Usagi Yojimbo: Origins, Vol. 1: Samurai

"Eleanor: Yes, Usagi Yojimbo. This is a delight. Neil: Here’s my first copy. I got these back in the 80s. Eleanor: That’s when I became aware of them, because there was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles storyline where Usagi Yojimbo comes into it. And I was like, ‘What is this rabbit samurai? I must know more about this!’ And the comics are amazing. They’re so good. They do a great job of narrating traditional Japanese folk tales, of explaining things. You learn a lot about Tokugawa era Japan by following him around. All these little vignettes are so effective. It’s got that great first-person narrative. It’s not unlike watching a Kurosawa film—only a rabbit is the samurai. Neil: It’s very similar to Lone Wolf and Cub , which is also quite a famous manga . There are these crossovers that happen. There are magical creatures, kappas , which are turtle-like characters from folklore and myth. It all gets glommed into 16th century Japan. It’s based on Miyamoto Musashi, who was a very well-known swordsman in the Edo period. The beautiful thing is that Stan Sakai, who wrote it, his family were Japanese immigrants to America. It was his way of connecting to their culture, to tell stories that don’t get told in America. One way of doing it is to throw an anthropomorphic animal at it, so that people are willing to listen. It’s a brilliant move, because if he had just gone, ‘Here we go, I’m doing Edo period samurai’ you would have had a lot less uptake. There is something about using animals that brings people in. Then he’s able to do many different things—like a traditional Japanese ghost story as a one-off. There are all these great ways of getting folklore in there, as well as telling versions of history. It’s densely layered and very effective. Eleanor: Yes, that’s a great way of doing it. Eleanor: I believe it is. The story takes place in the Edo period which is roughly the 17th century to the 19th century, under the Tokugawa Shogunate. There was the breakdown of a more imperial, top-down structure and Japan fractured into 300 different daimyo areas—local lords controlling everything. There was a revolution at the end of the previous period and that shook things up. He’s trying to tell us the story of the battles that brought that about. It’s deftly done. It’s very smart. Neil: Usagi is a masterless samurai who walks the road of hell, basically. It’s one of those stories like Zatoichi where you’ve got this person going into a town and sorting out people’s problems. He’s kind of reluctant. It’s very Fistful of Dollars —spaghetti westerns came from these kinds of stories. Usagi always gets somehow involved in some struggle and ends up being quite pivotal in the solution to it. It’s so much fun. You don’t realize that you’re vicariously learning a) Japanese and b) history. For example, you’ll learn the word musubi which are rice balls. They eat a lot of those on their journeys. You’ll get a little asterisk which tells you what they’re referring to, and you get an illustration of it as well. Eleanor: The most recent story arc that started in 2019 is all tied to bunraku , which I was really into when I lived in Japan . It’s puppet theater and I used to go all the time. The puppets are huge, almost the size of people. You can learn all about these things that otherwise you probably wouldn’t in the West. It’s really good and useful for that. Yes, he is. Even though Usagi Yojimbo is fairly well known and pops up in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , a cool thing is that Sakai owns the character exclusively. So he gets to decide what Usagi does. He can decide exactly when and where and what is going to happen. I think that’s great. I love to see more author control of characters. Neil: He’s such an amazing storyteller. He’s a classic example of a creator of comics, who does both the writing and drawing and he’s as gifted in storytelling as he is in drawing. He does both really well."