Hanzo the Razor

Now I'm not really very big into manga and anime. It's never really been my thing. I'm not going to denigrate the entire art form and say that it all sucks, but for the most part I find it childish, badly drawn and often times hair-pullingly full of faux-philosophical bullshit. Try as you might, you're not gonna find much anime in my collection.

Unless it's porn, I mean.

So when I say there is manga out there that I fucking love, you better believe I mean it. And the manga that I do love is the work of writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima. "Lone Wolf and Cub" is their magnum opus as well as their most famous collaboration, but for me, it's "Hanzo no Mon", localized to America by Dark Horse comics as "Path of the Assassin" that really shines as their best work. But it was in "Path of the Assassin" that I started noticing some....disturbing trends in Kazuo Koike's writing.

...

Yeah...it kinda seems like ol' Kazuo has a bit of a thing for women getting raped and then falling in love with the guy who raped them. The main character in "Path of the Assassin" has this happen to him no less than TWICE, and since I'm still only about three-quarters through the books I wouldn't be surprised if it happened again. Maybe it's just my soft squishy American liberal mind, filled up with stupid ideas that rape is fucking horrible and shouldn't be trivialized like that and sometimes women might even count as people, but I'm having a really hard time coming up with something that's nearly as offensive as having rape victims go ga-ga over the man who just took them by force. I mean seriously, what is worse than that?

Isn't one of these assholes dead now?

Anywoo, my point is that Koike-san takes the idea of rape being the thing that opens a woman's doors of perception (....) to unbelievable pleasure and runs completely off the fucking wall with it in the manga "Goyokiba", about an Edo samurai-police officer named Hanzo, a self-mutilating sadomasochist, whose nickname is "Kamisori" (meaning "Sharp" or "Razor") and who patrols the mean streets of Tokugawa-era Japan armed with a love for justice, a hatred of oppression and a giant cock that he routinely flagellates to make stronger.

"Sometimes you need to hit it to keep it in line."

Rooster jokes aside, the part I left out is how Hanzo goes about enforcing the law and bringing justice to  the people. But I don't need to tell you. All I need to do is show you the cover of the DVD boxed set of the films based on the manga, and trust you have both two working eyes and a memory-span longer than a boll-weevil's.

       The "Longest Arm" is his penis.

Yeeaaaaah. In his quest to see that harm does not befall the common man, Hanzo the Razor routinely rapes the ever-loving shit out of the women who know things about the cases he's working on, which sends them into such tremors of unbelievable ecstasy that they not only readily confess everything they know, they become placid, love-struck sex kittens who follow Hanzo around worshipfully.

Cuz, ya know, thats what really happens with rape victims.

There are actually three movies in the series but they're essentially the same thing over and over again. Hanzo stumbles upon some plot, does some detective work, beats the shit out of his massive dick with a wooden truncheon, finds a woman related to the plot, rapes her into paradise, fights some ninjas, and solves the crime. This shit would be nigh-unwatchable if it wasn't for two things: Shintaro Katsu, who plays Hanzo, strutting around these carefully constructed Edo-period sets like he was the Japanese version of Shaft, and the funkadelic soundtrack, both of which on their own are massively entertaining. These two things ALMOST manage to turn the movies into high-camp, but then we have a rape-scene and it gets all squicky again.

On a slightly related note, I realized my boxed-set of the Hanzo movies and my boxed-set of the TV series "Shogun" have weirdly similar color schemes. I hope this wasn't on purpose.

"Little Timmy said he wanted some Japanese-sounding movie...what was the name?"