RYAN HOLMBERG MANGA VIGNETTES (2) HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT RUFFIAN - VOLUME 2 (1972)

"Wow. Koike Kazuo and Yoshitani Keiji’s High School Student Ruffian (1971-73) only gets worse. Volume 2 opens with the hero, Muramasa, successfully infiltrating a radicalized student organization by showing up uninvited to a rumble with the riot police naked but for a fundoshi and a stocking over his head. He needs deeper access to find his brother (a comrade on the lam), so he rapes one of the women in the organization to get her to fall in love with him. The student radicals plan to lynch him for his crime, but he bullshits his way to respect by appropriating their philosophical justifications of violence against the state to argue for the merits of sexual assault. They buy it of course, because years of committed study and struggle are no match for the sophistries of a cocky teenager. And of course she falls for him, because she is a stupid female virgin, and becomes convinced of his phony profession of true love after humiliating himself for her by walking naked with a fish in his mouth through Shinjuku (described as something Buddhist monks once used to do to repent, but clearly a parody of avant-garde street performance). Later chapters have Muramasa ogling low teen gymnasts and fantasizing about them naked, after which he reminisces about the many broken-hearted lovers (rape victims) left in the wake of his adventures. He seduces a graphic designer, a bank teller, and a kendo teacher with lies, faked injuries, mean pranks, and by exposing his genitals. The last image here shows our hero telling readers that if you trap a girl in the snow with her skies on, you’re in for sure, because there’s no way she can move. Mind you: not an ounce of irony or compunction anywhere in the manga. My copy of volume 2 is the 59th printing from 1978 of a book first published in 1972 — a reprinting every six weeks for seven years. Now that’s popularity! When Koike Kazuo was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame, I wonder if the judges knew he was a best-selling advocate of misogyny and rape."
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