Wild Adapter
Author: Minekura Kazuya
Imprint: Chara Comics Special
Publisher: Tokuma shoten
ISBN: 4-19-960161-9
Reviewed by Jeanne
Yokohama 1995. The world of yakuza and drug-dealing and prostitution. Sanada, head of the local branch of the Izumo gang, hears about an intriguing young mahjong player, Kubota Makoto. He offers him a position running the youth group of the gang. Kubota isn't especially interested- "Can I go now? I haven't had lunch"- but Sanada makes him an offer. Here, bound and gagged, is the former leader of the youth group, who alas turned out to be a spy from the rival Toujou gang. Here are two guns, seemingly identical, one of which will blow up in your face when you fire it. "Let's see how lucky you are, Kubota-kun." Kubota still isn't interested in joining the gang, but the chance to try his luck attracts him. "You haven't got a good right arm, you can't play mahjong." He picks up a gun and shoots the guy, and complains how loud the backfire is. Thus Kubota Makoto, not on the face of it a terribly nice guy, but one who certainly belongs in the world he finds himself in. (And I have to say, anyone who's ever lived in Tokyo will be moved to tears of nostalgia by Minekura's detailed rendering of its grimy, scuzzy, undistinguished backstreets and cheap apartments.)
One feels one ought to dislike Kubota, or at least disapprove of him strongly, but one can't. There isn't enough of him to dislike- no malice, no villainy, no evil. "Chaos and order got all mixed up inside him," someone thinks about him, "and produced nothing... except Nothing." If ever nihilism walked on two legs, it does here. His emotions, his interests, his ideas, are all something he keeps at arm's length from himself. He plays mahjong, as he shoots ex-youth group leaders, as a way of demonstrating he's alive. "I can't really tell if I'm living unless I'm up against a live opponent," he smiles. His violence is exercised against the violent themselves, even if in slight excess. Toujou members strut about Izumo turf, dealing drugs, and one of them knocks the teeth out of an Izumo member who had the bad luck to talk to the Toujou guy's girl. Toujou member later finds Kubota waiting for him, and afterwards is discovered with his neck broken and his fingernails ripped out. "And bitten?" Kubota asks innocently. "Yeah, that too." "Humans are animals, after all," he shrugs.
(Hereafter are semi-spoilers. Tread carefully.)
Minekura rubs our noses in Kubota's violence again and again, but still somehow manages to keep our feelings on this side of sympathy. For one thing she presents him almost entirely through the eyes of other characters. These are usually people struck and fascinated by Kubota's personal magnetism, which can make him seem Mary Sue-ish at times. "A look to tear the heart out of you," someone thinks, stunned on first meeting Kubota's gaze. (Actually this is the guy who gets his fingernails ripped out.) Through most of this first volume we get him from the point of view of Komiya, the second in command of the youth group. Komiya, something of an innocent who fancies himself a hardened yakuza, is both excited and ambivalent about Kubota's casual violence and bland detachment. As their acquaintance progresses, the poor kid becomes more and more confused about Kubota himself. In fact he's falling in love, but it's only the readers who realize this. Komiya certainly doesn't, and Kubota- well, if he does, he won't give many signs of it. Some. Not many.
It's Kubota's nature to draw people to him- his underlings in the gang, Komiya, the oily Sanada himself- but to be incapable of responding. Not surprising when we learn that he's an illegitimate and unrecognized son whose parents took the attitude that he didn't exist. (His father was Someone, and a pretty charismatic Someone, but we still don't know who.) "I can't remember once having spoken to my mother or my father," he says calmly. It doesn't bother him. "You don't miss what you never had." In spite of which, thanks to Minekura's artstyle and the faint wistfulness in Kubota's face, both we and Komiya get the feeling that Kubota does indeed want something, if only he could find it. And allow himself to want it when he does.
In the middle of the book we get a two-page peek into what makes Kubota tick- a section narrated by him alone. He looked after a stray cat once. "Don't remember much about him, frankly, just how warm he was and how soft his fur. He didn't even have a name." One day, coming home from school, he found the cat dead, its insides ripped out by a dog and lying across the roadway. "I picked him up in my thin arms. He'd lost all the grace he'd had before and stiffened out of shape. I suppose he was born only so he could die that way. And I thought, some day I'll die like that too, with my guts all falling out of me." Kubota in fact rather embodies a principle first stated by Minekura's other character, Genjou Sanzou. "Anyone who kills and goes on living has accepted the fact that some day he'll be killed in his turn." Kubota is just a victim waiting for his own killer to find him. It gives him an odd fellow-sympathy for his own victims, but no mercy. And we eventually realize that, not unlike Sanzou, he's also waiting for redemption, even though neither he nor Sanzou know it (or recognize it, even when it's there beside them complaining how hungry it is.) The question is only which will find Kubota first, redemption or death. One rather hopes that the two won't come in the same package.
But into Kubota's uninflected grey nothingness comes, quite casually, the wild card of Wild Adapter. It's a drug that not merely drives people insane, it turns them into semi-animals with claws and shaggy hair, and ends by making their insides explode out of them. Five or six bodies with the tell-tale characteristics have showed up in the streets of Yokohama since the previous year, and the cop Kasai, Kubota's uncle, enlists Kubota and Komiya's help to get a lead on it. ("One of Japan's famous corrupt cops," Kubota says, were you wondering how come a cop can be palsy with the yakuza. In fact uncorrupt cops can be palsy with the yakuza too. It's how things are traditionally done there.) The drug ends by changing everything for both Kubota and Komiya. And so, at the end of volume one, Kubota finds himself picking up another stray cat- a large and heavy one. "I never learn." This one is lying unconscious in an alley, having somehow survived the people who were hunting him down and the effects of Wild Adapter itself. His name is Tokitoh, and we're all waiting desperately to see what happens next.
Of course, Kubota and Tokitoh are the protagonists of Minekura's other manga Executive Committee. The relationship between the two series has been the subject of some debate. Minekura herself, on the dustjacket of WA, calls it a 'parallel' (English word written in katakana) to ExecCttee. I might know what that meant if she'd said it in Japanese, but when it comes to English loanwords the Japanese follow the Humpty-Dumpty rule- 'When I use a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, neither more nor less.' Myself I think it means 'parallel universe' rather than prequel, because it rather boggles my mind that Kubota the nihilistic mafia hitman of WA goes on to become a woolly wombattish ordinary high school student in ExecCttee. Granted, this is Japanese manga where high school students somehow manage to live alone, pay their school fees, buy their own uniforms, and be single mothers raped by demons, without anyone ever breathing that taboo word 'how?'. So maybe I'm just being naïve about Kubota's antecedents. But I also like someone's suggestion that at the end of WA, whenever it comes, Kubota will wake up and find he's EC Kubota. It would be too cruel if the EC Kubota woke up only to find he was the WA Kubota, the one waiting for the day of his death.
http://www.aestheticism.com/visitors/manga...a/wild_adapter/thx
