Old Boy Book 1 (NSFW)

NSFW:  Warning sex and bare boobies!

"Why didn't they just kill me?" - Goto Shinichi

So, this month I am just going to be looking at all eight volumes of the manga series, Old Boy. A series of volumes that tells one long unbroken and focused narrative, rather than a looser storyline split into arcs.  And I am betting that quite a few of you are thinking about the incredible Park Chan-wook 2003 South Korean film of the same name and going "they made a manga out of that? How interesting, yet redundant."  Yet it's more interesting and less redundant than that, smartarse. The manga came first and the film was a loose adaptation that took the initial elements of the first half of the manga and wove them together into a film that has quite a different outcome than how the manga develops.  So if you have seen the film, this should still be of interest because of how the two complement and diverge.  If you are at all interested in East Asian cinema and somehow haven't seen Old Boy, go watch it NOW then come back and read this.  It really is that good of a film and I'll be revisiting it in the final write-up of the series when I compare and contrast how the two versions finish the story.

Anyway, this is a Seinen manga, meaning it is aimed at adults, written by Garon Tsuchiya, drawn by Nobuaki Minegishi and translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian. It was originally serialised in Futabasha magazine and ran between 1996 and 1998.  It was published in the west in 2006 and 2007 by Dark Horse comics on the back of the success of the film and is made up of seventy nine chapters across eight collected volumes.  If I was going to assign it a genre, then I'd probably go with the description on the back of the books and call it a "Bare Knuckled Urban Thriller". That means it has realistic violence and lady breasts in it and no super-powered alien martial artists Kamehamehaing each other in the face. With all that out of the way, let us begin.

[Note:  This manga is "unflipped" so must be read from right to left, and the sound effects have been left in the original Japanese and subtitled instead]

Shinichi Goto.

Oh one more thing before I start, the main character's name.  It isn't actually revealed until the end of volume two as "Shinichi Goto", but writing round that is going to be a massive ache up the backpipe so I'm going to call him by his real name of Goto right from the start, though I shall note his alias's, reasons why he conceals his name and when it's finally revealed as I trot through the story.

The story begins with a new worker at a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo being given an order to take to the "usual building".  He's instructed to take the bosses elevator and press the buttons for floors 7 and 8 at the same time.  This will take him to the mysterious floor "7.5" where a row of cells are.  A guard takes the order from him and passes it through to the inmates.  And we are introduced to Goto, in a cell with just a bed, TV and toilet facilities for company. We get a glimpse of his typical day which is working out and listening to the TV as he does so.

Sexy boy.

Then three men come into his cell and tell him he is to be released.  They hand him a suit and we get a look at how powerfully muscular Goto is as he changes.  This surprised the main man, who says he's in great shape for someone who was locked up for ten years.

Goto: "Why?  Who the hell put me in this place?!!"

The main man laughs saying he doesn't know and that this place is their organisation's "cash cow."  A place where people can pay to have others put away for any length of time.  Goto wonders why he wasn't merely killed.  The main man shrugs and says not everyone can sleep easy after murder.

One of the others suddenly clamps a chloroform soaked cloth over Goto's face.  Goto flips the man over his shoulder and kicks the gun out of the other man's hand.  Before he can attack the main man, the drug kicks in and he passes out.  The men then dump him in a park and leave him with one thousand yen, before scarpering.  Goto wakes up and soaks in his new, moonlit freedom.

The moon is something of a recurring theme in the story.

He goes to a sushi bar and carefully orders a meal he can afford.  After eating it he is left with a couple of coins.  He wonders if he sould phone someone and start accessing his past.  But he realises no one would believe him, so he drops the coins in the pocket of a homeless drunk and walks off, thinking about how he's already thought of a way to start "fighting back."

He decides it's time to "try something out".  He passes a group of suspicious looking young men.  He staggers into them pretending to be drunk.  They try to rob him at knifepoint but he beats them down and knocks one out, the rest flee.  He checks the unconcious one for money and takes ten thousand yen from him and goes for his "first booze in ten years".

As he drinks and savours it, he remembers reports on the TV he saw about gangs of kids robbing "old men" (he's only thirty-five! Means I must be ancient.).  He also wanted to know if his body could handle a real fight.  Then a young woman who works in the bar comes up to him and says he's bleeding from a cut on his face and puts a plaster on it.

Goto drinks and broods on who and why he was locked up, when the bar closes he leaves and bumps into the young woman who invites him back to her place to stay the night.  Having not had sex for a decade Goto can't resist.  Back at her place they share a drink and she introduces herself as "Eri".  She asks his name and he tells her "circumstances have made me discard my past name".  So she decides to call him "mister" for now.

There's a rumpled sadness about Goto that is very appealing.

After a couple more beers, she appears to Goto in just a towel and pretty much begs him for sex.  Goto doesn't turn her down and they begin bonking.  He asks her if she has a condom, she says no but that today is a "safe day".  So Goto really goes for it enjoying it as it's been "ten years since warm, soft flesh".  As they lie in a post-coital glow, he reaches down and finds blood.

Eri: "Now I'm rid of it.  'Virginity' how depressing.  I'm so glad I could give it to someone like you."

Um... Eri you do know virgins can get pregnant, don't you?  Anyway, you might be forgiven for thinking how convinient it is that Goto meets a woman desperate to have sex with him on his first night of freedom.  Never fear, this is actually something that gets explained later in the story.

Meet Eri.  It's Ok, she's legal!

As they sleep, a thuggish looking bloke stands outside Eri's apartment complex and speaks on the phone to a man who is the person that had Goto locked up.  This mystery man's name is kept a secret until the end of the story, he goes by the alias "Dojima" which is revealed a bit later on, but again, I am going to refer to him as that from the start because it's easier to write up.

The story then follows Dojima as he remembers back to ten years ago.  He met a man who worked for the organisation who runs the lock-up who gives him the low down on the place.  Some people have others locked up, others have themselves locked up while on the run from the police.  It costs thirty-thousand yen per night with a sliding scale of discounts based on the length of time required.  When Dojima asks how much for ten years, the man is shocked and surprised.

"Dojima"

He goes and phones his bosses and comes back and tells Dojima it'll cost him three hundred million yen, abduction on the house if he pays it all upfront.  Dojima shakes on the deal and they chat some more.  Dojima is curious about where the place is, the man says that his organisation had a building constructed and fudged the building codes so it had a secret floor made.  The man also thinks closes this mega-deal might get him a big promotion within the organisation (which is obviously the Yakuza).  Dojima finishes his trip down memory lane and we return to Goto.

He is sleeping next to Eri, then they are woken by the alarm at four in the afternoon.  She doesn't go to work until six in the evening, but decides to take the night off so she can spend more time with Goto as she believes she won't see him again once they finally part.  So they have a night of fun, going to an arcade, a nightclub and funfair before ending up back at her flat.

Eri and Goto enjoy a night out.

Back at her place she asks him to tell her his story.  He tells her about being locked up and that he has no idea why.  Last thing he recalled was hitting some bars in Shinjuku before waking up in the cell.  The only food he was given was Chinese, and from the taste, came from the same restaurant the whole time he was there.  Eri asks what he thought about all that time. 

He says for the first three months he thought he was going insane.  But then he heard the man in the cell next door asking to be let out as he only asked to be put away for a week.  When Goto realised that, he had hope that one day he too would be released, "but hell.. ten years."  Eri hugs him, saying again she is glad she gave him her virginity and he smiles, but then reiterates how he wants to know who and why locked him up all that time.

A Yakuza hairdresser of all things.

Dojima is back in his luxury home and his butler brings him the phone and he speaks with the man he has stalking Goto.  Dojima wants the photos he's taken of Goto right now, he develop them himself.  Goto and Eri are still talking about his incarceration, Eri asks about his hair.  Goto says that once a month he was forced to cuff and blindfold himself so someone could come in and given him a trim.  Goto also had a revelation about the possible aim of his imprisonment.

Goto: "One day it hit me.  Did they want to change my personality?!  Was their goal to turn me into a different person, consumed by negative passions?!"

So he decided to become "stoic".  Building his muscles like a man in a bleak desert temple. He also clung to the television.  It became his "window onto the entire world."

Meanwhile Dojima develops and contemplates the pictures of Goto.  "He's still got that aura about him" he thinks:

Dojima: "Doesn't he give a damn about that ten year gap in his life?  Was this entire project just a waste?"

And scowling he burns the photos.  Meanwhile Goto and Eri spend another night together.  Eri aks what Goto will do now.  Goto admits that the media might find his tale a juicy one, but would soon forget about him.  He says that although he had a lover back then he has "no regrets or attachments" from that time.  He really just wants to confront the person who did this to him.

Removing the chip.

As he reaches down for a cigarette Eri notices a scar in his back.  Goto quickly realises he must have a tracking chip implanted in him, something he saw on TV that people were doing as a kidnapping countermeasure.  He asks if she can be brave and dig it out, and she reluctantly does so, pulling out a small GPS chip.  Eri then tells him she'd be happy to hear progress reports in his "war".

Eri: "'Cause if you don't tell someone your secrets, you're sure to burst."

He promises to do so and leaves.  He starts working on a building site and the site manager offers him a place to stay in the transient workers flophouse.  Goto tells him his name is "Yamashita".  Taking a break he regards the small chip in the palm of his hand.  He flashes back to the rest of his coversation with Eri about it.  He says he can use it to trick his enemies.  If he wants to do something secret he can leave the chip in one place while he is in another, "one point to me!"

Construction worker Goto.

Ask he works on the site, Dojima and his thug have a meal in a top floor restaurant in a nearby building and Dojima spies on Goto with binoculars.  Goto gets a strange feeling - "I'm sure my 'nemesis' is near this very moment."  At the flophouse a friendly fellow worker "Kassim" introduces himself to Goto and they share a meal.  As he lies in bed, Goto thinks on how he needs to build up a bit of cash before he can go searching for the lock-up.

Two weeks later he bumps into Eri again and they catch up.  Goto says it's time to find where he was held and they are going to do it by finding the restaurant he was fed from.  Eri says there must be tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants in Tokyo, but Goto says he has narrowed it down.  One day he found a scrap of a receipt in the bottom of his bowl of noodles and it had "Seiryu" (Blue Dragon) on it.  There are only eight restaurants with that name in Tokyo, so they go to the first one and order gyoza (delicious meat or veg filled dumplings).  He takes his first bite and the volume ends with his thoughtful expression.

The first dumpling based cliffhanger ever?

Well what a cracking first book.  It sets up an incredibly compelling mystery based around a really cool idea - a criminal run prison that can lock up the innocent for a price - and gives us a strong yet somewhat sad main character in Goto, who is likeable, but you're left wondering if he really did do something horrific in his past to deserve what happened to him and just why Dojima seems so obssessed with him even after his prison "term" was up. Eri is a sweet character who makes a good sounding board for Goto and his thoughts, and she'll remain important to the story right to the end.  Of course reading it fresh it does seem odd she gives herself so freely to Goto, but what strikes an weird note now, is actually a clue to events yet to transpire and is just another of the mysteries whirling in the vortex of the conflict between Goto and Dojima whose game of chess is really beginning  with Goto making the first move via his hunt for the restaurant and discovery of the tracking chip. The artwork is fantastic, very atmospheric and gives the events a real feeling of place and the dialogue allows the art to tell much of the story too, which doesn't happen often enough for my liking.  Join me in a few days for volume two why don't you?