The Legend of Kamui Vol. 1 (of 10)

PLEASE NOTE: In keeping with the conventions observed in the book under review, all names in this article are presented in the Japanese naming order, family name before given name, e.g., Shirato Sanpei rather than Sanpei Shirato.

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Though we still await the summertime release of the fifth volume in Drawn & Quarterly's seven-part Tsuge Yoshiharu library, the publisher has already begun its next big reprint project from the famous Garo magazine, this time going all the way back to the beginning. Garo began publishing in 1964 as the joint project of Nagai Katsuichi, a veteran of the rental manga business, and one of the top rental manga authors with whom he had worked, Shirato Sanpei; Nagai published the monthly magazine through his company Seirindō, while Shirato initially exerted some editorial control while serializing the new venue's headline feature: "Kamui-den," The Legend of Kamui, which began running in issue #4.

Immediately we see some differences with D&Q's Tsuge project. While the Tsuge books follow their hesitant subject though much slipping and sliding across subject matters and visual styles, Kamui opens on a confident, popular artist in full control of his work – indeed, commanding a full studio, Akame Productions, since Shirato was also producing a popular ninja serial, Sasuke, for a mainstream boys' magazine when Garo began. While the Tsuge books are trim hardcovers between 250 and 300 pages, with a great deal of space devoted to contextual supplements, this first Kamui is a beefy 612-page paperback with no supplemental features whatsoever. Its second volume is also scheduled for the summer.

Readers nearing but not quite beyond retirement age may recall the last time Shirato's samurai comics were published in English translation: first as a biweekly 1987-88 Eclipse comic book series also titled The Legend of Kamui, then in two distinct lines of VIZ book collections at the beginning and end of the 1990s, neither of which managed to even collect all of the comic book issues, much less venture beyond. This D&Q edition does not repeat any of that material, which was created in the 1980s for the large publisher Shogakukan. Rather, the D&Q books will collect the original stuff, which ran in Garo from '64 through the middle of 1971, by which time the identity of the magazine had undergone a significant change into the avant-garde revue we most readily associate with that name. The original Garo, the Garo glimpsed here, was something of a consumer retail continuation of the youth-focused rental manga aesthetic typified by Shirato and Mizuki Shigeru, with a particular emphasis on the political worldview of Shirato's 1959-62 series Ninja Bugeichō, which had become a darling of student readers of the left wing.

The way in which Shirato will convey this worldview is evident from Kamui's first chapter, which positions very primal, nearly mythic vignettes amidst a panoramic view of feudal society in 17th-century Japan. We follow a chain of forest animals through their ecosystem, birds rustling loose foliage eaten by deer which splash through streams of fish leaping into the paws of bears, climaxing with an enormous dark-skinned wild man trudging through the woods, lifting a rabbit he has killed and bellowing the first spoken word of the comic, "KAMUI!!" The word "kamui" or "kamuy" comes from the indigenous Ainu people of Japan, and is used here as an invocation of the divine. Will this be the story of a Chosen One? A celestially appointed Hero to rule gallantly over all?

Before long, we are at a nearby estate where samurai are engaged in the sport of firing arrows at dogs from horseback. The animals are handled by hinin, outcasts who work with animal carcasses, oversee executions, and engage in similarly "unclean" trades. When the samurai run out of dogs, the outcast must substitute beloved pets from their own village. One handsome white pup stands stoically, regally, and is killed by arrows. But then a filthy one-eyed black dog is brought forward, who rushes and bites the samurai and leaps over the manor walls. They did not know it was a wolf. For the rest of the chapter, we receive a crash course in the Tokugawa class system of the early Edo period, particularly distinctions within the peasant farmer class from honbyakushō, land-owning farmers responsible for the remittance of taxes, down to genin, a servant class with no right to land ownership. Shirato adopts an observational style; we see farmers celebrating the payment of the rice tax, a rōnin humiliating a sword instructor of the estate and later being maimed by a fellow outsider, the arrest and execution of the fugitive leader of a peasant revolt, and, during all this, the black dog wandering, healing, killing deer, providing meat for others, summoning a pack by a mountaintop howl in the winter. In the outcast village, a baby is born.

This is all so when we next see the wild man, one chapter later, and he enters the outcast village to much uproar, this lowest class horrified by a being yet lower than them, and the baby approaches and feeds him and he holds the child aloft and declares the name "KAMUI!" – we know we are not dealing with a chosen hero in Kamui, but a means of navigating the myriad injustices of the social order.

The focus on class was not unique to Shirato; his rental manga contemporary and fellow period drama master, Hirata Hiroshi, was also fascinated by the class humiliations to which samurai were subject in works such as Bloody Stumps Samurai (English edition released in 2019 from Retrofit/Big Planet Comics) and Satsuma Gishiden (partially translated via Dark Horse in 2006-07). Nor was the sometimes educational disposition of Kamui; anyone who has read Lone Wolf and Cub will recall writer Koike Kazuo's tendency to build chapters around historical fun facts. What is vividly different about Shirato — indeed, what was different about the '80s iteration of Kamui vs. First Comics' Frank Miller-endorsed serialization of Lone Wolf — is the gradual drift of his narrative across the society that is his subject. There are only six chapters in this very thick book, because Kamui would occupy roughly 100 pages per issue of Garo for its first few years; Shirato uses all this space to linger on the collision of actors in the feudal system, demonstrating with particular force how the peasant class had ample psychological justification to despise the outcast peoples, as they were often used to perform unsavory or immoral duties such as desecrating the bodies of executed criminals, but also how this psychology is manipulated by the samurai class to redirect popular anger away from them. If Shirato's pace can seem leisurely, it is because his intent is systemic.

This is not to say there are no explicitly pedagogical moments. Take, for example, the young samurai Ryūnoshin espousing the code of bushidō as his guiding star in mastering the sword arts, only for a wandering scholar to lay down a little material analysis:

Few passages in this book are so wordy, although Shirato frequently addresses the reader directly though notes placed in the panel gutters or blocks of white space on the page. Sometimes he offers historical tidbits, sometimes he reflects on what the story means - sometimes he teases the reader with what's to come, like a proletarian Stan Lee. In these early years, Garo was still concerned with capturing a juvenile readership, and Shirato takes some pains to maintain clarity through such moments of direct address, and no small deployment of melodramatic devices; if a sweet maiden is engaged in a chaste courtship with a handsome young man, you bet your ass a lecherous daimyō is scheming mere steps away. Women have little to do but suffer in this first volume; the action is driven by boys and men.

And yet, Shirato exhibits a certain playful brattiness when he depicts action and violence: there is a noticeable distinction drawn between the beauty of swordsmanship in the controlled environment of training and exhibition, and the frantic, panicked way in which actual one-on-one combat is depicted. At one point, an anticipated showdown between two skilled swordsmen ends abruptly when one of them accidentally kills himself, as no doubt happened often with people swinging sharp pieces of metal at one another. Motives too are suspect: an honorable duel is later revealed to be a means of obtaining more lucrative employment, while a massive battle toward the end of the book, rightly filled with beheadings and dismemberment and cool acrobatics, is prompted by financial shortfalls due to an unexpected construction project ordered from distant Edo. "If anyone tried to advance economically, or move up in status, they immediately had to confront gigantic obstacles," Shirato narrates from the gutter. "And this was not only true of farmers."

This is all quite different from the popular understanding of Garo in the west. If there is something that connects Kamui to the magazine's later identity, it is perhaps the serial's appreciation for the bucolic as a simplifying force. With Tsuge, one escapes to the countryside to flee the burdens of industry and connect with a sort of fundamental Japan, a lingering pre-industrial identity. Shirato here devotes dozens, maybe 100 pages to images of animal activity: playing, eating, fighting, running, rendered in a supple cartoon style just a little down the road from Disney via Tezuka. Shirato's primary studio collaborator for the first years of Kamui was Kojima Gōseki, an artist slightly older than him who'd mirrored Shirato's own career path from postwar kamishibai narrative theater art into rental manga. “I drew all the pictures,” Kojima once told Frank Miller of Kamui, and while he is often described in conjunction with the serial as an inker, it seems likely that he was operating more in the American understanding of ‘finishes,’ worked out from panel breakdowns. Kojima would remain with Akame Productions for roughly three and a half years. Of course, in 1970 he would begin drawing the aforementioned Lone Wolf and Cub, which would raise him to global esteem.

I don't think Kojima is very often described as a "Garo artist," though his ink is surely all over those first few years; he feels especially present in the heavy outlines of forest rocks and the scratchy shadows of trees. But we must not read too much into nature. Following a particularly long stretch of wolf-themed exploits, Shirato admonishes us via text interjection not to draw too many parallels between the society of animals and the society of people, because animals discriminate on the basis of natural processes while people discriminate with deliberation, to preserve their advantages: this is feudalism. That Kamui reaches so far to address so much of this topic — and this first volume ends with a firm enough summary to suggest we have only read a prelude to the real story — is its outstanding characteristic above the very sturdy entertainment it supplies.

Before long, Shirato's cadence would fade from Garo's core identity, but here he adopts a tone of patient apologetics for the benefit of the curious. "Recently," Shirato writes in one chapter-ending dispatch, "I overheard a young person say, 'I don't like socialist countries.' He felt that in Japan, even if you fail, you can dream of making a comeback, bettering your circumstances, but under socialism everyone and everything is made equal. You can only do the work you are assigned. There is no motivation to better oneself." Shirato admits that people today are different from people back then; the struggle in the Edo period was only to live. "And eventually they would disappear," Shirato writes. "Others came after them, and even more followed. It's because of the efforts of all of those before us that we can dream the much bigger dreams we have today." Kamui, then, is a simplification; a reduction of industrial society's complexities to address the workings of exploitation in the plain language of feudal contradictions. Like it or not, the author says, the story will continue.

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