Old Boy – Deluxe Edition Volume 1 Review

Old Boy was written by Garon Tsuchiya and illustrated by Nobuaki Minegishi and released in the pages of Manga Action in the mid-90s. The plot revolves around Shinichi Goto, a man who finds himself drugged and placed in a single-room cell for ten years without anyone letting him know why. To avoid going crazy he spends the years working out, watching TV to keep up with the happenings out in the world (and to learn boxing “by visualisation” somehow) and surviving thanks to the daily delivery of Chinese food until suddenly one day some people walk into the room and tell him he’s being released. He’s drugged again and wakes up in a park, still none the wiser as to why any of this happened. This results in Goto wanting more than anything to find out why someone would do such a horrible thing to him. In fact that’s probably the biggest change the film version made: this isn’t a one-man army taking out thugs in a revenge fantasy, this is very much a slower paced affair, Goto is happy to bide his time and find out clues before taking any careful thought-out action.

At the start of this first half of the story (the manga ran for eight volumes and this collects the first four) Goto meets a woman called Eri and together they use Goto’s intimate knowledge of the taste of the Chinese food he had to eat for ten years to find the supplier. Goto then tails the delivery man to the apartment complex that secretly housed the room he was kept in on “Floor 7.5” that can only be accessed by a secret button press combination in the lift. There he beats up the guard and only gets the name of one yakuza informant out of him, as well as the information that the lockup was only supposed to be for people hiding from the police for a few days/weeks or as punishment for a couple of months but he was an exception as someone paid a huge sum of money to lock him away for ten  years. This only confuses Goto more as he really can’t think of anyone who would have such a grudge against him that he’d go to those kind of lengths. As the story progresses, Goto meets back up with some old friends from ten years ago and begins to get in contact with the man who locked him up via a mobile phone left for him, leading to a long game of cat and mouse with a few odd twists leading into the second half of the series.

I’ll have to say that I’m not sure how they’re going to stretch the story for another 800-odd pages. It really feels like it’s got to come to a close soon, but I guess that’s a story (or half a story) for another time; what we have here is really entertaining. The artwork is really good, especially the expressions on characters’ faces, and the plot is fun to follow. I will say though that I can’t imagine what this was like when it was first being released. Being able to read several chapters daily kept the pace going for me here but some singular chapters were just Goto eating Chinese food or contained a single phone call, well written dialogue and well drawn and all but I can imagine that being rather annoying, given the chapters were released fortnightly. I’ll also point out that the story is extremely “macho” in that our tough male lead character is the sole focus, women barely feature beyond being occasional sexual partners and, for that matter, a lot of the other male characters are similarly personality-less. The key storyline with Goto and his captor is great but the characters around that story aren’t given much thought.

As for this deluxe re-release from Dark Horse Manga, I honestly can’t fault it, from its shiny reflective cover to its clean glossy pages, it’s quite the treat for the eyes and the bookshelf. Obviously being an 800+ page hardback means it’s not something light you bring on a train ride to read and can be a struggle to read in the wrong position at home, but still perfectly doable!

Old Boy’s first half was a good read, great artwork and a fun story which is yes very slow-paced (especially compared to the film) but it has enough twists and turns thrown in at just the right times to stop the pace from getting too glacial. While that key storyline is great and worthy of praise, I will say that the characters around our main protagonist and antagonist are paper-thin so it’s not a highly developed world of interesting characters, it’s a singular story of cat and mouse between two men that’s at the core here, and thankfully a very good one it is too.

Our review copy from Dark Horse was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).