Ten years ago Shinichi Goto was kidnapped and locked away in solitary confinement with only a television set for company. To keep from going mad, Shinichi has devised his own workout program and his body, underneath his shapeless clothes, is ripped and rugged. He has no idea why he’s been imprisoned in a room on floor 7.5 (reached by pressing an elevator’s 7th and 8th floor buttons simultaneously) and when he’s suddenly visited by three men and told he’s been released, there’s no explanation for that either. All they’ll admit is that he’s been in the hands of their “organization” and that there are others on his floor who are hiding out until the statute of limitations on their crimes run out. Furious, Shinichi attacks the messengers, who knock him out shove a thousand yen in his pocket and dump him in the woods. When he wakes up, Shinichi has just one goal, to find those responsible for stealing ten years of his life and to find out why.
And so begins the legendary 90s manga saga written by Garon Tsuchiya and illustrated by Nobuaki Minegishi. We don’t really know that much about Shinichi but we suspect he’s not a very nice guy. Still, he has our sympathy and although he has his freedom, he doesn’t seem to have much else. In fact, once he’s bought himself a meal, he doesn’t even have enough left over to buy a pack of cigarettes. (To the dismay of passerby, he grabs a half-smoked ciggie off the street and walks off puffing it.) What Shinichi DOES have, however, is a very particular set of skills and right away he blows the cobwebs off by pretending to be a drunk so that a group of thuggish wannabes will be lured into his personal space. They’ve got knives and attitude; he’s got brains and experience, and by the time the encounter’s over, Shinichi is 10,000 yen richer. And he has the beginnings of a plan.
The WHY of it torments him. Why did someone imprison him in a private mansion; why not just kill him? A cryptic comment from one of the “messengers” who came the day he was released gives him a clue, but it’s not much to go on. But Shinichi has nothing but time to devote to his quest.
We understand what drives Shinichi and look forward to learning the secret of his past because we want to know why also. Much of what happens after he steals the street thug’s money, though, feels like contrivance piled on top of coincidence as he meets Eri, a young woman who notices he’s bleeding after his fight and invites him back to her place for a little sexual healing. We later find out that she’s got a connection to him that makes her behavior less inexplicable, but fans of 80s-era action movies won’t be bothered at all by her impulsive decision to hop into bed with Shinichi so soon after meeting him.
The characters here are surprisingly nuanced, and while Eri comes across as just the slightest bit neurotic (she has a secret Shinichi only learns AFTER they’ve had sex), her life is extremely complicated. And we worry about her. As it becomes clear that whoever held Shinichi for ten years is not quite through with him, we can’t help but think that his story is not going to end well and that there IS going to be collateral damage.
Shinichi seems to have forgotten much of his past, including his name—Eri calls him “Mister”—and that gives the story a kind of BOURNE IDENTITY quality. Shinichi is not just looking for the why, he’s also searching for the who—his own identity. That makes him sympathetic, and even as he goes about his violent work, we tend to be on his side.
As the story unfolds and we learn that his abduction and incarceration cost three hundred million yen, our curiosity grows. And again we have to ask—as Shinichi himself asked—why not simply kill him?
But that’s part of the secret, and this is a story that does not reveal all its secrets all at once. And some of those secrets go back even further than a decade ago, back to Shinichi’s childhood and a childhood friend named Kakinuma. What he’s done and why and how he has carried out his plans and the origin of floor 7.5 is all fascinating stuff, and we find ourselves just as sucked into his corrupt world as we are engaged by Shinichi’s plight and the almost procedural element of his investigation as he follows every single scrap of information and chases down every single clue.
The author and illustrator have created a believably dark and bleak world (almost Kafka-sque) for this story, and readers will find that their main complaint is that the story plays out across multiple volumes. To find out everything that happened and understand the connections beneath the story involves an eight-book commitment.
There’s a terrible beauty to Shinichi’s relentless vengeance quest, accentuated by chapter titles like, “Evil floats up like a song,” that remind us this story is the product of Japanese culture and has its own set of sensibilities. (The first feature version of the story was filtered through a Korean filmmaker’s eyes and the latest one is a product of African-American auteur Spike Lee, which will give the material an intriguing cross-cultural flavor.) This is one of those rare times when it might be better to see the movie first and then go back to the book(s) to have them fill in the backstory. As a book, it is a “slow burn” of a revenge story, and that works well on the page.—Katherine Tomlinson
