Random Happenstance

It's weird, I think I would see this more often with bands, and not even necessarily "one-hit wonders." They might have a song I really like, but I also might not feel the need to keep listening to them? This is actually one of my favorite single issues ever, and while I have read more, I don't necessarily see the point. From 1989, Fist of the North Star #5, featuring "Chapter 8: The Fire of Vengeance; Chapter 9: Tenacity…and Rage! Chapter 10: When a Giant Star Falls" Written by Yoshiyuki Okamura (as Buronson), translation by Fred Burke and Satoru Fujii, art by Tetsuo Hara, touch-ups by Wayne Truman. (Oddly, the GCD seems to treat this as new; Viz had collected it from Weekly Shōnen Jump (Japanese: 週刊少年ジャンプ), although I couldn't tell you the issue numbers.) This is also a squarebound number, please excuse that in the scans!

This is hyped as a "Special 64 page origin issue!" as the hero, Kenshiro, and his tagalong sidekick Bat, finally catches up to his foe, Shin, who had stolen Ken's girl Yuria. Literally, not figuratively. Post-apocalypse, Kenshiro had been doing pretty OK: while his master had just passed away, he still had Yuria, and the techniques of the North Star, Hokuto Shinken. Shin was his opposite number, practitioner of the Southern Cross: their master had wanted them to preserve both martial arts, and never fight; but after his demise Shin starts a reign of terror. He easily defeats Kenshiro, claiming his foe lacked "desire, and tenacity." Shin had both in spades, since he was ambitious, and in love with Yuria; who is disgusted by him. To force her to him, Shin pokes holes in Kenshiro, in the shape of the Big Dipper, until she finally relents and claims to love him. Kenshiro is left, face-down and bleeding in the dirt, to begin a long quest to get her back.

Now having learned "tenacity," Kenshiro is seemingly light-years beyond the blindingly fast Shin, effortlessly moving past his attacks and exploding one of his henchmen. (The Hokuto Shinken involved hitting pressure points or tsubo, like hitting someone in just the right spot for their skull to split into two!) Shin opts to remove Kenshiro's motivation, by punching a hole through Yuria: I see what he was trying to do there, but doesn't work. Enraged, Kenshiro smashes Shin's defenses, and punches tsubo into him in the shape of the Southern Cross. "One minute," Kenshiro tells him, presumably before he exploded into a mass of blood and gristle. But Kenshiro turns to Yuria, only to find...she was a doll?

Beaten, Shin tells him how he tried to win Yuria over, by beating his rabble into an army, taking over the countryside, and building a new city, Southern Cross. Yuria was unimpressed, and couldn't stand watching the horrors Shin committed anymore: she breaks her promise to Kenshiro to "live," and throws herself off a building. Shin cried, for the first time in his life, and Southern Cross would become Yuria's tomb. In a final act of defiance, he refuses "to be killed by the Fist of the North Star!" and throws himself off what might be that same building; which might be a less painful end than he would've gotten.

In the end, Kenshiro digs a grave, and buries Shin. Bat asks why, and is told "because we loved the same woman." 

I know I've read more of this series since--I probably read the next three issues Viz put out at the time--but in a lot of ways, the story ends for me right there: the hero gets vengeance, and it ultimately means nothing. Moreover, is there even a reason to go on? OK, I did read a lot of issues over the weekend; and yeah, Kenshiro finds a reason to live. Partially because of a huge retcon of this issue!