Masamune Shirow; pub Kodansha (Jp), Dark Horse (US), Titan Books (UK); ser
hacked; only an outside observer can detect the signs.
This is where Section Nine comes in, a group of security observers on the periphery of the Japanese govern- ment, led by Aramaki, a gruff elderly man who will do whatever it takes to protect his team. Batou, Motoko’s right- hand man, is a light-hearted cyborg and the team’s main muscle, and several other members, including the mostly human Ishikawa and Togusa, provide tactical support. But even the special- ists of Section Nine have their hands full dealing with the ghost hacker known as the Puppeteer. Their struggles with him continue through the entire series, and even at the end you’re not quite sure whether things have been resolved.
That’s partly because the action sequences and political intrigue give way to exploring the basic philosophies behind what makes humans human. When the Puppeteer finally infiltrates Motoko’s mind towards the second half of the series, her teammates see her start to behave erratically and they try to piece together what is going on. Meanwhile, Motoko and the Puppeteer are engaged in deep conversations about what the Puppeteer represents, and how he feels about becoming a sentient being within the network. He speaks at one point of fragmented information about Motoko existing in her colleagues, genes and memes growing in a genus-1 Toroid, macrocosmic ascension and indetermi- nate declension. Umm… right. Helpfully,
detailed footnotes are interspersed between frames, with Shirow obsessively explaining the technologies and scien- tific, cultural and social backgrounds behind his creation. Dark Horse’s second translated edition also contains fourteen pages worth of additional author’s notes.
The story does have its lighter moments, often provided by the spider- like Fuchikoma helper robots that Section Nine relies on for combat and surveil- lance backup. The Fuchikoma are rather childlike in their behaviour, for instance throwing a tantrum and demanding a higher grade of oil before they’ll carry out a task. One short, four-page chapter is devoted to the robots’ plans for a revolution, stalled when Batou promises his Fuchikoma unit some oil “with a new fragrance”, and when Motoko manipu- lates another unit into agreeing to stick with the status quo.
After Ghost in the Shell, Shirow would go on to write two sequels, the eleven-chapter Ghost in the Shell 2:
Man-Machine Interface (serialized in Young Magazine in 1997) and Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human Error Processor,
four chapters from Ghost in the Shell 2 that were originally intentionally left out of the tankōbon version by Shirow himself. While both have their share of fans, a good portion of those two works loses the precarious balance between action and philosophizing that the first series maintains, sinking under the weight of what amounts to extended bouts of psychobabble.
T
he adventures of the trained assassin Duke Togo, better known as Golgo 13, number more than four hundred stories, filling thousands of printed pages in Japan. Exposure in Western markets may be more limited, but you don’t really need to read it all to get a sense of what this assassin can accomplish. The stories are all self- contained, each with its own complex network of relationships and real-world intrigue, ready to be broken wide open.In the world of Golgo 13, being a target of the famed assassin means you’re marked for certain death. His skill is such that sometimes he barely needs to appear in the manga that bears his name; all he has to do is show up in a few frames, pull a trigger and bang – his target has joined the choir invisible.
But when the assassin has been plying his craft for the better part of four decades, making Golgo 13 one of the oldest manga still in publication in Japan today, all those brief appearances add up to a rather impressive dossier. If there’s a conflict or conspiracy in the world sometime in modern history, chances are that the assassin played a
role in it. The 1989 student uprising in Tiananmen Square in China? He was hired to take out a Tibetan activist. The 2000 US presidential election, with the controversy over the vote count? He shot the ballots involved in the Florida recount, causing Al Gore to lose and solidifying George W. Bush’s victory. He also helped President Bill Clinton stop Saddam Hussein’s would-be weapon of mass destruction, aided South African president Nelson Mandela in halting a terrorist plot, and went up into space at the request of President Gerald Ford to prevent a disabled secret US govern- ment spacecraft from interfering with a scheduled rendezvous between the
Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft.
Golgo 13 is in a sense a contempo-
rary version of the rōnin, or master- less, samurai stories of years past. The emotionally detached assassin wanders the land without allegiance to any partic- ular group, cause or nation, taking on jobs when he feels they match his personal code of ethics. In Golgo’s case, he makes contact with his employers just once and refuses to shake hands in case it reveals which hand he uses to shoot – rather than a sword, Golgo 13 wields a trusty
Golgo 13
Takao Saito; pub Shogakukan (Jp), Viz (US); ser Big Comic (1969–); vols
M16 rifle, with which he’s missed a target only once throughout his career. And this contemporary rōnin also provides women with new heights of pleasure thanks to his skills in the bedroom. He isn’t a James Bond playboy type, though – many of his sexual encounters are with prostitutes, and he never exhibits the same signs of pleasure as his partners. Several theories exist as to why he has sex before his missions, including as a means to distract himself from approaching danger; a way of spreading his genes whenever he feels a threat to his own life; or simply in order to fulfil an ambition to have sex with as many women as possible.
The art is thoroughly consistent, thanks to the studio system created by
Saito, and has evolved little from its origins in the 1970s, making it look rather dated to more recent manga readers. Viz’s definitive thirteen- volume series (published 2006–08) takes advantage of the manga’s longevity, each volume pairing a story of contemporary appeal with a “classic” adventure set in the 1970s. The series also benefits from exhaustive notes collectively entitled “File 13: Secrets of the World’s Deadliest Assassin”, which get readers up to speed on the assas- sin’s career, everything from the torture methods that Golgo 13 has endured to an entire essay on his sexual technique, the last an indication of utter devotion to the source material.