List Item: Read half of the 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die
Progress: 28/501
Title: Lady Snowblood
Writer: Kazuo Koike
Illustrator: Kazuo Kamimura
Year: 1972-1973
Country: Japan
Right, so the first thing I had to remind myself of whilst reading Lady Snowblood is that it was originally published in the Japanese edition of Playboy. I bring this up because there is a whole lot of nudity; something that I had to deal with as I was reading this on a crowded train.
Does the nudity make a lot of sense in the narrative? Sometimes, yes. Most the of time it is gratuitous, as is a lot of the sex (both hetro- and homosexual), but you can kinda take it as artistic license. Like how you would feel a lot of the swearing in a Quentin Tarantino film is down to his choice as a director.
I bring up Tarantino becuase Lady Snowblood and the films based on this manga were a source of inspiration for Kill Bill. Once you’ve read this you can see where he got a lot of inspiration for a bunch of the scenes.
In essence, Lady Snowblood is a story about retribution. The main character, Oyuki, was born to a woman in prison (who seduced prison guards in order to get pregnant) and has become an assassin to take revenge on the four people that wronged her mother.
Over the course of the four volumes we watch as Oyuki takes on a number of contracts, prepares for them with different pieces of training and then goes about executing her plan. As you would expect she always succeeds, but it plays well with the expectations since there were times where I thought she might be in some legitimate danger (such as the time when she was tied to a tombstone and was about to be assaulted by a man with a gargantuan penis… )
The central thread of revenge, although deviated from, is never forgotten though. By following it you cannot help but feel awful for Oyuki. Her life is dedicated to avenging the mother she never got a chance to meet. We never really see her have fun or, aside from a short chapter, do anything that could be described as familial. It’s all work to satisfy the end goal and she’s never truly happy.
By the end of the manga she completes her mother’s retribution and we see her weapon (a sword concealed in an umbrella) floating away on the tide. I saw this and had the hope that this means she was able to carve out her own identity and live a quasi-normal life.
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