Usagi Yojimbo #4: "Bounty Hunter"
This review was comissioned by @krinsbez
Back to Usagi Yojimbo! I've been waiting for this for a while, honestly. I had few to no complaints about the first few Bushido Bunny stories, and quite a few praises. There's a lot of it ahead in queue, courtesy of @krinsbez, @The Narrator, and @Bernkastel, so hopefully the rest of you like it as well.
Today's story is simply called "Bounty Hunter." Either Usagi is expanding his portfolio from bodyguarding to bounty hunting, he'll get caught up in a bounty hunter's shenanigans, or he'll have a bounty hunter sent after him by Hikiji in retaliation for the Geishu fiasco. Probably not the third one, just yet; Hikiji likely has more important things to do in the short term to recover from that expensive L.
Open on an incredibly detailed and atmospheric cover illustration.
Japanese samurai dramas and American westerns were always analogous genres, but this cover really drives that similarity home. I especially love the leaves blowing around in the dust clouds, and the way Usagi's ears are fluttering at juuust the same angle as the tree branches in the background. Plus the shadows, the cracks on the buildings, it's one of the best images in the series so far.
Fortunately for Usagi, this town isn't as abandoned as it looks; people are just understaandably reluctant to go outside, let alone repaint, when the weather is like this. He fords his way into an inn and bruskly calls for food and strong drink. He's in a worse mood than the weather alone is likely to account for, but given the disappointing outcome of his last mission that's pretty understandable. Even banging his patron's bodyguard only makes up for a little bit of that aggravation.
His meal arrives, but he's no less grouchy when he sits down to eat it and is immediately hailed by the rhino one table over.
Usagi warns him that there can be a whole lot MORE blood on his blade if he's tries to fuck with him. Damn, Usagi is *really* in a mood right now. Rhino-san, his jimmies seemingly unrustled, introduces himself as the bounty hunter Gennosuke. Usagi tells him that that's really cool and all, but there isn't a bounty on him, so fuck off. Gennosuke cheerfully interprets that as an invitation to come over and sit down at Usagi's table.
Heh, maybe he actually is trying to pick a fight after all.
Also, I wonder if the author was intentionally playing with audience expectations when he decided to make this character a rhinoceros. It's not at all the kind of personality that usually gets associated with them.
If nothing else, Usagi has managed to make Gennosuke understand that he doesn't feel like sitting through pleasantries right now, so he gets down to business. Gennosuke is trying to bring in a notorious bandit chief called One-Eyed Ichiro. Unfortunately, his gang turned out to be bigger and better dug in than Gennosuke expected, so Gennosuke is looking for some skilled backup.
Ah, those occupational hazards. Always good for commiserating over.
He can pay; he offers Usagi fifty ryo to help him take out Ichiro. The phrasing and framing suggests that Usagi is short on money right now and could really use that amount. Which means that this takes place a little longer after the "Lone Rabbit and Child" adventure than I thought, because Usagi did walk away from that one with some cash. Or it hasn't been that long, but he bought something really expensive, I guess that's also possible. Anyway, Usagi is visibly tempted by the money, but tells Gennosuke that he's not that kind of mercenary; he's an honourable yojimbo, not a shinobi. Oh come off your high horse Usagi, seriously. Gennosuke, still sanguine despite Usagi's prickliness, offers him an unconventional workaround.
He's not going to help Genno hunt the bandit chief. He's just going to protect Genno from counterattacks while he does the hunting. Usagi thinks that's ridiculous, but it also does satisfy his requirements, and he does need the money, so.
Genno fills him in on the situation. Ichiro is a very skilled fighter, and has a particular knack for escaping bad situations. He's also recently welcomed his brother, Kenichi, into the gang, and Kenichi has quickly been building a reputation almost as fearsome as his brother's as the group's second in command. They've taken over a nearby shrine and fortified it, holding the priest hostage to keep the nearby villagers compliant. These guys are pretty brazen. And pretty sacrilegious; probably not a good idea in a world where magic is real and kami can actually curse you for defiling their temples, but we already know that the brothers are bigtime risk-takers.
The following morning, Genno finishing filling Usagi in on the details as they make their way to the target. The bandits don't seem to be bothering to try hiding their presence, at this point.
That looks like about half the gang ready to meet them right off the bat when they approach, in an open environment that favors the larger group. If Genno is in Usagi's ballpark of fighting skill then this should be doable, but otherwise they'll have to do something tricky.
...hopefully he's in Usagi's ballpark of skill, because he just made it impossible for them to do anything tricky:
Well, he's confident if nothing else.
Fortunately, Gennosuke actually is good enough to justify that kind of recklessness. In fact, he might even be as good as Usagi! The two of them fight through an intense melee, quickly pressing in to the shrine's entrance and carving through the first wave of defenders. Once they have some breathing room, Genno instructs Usagi to hold off the remaining bandits while he races ahead and tries to nab Ichiro and/or his brother before they can slip away as they're wont to do.
I still like the detail, but when the battle scenes are this jam-packed it actually kind of makes the scene harder to follow. There are a couple pages of basically this:
It's the only time since the very first proof-of-concept story that the visuals haven't entirely worked for me.
Fortunately, the crowd gets thinned out pretty quickly after that, and the action gets much easier to follow. With Usagi covering his back, Genno advances into the inner sanctum where he finds One-Eyed Ichiro and his hostage...hmmmmmm.
Okay. Genno has heard that Ichiro's brother recently joined the gang, but has he seen the guy yet? The fact that Ichiro and the priest both appear to be the same breed of cat seems very suspicious to me.
Or...actually, should it be suspicious to me, or not? The animal people thing seems to JUST be stylistic. I don't think there's been any indications that blood relatives tend toward being the same animal. The one married couple we've seen so far were a cat and a rhino, and if they ever had children we don't know if any of them were cats OR rhinos, so...yeah, I dunno. On the other hand, one of the main selling points of using animal people is that it's really easy to make them look visually distinct, and introducing two new characters at once who are the same animal runs counter to that unless the author is trying to hint at something.
Okay, I guess I'm not sure, but I'm wary of the possibility at least.
Hah, it turns out my initial hunch was right! While covering the hallway, Usagi takes out another bandit who tries a desperate lunge, and happens to break a window that the real priest is behind. Or at least, what's left of him.
I'm not sure if he's supposed to be dead or just unconscious and suspended. The rope isn't around his neck, so he wasn't hanged to death, and I'm not sure why the bandits would just keep a dead body tied up in their base. Well, either way, the "hostage" that Ichiro is threatening Genno with is a fake.
That said, the fact that the real priest is also a similar-looking cat isn't making me any less confused about what that commonality is supposed to imply lol.
Back in the inner sanctum, One-Eyed Ichiro does a pretty good fake negotiation. When Genno doesn't seem to particularly care if the priest lives or dies as long as he can collect his bounty, Ichiro tosses his disguised brother Kenichi aside and removes him from Genno's immediate field of vision as the duel begins.
Naturally, the "priest" isn't actually restrained, but just has some rope coiled loosely around his wrists. And he also has a short sword hidden in his robes. Genno happens to spot the sneak attack coming out of the corner of his eye, but not in time to completely avoid it. It's the best he can do to just turn Kenichi's would-be deathblow into a flesh wound by bonking him in the face with his backhand.
Injured and off-balance, Genno is knocked to the ground (though not before landing a good hit on Ishigo in return, to his credit) and only saved at the last second by Usagi's entrance. Good bodyguard instincts there, Usagi, even if you had to kinda sorta break your employer's most recent instructions in order to act on them. Anyway, the brothers are already injured to different degrees, and ironically caught offguard by their enemy having someone else come up behind them. Usagi finishes them off before they can put up much more of a fight.
Genno is still conscious. It looks like he'll be fine as long as he gets that wound cleaned and bound before he loses too much more blood.
I love these zany anecdotes about Genno and Usagi's careers that they casually mention to each other. Like, how many times have targets of Genno faked being priests specifically?
Genno points out that Usagi probably should have just left him to die and brought in the brothers' bodies himself, collecting the whole bounty instead of just 50 ryo. Usagi just reiterates that he's a bodyguard, not a bounty hunter, and wilfully allowing his charge to die would be a grave insult to his entire profession. Usagi helps Genno limp back to town, as behind them those frog-sauropod things start helping themselves to the dead bandits.
...it kinda weirds me out that those things are scavengers, considering that neither frogs NOR sauropods are scavengers. Odd choice indeed.
Skip ahead a couple of weeks! Genno has recovered, and received the bounty for the heads of the Crime Kitties. He pays Usagi and wishes him well, jokingly hoping that Usagi never ends up with a bounty on him. Usagi tells him that he was starting to worry he was going to disappear on him as soon as he was healthy enough, but Genno assures him that he'd never do that to a friend.
Um. Well. Sort of. They've been staying at this inn for a couple of weeks, and Genno seems to have gotten the owner to believe that Usagi is covering them. He's also gone before Usagi can learn about this.
Heh, I probably should have seen this coming from the beginning when Genno made a point of telling the innkeeper to put everything on credit.
On one hand, Usagi might be regretting all those haughty remarks about their respective flavors of merc right about now. On the other, I kinda suspect that Genno would have fucked him over even if he hadn't insulted him; he definitely didn't put much effort into NOT seeming like a greedy scumbag over the course of the story. Well, in any case, I have a feeling that Usagi and Gennosuke will meet again at least once more, and that their next meeting is going to be a hell of a lot less cooperative after this.
So, that was the first real self-contained Usagi Yojimbo story. The original short was a standalone, but it alluded to the larger plot with the larger scope antagonist in Lord Hikiji. "Bounty Hunter," on the other hand, could actually be the beginning and end of Usagi's entire existence as far as a casual reader is concerned. In fact, it's actually easier for me to imagine that this story takes place before "Lone Rabbit and Child" rather than afterward.
Real old timey vibes and archetypes in this one. Scumbag Gennosuke in particular is a character type who shows up a lot in samurai stories, and also (to a somewhat lesser extent) in cowboy stories come to think of it. Not much more analysis to do, I don't think. Just a fun little romp. I do look forward to Usagi getting back at the rhino someday, though.
