Reviewer: Jimmy Lin
Written by Kazuo Koike
Illustrated by Goseki Kojima
Tranlated by Dana Lewis
Publisher: Dark Horse
If I were Japanese, and I were to meet the gentlemen behind Samurai Executioner, I would get on my hands and knees and bow in the formal fashion, adressing them with the honorific “sensei” reserved for great artists. Because Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima singlehandedly created two of the greatest samurai dramas ever. Lone Wolf & Cub and Samurai Executioner can stand with Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi and any of Akira Kurosawa’s epics. This is stuff that excited a culture already tired of stoic men in stiff clothing making formal speeches in stilted language with big swords. These are the series that made a generation of American comic artists sit up and say, “Oh shit, you can do that?!”
Oh yeah. Great stuff. Incredibly great stuff. Stuff that redefines, that makes you sit up and take notice. Frank Miller and Brian Michael Bendis definitely did so.
Samurai Executioner revolves around the third Yamada Asaemon, the official O-Tameshi (sword tester) of the Shogun. Unlike LW&C, SE does not follow an extended plot; instead, this manga is series of episodes throughout Asaemon’s career. The first story tells us how he gets his start – by beheading his own father. This, in itself, is grim subject matter – especially considering the graphic realism of Kojima’s art – but the emotional twist here is that the father – the second to hold the official name “Yamada Asaemon” – considers the patricidal act to be the necessary conclusion of his son training. That’s right – the second Asaemon orders young Yoshitsugu to literally split his head in half in order to be certified in the family martial art.
It’s a helluva kick in the pants, but Koike and Kojima are just getting started. To become Asaemon the third, Yoshitsugu must chop through several bodies and behead a condemned prisoner. These are all old hat for high-level tameshi, but by cruel coincidence, the prisoner happens to be Yoshitsugu’s first lover. That’s right – in order for this young man to get the job of official corpse-chopper, he has to kill his father and his lover.
Wow. Oh shit. It’s like a grim and grisley soap opera, but with Koike and Kojima at the helm, SE feels anything but trite. Koike’s dialogue and captioning are sufficiently sparse where necessary, allowing Kojima’s cinematic art take center stage. At other times, they fill in the necessary details and plot points in lyrical language. You have to allow for translation issues – otherwise, some lines seem overly dramatic – but the writing is masterful, taut, and poetic.
SE obviously serves as a reference for rabbit-ronin Usagi Yojimbo, but where Stan Sakai’s cartoon masterwork is largely bright and cheerful, SE is dark, dark, and dark. The co-creaters were obviously fans of Akira Kurosawa, and the deliberate pacing punctuated with swift action could have come straight out of Seven Samurai or Yojimbo. The plots are some of the darkest to populate comics literature. We follow the pursuit, capture, and execution of a schizophrenic serial arsonist, who’s beheaded as she almost rapes a firefighter during a fire. Koike and Kojima take us behind the bars of a woman’s prison and into the life of a female warden, whose life has been defined by kidnapping, rape, prostitution, and the desire for revenge. Court intrigue forces a young woman to become the subject of a bizarre S&M plot, and the only way out is to either relive the experience or die in the process.
And yet, there are some points of light in all of this. Yamada Asaemon is not only a tester of swords but also a pillar of his society. SE also shows Asaemon as a reformer crusading for a better justice system and as an inspiration for a young cop seeking to improve his skills. There’s just enough to keep the series from sinking into a mire of negativity, and you can see how SE allowed Koike and Kojima to mature and grow. LW&C is their undisputed magnum opus (in print consistently since its first publication in the 70’s), and in SE, you can see the some fine, fine chops being honed. There are a few pacing problems in SE, and there are a few times where more delicate folks may just give up on the series altogether (the unrelenting strangulation and necrotic rape of a little girl, for instance) – but overall, Samurai Executioner is prime work.
