An installment of Black Lagoon where scarcely anything blows up would seem to be, on first glance, not much of an installment of Black Lagoon at all. Like glycerin without nitro (har, har). But one of the pleasures of this story is how there’s, well, a story in between and above the sound of gunfire and empty shells hitting the ground. A story is about people. Lagoon listens to its characters and gives them freedom of speech and thought, and so the story’s about them and not just a pile of spent ammo.
The last book closed off on a cliffhanger, which is quickly concluded in the first chapter here — it’s notable mostly for the way Revy tears Rock a new one (verbally and darn near physically, too) for nearly messing up the whole mission. She doesn’t respect anyone she has to go and bail out, and what’s more she figured she was beyond all that with Rock: he can go to the bathroom all by himself and everything, right? Of course, the real insight here is not that either of them is going to abandon their position completely — Revy’s no more going to become a marshmallow than Rock is going to become a stone cold killer — but that over time they’ll find a place somewhere in the middle of both extremes.
The rest of the book’s taken up with a new adventure, “Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise” (oh, how I love the chapter naming in this series), wherein Rock & Co. get whisked on back to Tokyo. Not pleasure, business: Balalaika’s looking to expand her operations within Japan, and brought Rock along to do the translation honors. Revy’s also been brought along as muscle for Rock’s sake, since Balalaika can more than protect herself. Once Revy arrives in Japan, though, she’s miffed at how looking Asian but being an English-speaking New Yorker at heart puts her totally at odds with that place.
Several paralleling plot threads begin to unspool. The first concerns Rock himself, now a markedly different man than the one who left Japan all those months ago. His views on everything — his life, his sense of what people have to do in this world to survive, the meanings of his own actions — are different enough that everything from before seems like it belongs to another man. At one point Revy hints, none too subtly, that he should try to see his folks — given the kind of life they lead, who’s to say they won’t get another chance? But Rock can’t bring himself to do it; what’s more, he lies about the whole experience. He tells Revy he went to the house and found nobody home, but his words are interleaved with panels of him refraining from ringing the doorbell. This just isn’t his world anymore.
The other major thread involves Rock as well, but indirectly at first. While at a town fair with Revy (there’s a great gag involving her shooting skills at the target booth), he runs across a teenage girl named Yukio, last name Washimine. She’s intelligent and modest, not the sort of girl you’d expect to have a thug enforcer for an older brother (which she does). Rock doesn’t know this, but she’s the heir to a yakuza clan that has fallen on hard times. The death of their leader has left the group rudderless and on the brink of disbanding for some time now, and this fact has festered at the back of her mind for a long time. No one else seems willing to step up, and so for the sake of her family’s honor — the family name being more important than any one member of it here — she reluctantly decides to assume the position of the head of the clan.
This is bad news for a whole mess of reasons, not the least of which being the Washimine group has been headed on a collision course with Balalaika and her outfit for some time now. Rock is the only one who realizes this, and by the time he’s put the pieces together it’s probably too late. Worse, by that time he’s seen more of Balalaika’s true nature than he ever wanted to. She is not merely a stern (if also charmingly eccentric) taskmaster; she’s power-mad and hungry for a fantastic death. “I am here to bring destruction and domination,” she tells one of the yakuza through Rock. “All I care about is seeing how long I can dance on the bottom of hell’s cauldron.”
What’s remarkable is how despite her predilection for unrepentant evil, Balalaika’s one of the best characters in the whole series. We may not like her, but she’s not meant to be liked. That we find her fascinating to watch is all that’s needed. It’s been hinted at before that Revy barely avoided becoming like this. In fact, we’ve seen her pull back from that edge ourselves — but the book cliffhangs on a moment in which she may well have gone too close to that edge at last.
Art: When the animated version of Black Lagoon appeared Stateside, it sported an only slightly modified and cleaned-up version of Hiroe’s art style. It’s masculine and bold, but also full of playful energy and wild, Michael Bay-like POVs — check out the panel where Revy does double-gun duty into adjacent panels.
The art also doesn’t suffer from the cold, over-polished seinen look that you see in something like Ryoichi Ikegami’s work — Hiroe’s having as much fun drawing this as we have reading it. The book’s also loaded with splashy character designs, from Revy’s tribal shoulder tats and Daisy Duke cutoffs to Balalaika’s Soviet-army surplus fashions. Best of all, the book’s in a slightly larger trade paperback size (8 ¼ × 5 ¾) — bigger than the original tankōbon printing, which allows the art to stand out all the more in all its sassy glory.
Translation: Back when Viz first announced Black Lagoon at Comic-Con East, I was one of the lucky few who walked out of that panel with a prize: a copy of the original Japanese-language edition of volume one, to which I also added a copy of volume two purchased with my own cash. Even with my relatively limited command of Japanese (as I put it to the publicity manager, “I know just enough to get into trouble”), I could tell Lagoon would require any translator to make tough decisions about what to keep and in what form. There are many places where Hiroe has the characters speak directly in English right on the page (especially Revy), or intermix English into their Japanese (as Dutch does, probably as a way to depict how he speaks English to Japanese readers!), or speak directly in Russian (Balalaika) or Spanish (Roberta). It’s brutally eclectic.
The good news is that the translator, Dan Kanemitsu, kept all this and more in mind, and created a translation that’s both faithful and accessible in all of its eccentric uses of language. He was, in fact, consulted by Rei Hiroe for the original Japanese-language edition of the story, and so it seems only natural to have him do the translation. When something was rendered in both another language and in Japanese in the original, here the Japanese has been rendered into English and the original language left intact. To my surprise, many things that I thought were translator’s inventions were in fact originally there in some form. I don’t have a copy of the untranslated volume 4 to compare with the translated version, but if it’s anything like the work done in the last three volumes (and I have no reason to doubt that it is), it’s superlative work.
As with the previous volume, there are a couple of contextual endnotes re: the yakuza and the Russian mafia, and there’s yet another gag manga where everyone in the entire cast is gender-switched. There are some things you just can’t unsee…
The Bottom Line: Most of the time a series — whether a comic or a TV show — picks a basic mood or tone and sticks with it. The best ones can juggle. Black Lagoon #4 shows that Rei Hiroe is just as adept at building character-driven suspense as he is at blowing things to pieces.
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