Books: Japan (Buronson / Kentaro Miura)

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2012-02-28 10:00:00-05:00 No comments

Product purchases
support this site.

Another instance of Miura (Berserk) lending his considerable talents as an illustrator to a nearly-worthless story. The last time he did that was with King of Wolves, also with a story by Buronson, but Japan is worse.

In some ways this is Wolves turned inside-out: a gallery of characters are flung into the future instead of the past, where Japan has turned into a wasteland and all the natives have been ground under the heel of a pan-European dictatorship. Their one hope is a meat-headed yakuza (at least he knows he's a meathead) who doles out Justice and Righteous Vengeance in equal measure.

The story's dumb enough, but there's also generous dollops of crass sexism and pinhead sociology to boot. At least when Kazuo Koike did this kind of thing (Crying Freeman), or when Ryoichi Ikegami drew it (ditto, plus Wounded Man, Sanctuary and Buronson's own Strain), it had the saving grace of being enjoyably smarmy pulp trash. The whole thing feels like a dry run for a series that was never commissioned, and thank goodness for that: Miura's far enough behind on Berserk as it is.