MANGA: RYUKO By Shelley Pallis
“T
he Middle East is great,” chuckles an evil gangster in Eldo Yoshimizu’s manga Ryuko. “It smells of blood all the time. You’ll love it.” There are a bunch of opportunities to be had as the Soviet Union collapses, and cartels from former Communist states duke it out over surplus arms, artificial revolutions and the copious profits from international drugs deals. But that’s all in the past... or is it? Ryuko leaps ahead to the present-day, as Tokyo gangsters fight to hold onto their turf after an incursion of Chinese rivals. The inheritors of the Black Dragons syndicate are locked in a turf war with the Yajima gang, over businesses both legal and illegal, while the Chinese Triads sneak up on them both. A bunch of long-standing vendettas reach bloody resolution on the streets of Tokyo, but as the bodies pile up, we start to realise that we are watching the end of a long,
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long cycle of retribution, that chases its origins back a generation or more.The icy-cool Ryuko is the uncrowned queen of Japanese gangland, a free agent exiled from the underworld after murdering her own father. “You don’t take power with justice,” we see him boasting to her in yet another flashback. “You take it by winning.” Former gang-boss Garyu doesn’t have time for adopting strays or doing right by old friends. He just wants to get out while the going’s good, shutting down his gun-running operation to Central Asia just ahead of the coup that’s going to ruin everything. But his daughter Ryuko is cut from a different cloth, a ruthless businesswoman with a sense of loyalty and honour so overwhelming that she is prepared to kill him over it. By the time she finds out it was a misunderstanding and she didn’t have all the facts, she has already kicked off another round of violent retributions.
