sexual murderer by night. The sharp contrast provided by this short description of the two leads motivates everything in the story, at least at first. Garai’s career path is more than just a career; it’s his way of life. The image that Yuki presents while on the job is a lie but on the plus side he feels no guilt when he makes love with the uninterestingly conflicted Garai. Initially Yuki seems to commit his crimes for financial gain and career advancement but the author throws out this politically charged idea and turns Yuki in to a much simpler character who just wants revenge on those who made him the way he is.
But what way is that any ways? The back story behind Father Garai and Yuki’s relationship and Yuki’s disease is pure boys’ love (probably). When they were much younger, Garai and his friends kidnapped Yuki during his family vacation. Garai took Yuki to a cave that would be used as a hide out and that’s where they have their shared experience. The cruel twist on the standard genre conventions is that when they leave the cave and return to the real world, they find that everybody else is dead. They were killed by a poisonous gas called MW that was accidentally released across the island. The incident is covered up by the responsible governments and the killed islanders are gradually replaced by relocated people.
MW turned Yuki into a violent killer. Trying to put on a label on what that signifies thematically is problematic. I mean it could represent his frustrations with discovering that he’s a homosexual or a mental break down from seeing all of those dead people at once and the subsequent cover up or something else all together. Regardless, Yuki’s life from that point on is defined by taking down the conspirators. He’s content with exploiting his secret sexual relationships with both males and females to further his plans. He gets away with it because males don’t want to be seen as gay and females don’t want to be seen as deflowered rape victims.
To casual readers Yuki probably comes across as boys’ love hero turned super villain despite fighting against corruption. My guess is that the author was using Yuki’s extreme behavior to release frustrations with how apolitical boys’ love stories really were by going too far in the other direction. Of course Yuki really is a villain if for no other reason than efforts are undermined by his indifference to humanity as an eternal life form, suggesting he only cared about personal vengeance. It’s any one’s guess as to why Yuki wants humanity to end with his own life. My first reaction was that since he’s unable to bare children with the one person he loves, he doesn’t care about what happens after he dies. I thought this way was because it ties in with the ending of Apollo’s Song but I’ll discuss that another time…
Ichi the Killer Vol. 4 (Hideo Yamamoto, Young Sunday)
This is clearly a transitional volume bridging the first three introductory volumes with what I imagine will be the ongoing war between Kakihara and Ichi. In this volume Kakihara’s yakuza clan is ostracized by the rest of the crime community which, mildly speaking, causing him to unleashes his most brutal instincts on any one who gets in his way. Unfortunately a lot of this volume is spent watching him make his mark on his new enemies though there was one scene that I loved. It initially appears to be like all the other Kakihara torture scenes in this volume but the difference here is that he’s willingly joined by his girlfriend, Karen.
Up until this point Karen has been a non-entity to the story, merely a background female character that fits the unusual but hardly unfamiliar role of “crime princess”. She’s cute, reserved, clever, loyal and boring. In this scene she begins stabbing the leg of a poor tortured sap and stares deeply at his anguish filled face. While disturbing at first, it soon becomes clear that she’s using his body as an artistic medium. This is largely suggested by the way the panels are framed, never showing the two faces in one panel but rather the separate panels are almost aggressively close. Now as much as I appreciated this scene it bothered me that Karen had such little reaction to the violence when she entered the room but a later scene makes up for it.
Impressed by Karen’s actions, Kakihara decides to introduce her to the wonderful world of S & M. Kakihara asks her to stab him just like the man from earlier. She attempts to cut him but finds it greatly uncomfortable. It seemed that Kakihara wanted to help her embrace her sadistic side but instead was forced to face the fact that not everybody is as accepting of pain and violence as he is. The humorous aspect of this scene is that Kakihara is actually thinking about Ichi in anticipation of the pleasurable pain that will be unleashed when they meet, which is far from the anger, fear, or confidence that you’d expect to see from a man in his predicament.
Meanwhile, Ichi moves into the condo building that Kakihara’s clan resides in and calls into a couple of phone sex clubs. At one point it appears that he’s found his dream girl. She enjoys being bullied and physically abused by strangers but her dream is to be sliced by a giant blade while standing. Knowing full well that he can fulfill her (and his) dream, Ichi carefully asks if he can bully her but she finds his politeness to be a complete turnoff and so she rejects him.
This scene only really works when looked at in contrast to the previous scene between Kakihara and Karen. In this scene, both participants only care about fulfilling their ideals while missing out on the great opportunity in front of them but Kakihara and Karen challenged one another and probably emerged with a stronger bond. The difference between the two scenes is the technology element and I can’t wait to see if similarly contrasting scenes play out later.
