House of 1000 Manga

Inuyashiki

Inuyashiki

“When I see old men eating beef bowls alone, late at night…lonely old salarymen…I wonder what their joy in life is. Why are they eating alone? Don’t they have families to be with?”

I almost read a YA

Inuyashiki is the kind of guy who'd be a background character in another manga. He's out of shape, timid and short. He worked his whole life to buy a mediocre house in the shade of a larger building. His family doesn't care about him, except for his one friend, his dog Hanako. On the subway he sees muggers harassing other middle-aged men, but he's too timid to intervene; his equally wimpy son sees this and hates both of them for it. (“We're just a family of hobbits. We're meant to live in our hole and tremble in fear!”) As if he dreary life weren't bad enough, one day his doctor gives him bad news: he has stomach cancer and only has a few months to live. His first instinct is to tell his family, but none of them will pick up his phone call, so he goes out to the park at night with his dog and cries and cries.

That's when the alien spaceship hits him and blasts him to pieces. The unseen aliens make a hasty decision to cover up their interference in Earth by…giving him a brand-new robot body, of course! Inuyashiki wakes up the next morning in the park, not sure what happened. At first he thinks the weird changes in his body are due to the cancer: his back pain is gone and he doesn't need glasses anymore. Then his arm starts steaming and unfolds into a metal cybergun which shoots out…the undigested meal he ate the day before. Also, pushing a button in his chin makes his head open up, revealing a bunch of metal nodules where he used to have a brain. And that's when he REALLY freaks out: is he human anymore? Is he even himself any more?

Yes, Inuyashiki is the story of an old man who turns into a military-grade super-robot (you need some flesh to be a cyborg, right?) and the violent adventures that ensue. If you have any doubt that it's violent, know that it's by USB ports from their fingernails (they aren't 100% wireless?).

Reading this manga on

But every superhero needs a villain to fight, and like Gantz, Inuyashiki also contains horrifying evil. Turns out that another person was also killed and reconstituted by the aliens: Hiro Shishigami, a friendly, handsome teenager, the kind of nice guy who goes to his childhood friend's house to convince him to go back to school after bullies scare him away. Hiro cares about his friends; however, he doesn't care about anyone else, and he uses his newfound robot powers to kill people he thinks aren't worth living (“When you get down to it, no one really matters aside from family and friends. Who cares if other people live or die? In fact, it's usually way more shocking to me if someone dies in a manga or anime or something.”) Ando, his buddy, can't believe it when Hiro starts promising to kill the people who bullied him. It's one thing to talk about it…but to actually kill someone? As a bit of self-promotion, and doubtless as an F-you to people who thought Gantz was a bad moral influence, the harmess Ando turns out to be a fan of Gantz while Hiro, the amoral sociopath, prefers

Readers of Gantz are generally divided between those who think it's a cool, dark, gory science fiction series, and those who think it's an amoral, nihilistic stain on humanity, and the same battle lines will be drawn between readers of Inuyashiki. Three volumes in (Oku has said the series will run for 10 volumes), this series has a brighter outlook than that one, with an idealistic hero facing few of the brutal “the end justifies the means” decisions the Gantz characters must constantly make. But there's still head-crushings and eye-gougings, some of them perpetrated by Inuyashiki himself, who doesn't kill but isn't above inflicting permanent injury. Perhaps you could say he has no choice, for there are evil, evil people out there, murderers and rapists (warning: both men and women get raped in Inuyashiki) who stoke the reader's, and the hero's, righteous rage. It's definitely catharsis to watch the horribly evil get splattered by a weak-looking little old man, but a pattern emerges of new innocent characters being introduced just so they can be abused by villains and give Inuyashiki an opportunity to avenge them, as if Oku had not only reinvented the supehero genre in some alien laboratory but speed-evolved it to the early 1990s and the refrigerator cliché. And will the new, super-oyaji Inuyashiki ever make his peace with his family, or will they remain two-dimensional ciphers who hardly show up after the first volume?