Banana Fish, Akimi Yoshida
Apr. 5th, 2009 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandra"And then, of course, second, the heirloom Yongzheng bowl he smashed over the previous valet's head."
Volume 9. Ash is surprisingly pouty on the cover of this one (not literally, as you can’t see his mouth, but it’s very much a model pose – hair shoved up with one hand, over the shoulder glare). Can’t find the image it’s taken from in this volume, tho’.
Back on the train. Ash has just told Arthur to stop running away and fight him. The police are coming, but all they’ve managed to do is catch up with, and then lose Cain’s gang. Another female speaking character (in police traffic control) shows up for two pages. Nice use of close-ups and pull-backs in this sequence – this is a manga where I always have a good sense of location. Arthur asks Ash if he knows why Arthur hates him; Ash says he does, and it’s not his fault (neither of them clarify this – Arthur feeling second to Ash in things? Something more personal?). The train pulls to a stop, brakes squealing.
Eiji is running down the street. Bones and Kong find him and pick him up in their car, saying they’ll take him to Ash. Despite the fact that Eiji got to say “fucking” twice in the first volume the gang have gone all mealy mouthed and Bones says “fudged” in a completely unconvincing manner.
Sing (on motorbike) and his gang have caught up with the stopped train, but it’s on a bridge in between stations. As they look up Arthur and Ash are fighting on the tracks, and Ash takes a cut to the shoulder. In return, he manages to slash Arthur across the face. Cain’s gang arrives. Arthur gets Ash down on the tracks. Eiji, Bones and Kong arrive as Ash kicks him away and gets up again. Arthur does that thing of licking your opponent’s blood off the knife that (almost) never indicates that you are the sympathetic and victorious protagonist (I think if you are an edgy anti-hero you can lick your *own* blood off knives), and when they close again Ash gets Arthur in the gut, then across the throat, and he falls off the tracks, dead. Everyone starts cheering except Eiji, who stares up at Ash, and Ash yells at him to go back to Japan.
And the police sweep in. They order Ash to surrender, but instead he collapses from his wounds. The police then arrest practically everyone in the crowd (Cain and Sing discuss Ash, in a failure to pass whatever the race-based version of the Bechdel test would be), including a surprisingly stroppy Eiji, and Jenkins and Charlie take a look at the trail of bodies Ash has left behind. Max and Ibe realise Eiji and Ash aren’t going to be showing up at the airport and then hear about the riot. They head for the hospital, where an unstable (physical condition) Ash is being operated on.
Sing and Eiji (I hadn’t realised they hadn’t met in person before) both get bailed from prison, by what turns out to be Yut Lung. Back at whatever house they’re using, it becomes apparent that Yut Lung has had his dodgy incestuous brother modified, presumably by Dawson, to be one step up from a zombie. Sing is obviously trying to work out what’s going on, with Eiji as well as with Yut Lung and his brother, and not liking what he finds out. Meanwhile Max and Ibe, looking for Eiji, end up at Ash’s apartment, where they find most of the gang hiding behind the sofa (these street gangs are sneaky). They’ve checked every police station for Eiji, and haven’t found him.
Yut Lung confronts Eiji in a nasty, superficially polite manner, designed to point out just how useless Eiji is to Ash (while pointing out his own fears of the opposite being true. And Dino is coming back to New York.
Jenkins interviews Ash, who is a) unhelpful and b) now 18, so legally an adult. There is a scene involving a lot of star-struck female nurses that I would prefer not to take into account when considering the gender balance in this manga, and then someone distantly connected to the DA’s office shows up to give Ash an IQ test (he scores 180) as part of his post-op recovery/interrogation and *then* a killer disguised as a nurse tries and fails to put a lethal amount of muscle relaxant into Ash’s iv line, shooting the cop guarding Ash and then suiciding via poison tooth when Ash successfully fights back (this attempt has come not from Dino, who would want Ash alive, but from the politicians allied with him who have less time for Dino’s obsession).
Max and Ash catch up on plot developments until Charlie kicks him out. The FBI swoop in and take over the case, transferring Ash at very short notice to a mental health centre under the care of Dr Mannerheim. Meanwhile, Max is talking to his newspaper contacts about the Banana Fish story, and ends up as a stringer for Newsweek, and Eiji has failed at yet another escape attempt from Yut Lung, although he is clocking up an impressive amount of property damage in the process.
Max finds out about Ash’s transfer from a drunk Charlie, and reveals his own disillusioned police past, before plotting to get in to see Ash by pretending to be his lawyer. Before he can do so, however, it’s announced on all the media that Ash has died of his wounds after transfer…
Volume 9. Ash is surprisingly pouty on the cover of this one (not literally, as you can’t see his mouth, but it’s very much a model pose – hair shoved up with one hand, over the shoulder glare). Can’t find the image it’s taken from in this volume, tho’.
Back on the train. Ash has just told Arthur to stop running away and fight him. The police are coming, but all they’ve managed to do is catch up with, and then lose Cain’s gang. Another female speaking character (in police traffic control) shows up for two pages. Nice use of close-ups and pull-backs in this sequence – this is a manga where I always have a good sense of location. Arthur asks Ash if he knows why Arthur hates him; Ash says he does, and it’s not his fault (neither of them clarify this – Arthur feeling second to Ash in things? Something more personal?). The train pulls to a stop, brakes squealing.
Eiji is running down the street. Bones and Kong find him and pick him up in their car, saying they’ll take him to Ash. Despite the fact that Eiji got to say “fucking” twice in the first volume the gang have gone all mealy mouthed and Bones says “fudged” in a completely unconvincing manner.
Sing (on motorbike) and his gang have caught up with the stopped train, but it’s on a bridge in between stations. As they look up Arthur and Ash are fighting on the tracks, and Ash takes a cut to the shoulder. In return, he manages to slash Arthur across the face. Cain’s gang arrives. Arthur gets Ash down on the tracks. Eiji, Bones and Kong arrive as Ash kicks him away and gets up again. Arthur does that thing of licking your opponent’s blood off the knife that (almost) never indicates that you are the sympathetic and victorious protagonist (I think if you are an edgy anti-hero you can lick your *own* blood off knives), and when they close again Ash gets Arthur in the gut, then across the throat, and he falls off the tracks, dead. Everyone starts cheering except Eiji, who stares up at Ash, and Ash yells at him to go back to Japan.
And the police sweep in. They order Ash to surrender, but instead he collapses from his wounds. The police then arrest practically everyone in the crowd (Cain and Sing discuss Ash, in a failure to pass whatever the race-based version of the Bechdel test would be), including a surprisingly stroppy Eiji, and Jenkins and Charlie take a look at the trail of bodies Ash has left behind. Max and Ibe realise Eiji and Ash aren’t going to be showing up at the airport and then hear about the riot. They head for the hospital, where an unstable (physical condition) Ash is being operated on.
Sing and Eiji (I hadn’t realised they hadn’t met in person before) both get bailed from prison, by what turns out to be Yut Lung. Back at whatever house they’re using, it becomes apparent that Yut Lung has had his dodgy incestuous brother modified, presumably by Dawson, to be one step up from a zombie. Sing is obviously trying to work out what’s going on, with Eiji as well as with Yut Lung and his brother, and not liking what he finds out. Meanwhile Max and Ibe, looking for Eiji, end up at Ash’s apartment, where they find most of the gang hiding behind the sofa (these street gangs are sneaky). They’ve checked every police station for Eiji, and haven’t found him.
Yut Lung confronts Eiji in a nasty, superficially polite manner, designed to point out just how useless Eiji is to Ash (while pointing out his own fears of the opposite being true. And Dino is coming back to New York.
Jenkins interviews Ash, who is a) unhelpful and b) now 18, so legally an adult. There is a scene involving a lot of star-struck female nurses that I would prefer not to take into account when considering the gender balance in this manga, and then someone distantly connected to the DA’s office shows up to give Ash an IQ test (he scores 180) as part of his post-op recovery/interrogation and *then* a killer disguised as a nurse tries and fails to put a lethal amount of muscle relaxant into Ash’s iv line, shooting the cop guarding Ash and then suiciding via poison tooth when Ash successfully fights back (this attempt has come not from Dino, who would want Ash alive, but from the politicians allied with him who have less time for Dino’s obsession).
Max and Ash catch up on plot developments until Charlie kicks him out. The FBI swoop in and take over the case, transferring Ash at very short notice to a mental health centre under the care of Dr Mannerheim. Meanwhile, Max is talking to his newspaper contacts about the Banana Fish story, and ends up as a stringer for Newsweek, and Eiji has failed at yet another escape attempt from Yut Lung, although he is clocking up an impressive amount of property damage in the process.
Max finds out about Ash’s transfer from a drunk Charlie, and reveals his own disillusioned police past, before plotting to get in to see Ash by pretending to be his lawyer. Before he can do so, however, it’s announced on all the media that Ash has died of his wounds after transfer…
