Ryuu no Michi

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There are two gripes that I have with stories that take place after their protagonists awaken from cryogenic stasis. One, they tend to be about the unending sliding scale of reinvigoration, the ripple-like but otherwise fruitful clamoring for sustenance, the acceleration and exacerbation of discord on top of fringe ideas, followed by the eventual time of reckoning, where either the “heroes” live to tell the tale, or do not. They -- methodically and generously filling us in on the various trajectories heralded by these pioneers by whom we are cordially invited along to invest our energies into providing affable running commentary lest their prayers go ... unanswered and no one is present to cry out in anguish alongside them -- drone on for proverbial eons about which path is the right one for them and ultimately waste our time by handwaving us through a oceanic cistern of been-there-done-thats that, understandably speaking, we do not recall asking for in the first place. This feeds directly into my second gripe. Maybe instead of pooling ambition and scope into the fold and making the linearity of all progression so patulous and dependent on the whims of authorial intent, why not spare beguiled audiences the narrative sprawl of cursory tales of personal growth and learning to graft oneself onto communal values and in a certain regard, allow the pages of a concisely outlined work to be occupied with the held beliefs of its pertinent author. Despite how conceited such an undertaking may seem at a glance, when you account for the flexibility of creative expression in a medium as sorely underutilized as manga, you immediately begin to wonder where its imaginary boundaries lie and how much an author; an illustrator; an AUTEUR can push the envelope before being urged to tone down the overflowing madness that is spontaneously birthed and spurted from the crest of his noggin.

Shotaro Ishinomori. His was a name that I'd already been acquainted with since my early days on the internet, scouring for all manner of rubbish to latch on to and make my temporary personality before letting it all fade into obscurity. Kamen Rider was one of these things. As a nine year old with all the world in the palm of his hand, i’d binge 20-30 episodes of varying Rider shows across the Heisei era of televised broadcasts at a time, proceed to tell my besties about it -- to which they’d just nod in solidarity and just go about whatever it was they themselves were fixated on at the time -- and elaborately recite aloud the transformations sequences from heart. With unbridled glee no less. I'd watch these crime-fighting heroes go about their perennial duty of painting the not-so-savory personifications of disorder in a monochrome light, with none of these framed evildoers ever being gift-wrapped the opportunity to make amends for what they've done and so forth. Straightforward, morally linear stuff. Indeed, the series has always postulated the idea that the wants and needs of "justice" or the vague feelings of warmth and premeditated comfort beheld by society at large come ex aequo. Which drives home the personal significance of it all to me; I would graciously stomach, with a tinge of admiration ever-more, stories about the partisanship and ironic duality between the forces of good and evil. Both are like two sides of a seemingly lunar-draped coin. What constitutes "good" things? An innate sense of purpose? The parallels between a person/object and its role in the natural order? And conversely, does a fundamental vacancy for interest in cohabitation occupy the root of all evil? It cannot be proven for certain. Everyone has conflicting views on what they describe as the "truth" regardless, so defining such equivocal concepts in equally reductionistic terms would be counterintuitive to the single most ingrained tenet of the written form.

I happened across Ryuu no Michi as do many other readers do. Observe a group of individuals discuss the body of work of a sole man, become curious myself, do a little bit of digging on who said man might be and what he has published to date, and then realize he was someone whose name I’d known about since forever ago, and at last select from his hefty collection of stories and accounts of real world happenings at their time of conceptualization. With 28 chapters spread across 8 volumes, I went into it expecting it to be a cakewalk considering its diminutive length and that it was the first in a long line of manga Ishinomori would go on to stamp his name on. I couldn’t be more wrong.

To start with, the art is, to put it lightly, majestic as the Aether, consistently fluid in its depictions of busy limb-to-limb action, and achingly rapturous in how it’s illustrated for close to every spread you’ll lay eyes on insofar as your attention is kept sailing over the course of the read. Not once will you ever work your across landscapes devoid of soul poured into every miasma of uniformly repeating squiggles and the mark of while yet an accomplished artist, but truly bewildering talent of the highest pedigree. To think he managed to achieve this much while only still in his early thirties.

In one spread of Ryuu, our titular character sits alone in a field of dust and debris with plumes of smoke filtering into the atmosphere in excess. The aftermath of the carnage is rendered in such a way that the largest objects take up most of the frame and are consequently blackened out either completely or partially to show the difference in distance between the foreground and background.

Another of Ryuu no Michi’s inferred strengths is its arc-by-arc structure of showing how the planet got to the point it did where it became virtually inhospitable for further human progress. Instead of being shown bits and pieces of survival bravado and what each character introduced is supposed to help with in Ryuu’s bearing of the torch and ultimatum for a better tomorrow, we are graced with the fallout of a once-shimmering and once-prosperous cluster of evolutionary ingredients, now desecrated and in a state of monumental disrepair. Well, not quite but the gist is that the food chain’s disrupted and predators once have now become the hunted and vice versa. Likened to many myths of ancient origin, the individual tales told within these arcs put on an air of postmodernity atypical of the espoused schools of thought made ubiquitous in the 1970s. The god(s) guiding him by the hand on his journey for resettlement lay the brickwork for what is expected of him as a future bastion for the declining remnants of the civilized man, reminding him that if he is to perform at an acceptable optimum, he should pay no worry to his worst critics and just go about ruling with loose morals, implying that he should first establish sunny relations amongst peoples of the gamut of gene pools there now fill up the (un)earthly landscape. Projecting his own set of beliefs and moral axioms has to be the least of his responsibilities given that propounding forward-thinking or backwards arguments for an entire populace’s worth of tunnel-visioned faculties to hear would most certainly stoke the flames of discord, not to mention the unintentional conundrums that doing so would inevitably leave on the table. He has to earn these dispersed men and women’s trust and adulation if he seeks an opportunity to round them up and have them get along with one another.

The extent of Ishinomori’s knowledge of divergent species and the enumeration of specifics that come with it is definitely something that cannot be overstated. He repeatedly brings into focus concepts pertaining to how a demarcated civilization may unexplainably exploit the use of the limited resources and realize their potential as a society by having a democracy in place to decide upon what’s best for themselves and other subservient species that live alongside them. He clearly acknowledges that preexistent systems that have been lost to time due to the devastation of their forebearers will spontaneously crop up again at a certain point along a linear flowchart of time, also due to the cycle of causality and how things repeat themselves after enough time has passed.

All in all, i have to say that I’m fairly pleased with this manga. It has all the hallmarks I often associate with tales taut, ambitious in scope and yet comfortably reminiscent of an idealized (my perceived ideal) manner of storytelling that pulls no punches. Would I have wanted more of this, padded out to include at least a dozen more chapters to wrap certain plot points revolving around a number of the side characters whose final appearances were so unnecessarily far back from when the finale was finally set in motion? Of course! But what it all does right for me greatly outweighs what it doesn’t.

Shotaro Ishinomori, creator of the Kamen rider and Cyborg 009 franchises, is one of the most influential and prolific manga artists of all time. Unfortunately, most of his manga has never seen official publication outside of Japan, unlike the works of famed Osamu Tezuka. They’re pretty difficult to find. That’s a shame since many of Ishinomori manga are great. The Way of Ryu is one of such examples.

First warning, don’t be fooled by the cartoonish character design or the seemingly silly and cliché storyline at the beginning. This manga is Berserk-level in term violence and dark story. You will see people, plant, insects, animals, robot ... get cut down, chopped up, burned, and dismembered in various creatively horrifying ways. That’s not to mention all the psychologically scaring events. The mutated Earth here makes most post-apocalyptic world look like Disney theme park. The art is Berserk-level of greatness as well, with incredible sceneries and extremely detailed background art. The buildings, creatures, machinery design are all exceptionally creative and wonderfully strange, drawing inspiration from old fantasy and sci-fi art. The action is tense and wonderfully drawn. The characters design look quite weird compare to the modern manga art style, but you will likely get used to it after few chapters.

Story-wise, all the horrible stuffs are sometimes hard to tolerate, but I still pressed on because this manga’s story is really good. Shotaro Ishinomori didn’t just draw violence for violence sake, he use it to convey his belief about moral, spiritualism and the meaning of human civilization. In a way, this manga is similar to Kino not Tabi, featuring a character who travels around a strange world. Each location the main character Ryuu visit portrays a different moral dilemma or a different aspect of humanity. As the story progressed, Ryuu learn more and more about himself and the world, leading to a spiritual evolution. It is quite though provoking.

However, the manga is hardly flawless. I have some beef with the story’s conclusion. Saying more is a spoiler, so let’s just says the conclusion is quite strange and doesn’t answer every the question satisfyingly, both theme-wise and story-wise. The journey is more important than the destination, I guess. Another problem is that this manga can be very heavy-handed. Written during the height of the cold war, the author has no hesitation in showing his anger regarding the development of civilization and world politics. His arguments in this manga are often emotionally charged, hammering home his criticism of everything from materialism to religion. As a side effect, characters occasionally act more like a device to deliver the messages than a real person. Thankfully, the cast are generally interesting and have good development.

Overall, this manga might not age well in some aspect, but it definitely worth a look if you want something exciting but still worth thinking about.