The Fable Omnibus 4 Review
While the vast majority of the previous book had an action-packed feel and dealt with highly sensitive subjects such as sexual assault, in this edition of The Fable, things take a less hectic turn, although that doesn’t mean the action stops.
With hitman The Fable, aka Akira Sato, having saved Misaki, a woman at his new place of work at a design company, from being forced into a yakuza-run call girl business, things start to quieten down. However, before that, the perpetrator Kojima gets his ultimate punishment from those higher-up in the organisation protecting Fable/Akira while he is trying to keep a low-profile.
There are some other problems too. While Misaki recovers from what has happened to her at the flat Fable/Akira is sharing with his fake sister Yoko, she faints. She is too heavy for Yoko to carry, so Fable/Akira helps her. When Misaki recovers, she discovers that Fable/Akira has drawn idiotic naked doodles of what happened to her at the flat, and thus begins to distance herself from him – something he doesn’t understand.
Later, one of the lower members of the local yakuza, Ryo Kuroshio, recovering from a leg injury, meets Fable/Akira at his flat. Kuroshio is one of the few people who know about Fable/Akira’s true identity as one of the best hitmen in the business, and wants to learn how to become a hitman as good as he is. While reluctant to teach him, Fable/Akira does agree to take Kuroshio for a three-day trip into the wilderness. However, it is not a camping trip, or even a test of survival skills. Fable/Akira just wants to sharpen his skills in the wild, believing himself to have gotten rusty. Kuroshio soon experiences the shock of having to deal with such primitive surroundings, learning to cope with eating snake meat, and even coming face-to-face with a bear.
As stated at the start, this collection makes for a change in general tone following the events of the previous omnibus. While nothing appears to be as dramatic as the showdown Akira/Fable faced last time, there is still plenty of stuff going on, from Kojima’s punishment for behind-the-scenes call girl business, to Akira/Fable and Kuroshio’s adventures in the wild. There may be no gun battles, but fighting off a bear is still a thrilling sequence of events. There are still comic moments in the manga too, mainly thanks to Kuroshio’s culture shock of having to deal with so many peculiarities in the forest.
While Katsuhisa Minami’s manga is good to read, I did come across an issue with Kodansha’s production of this collection. I obviously cannot confirm if this was an isolated incident, but the review copy I was given for some reason had a duplicated section, with pages 35-66 appearing in the book twice. Fortunately there was nothing actually missing in the book itself, and aside from this error, nothing else appears to be wrong. Adam Hirsch’s translation and Arbash Mughal lettering all appear to be good, and there are some translation notes and colour pages to go with this edition too.
Having seen the action shift from yakuza battles to fighting in the great outdoors, it will be interesting to see how the series continues in the next omnibus.
Our review copy from Kodansha was provided by Diamond Book Distributors.
