The Samurai and the Viking: A Curious Meeting Point
The words above and the examples ground
Lone Wolf & Cub in a narrative of historical accuracy. However, although Kazuo Koike, the writer of
Lone Wolf & Cub and screenwriter of five of its six movie adaptations, attributed in a 1987 interview the making of the story to his own
bushidō upbringing, he revealed in 2015 yet another fundamental source of inspiration, one that leads us from ‘manga’ not only back to the European Middle Ages but also to ‘saga’: he was inspired by
Siegfried, the third opera of Wagner’s
Ring cycle, to give Itto a potentially vulnerable spot in the form of Daigoro, his three-year-old son, so that the readers would be held in constant suspense (‘when the hero has a weakness, the readers won’t get bored; they will be worried for him’).
1 The 1987 interview was conducted in writing by Frank Miller to Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, respectively the writer and the artist of Lone Wolf & Cub; it was reprinted in 1995 in a magazine called Manga & Anime! (issue 148), the precise information of which we can no longer find. However, the interview itself has been scanned and uploaded by Ben Towle, a US cartoonist, on his personal website: <https://www.benzilla.com/uploads/2024/04/Miller-LW-and-Cub_sm.pdf> [accessed 21 Jun. 2024]; in this interview, when asked about his own educational and cultural background, Koike answers that he holds ‘4th degree kendo’ and practices archery; he was born to ‘the family of bushidō tradition’, therefore it is only natural for him to ‘understand Hagakure bushidō’. The 2015 interview was recorded for a new blue-ray collection of Lone Wolf and Cub by Criterion Collection (2016) as a special feature. For Wagner’s influence and impact in Japan, see Takagi, ‘Malory in Japan’, pp. 278–9; and Toru Takenaka, ‘The Reception of Wagner in Japan at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Non-musical Dimension of Cross-Border Music Transfer’, in Joanne Miyang Cho (ed.), Musical Entanglements between Germany and East Asia: Transnational Affinity in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Cham, 2021), pp. 25–47. Although Koike offered no elaboration and it remains unknown as to whether or to what extent he was familiar with the Old Norse materials that inspired Wagner, we did, in our initial reading of
Lone Wolf & Cub prior to watching the 2015 interview, notice comparable elements between the manga and
Vǫlsunga saga, particularly in the two father-and-son pairs: Itto and Daigoro, and Sigmundr and Sinfjǫtli.
2 Although Vǫlsunga saga in its entirety was only translated into Japanese in 1979, stories from it and the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda are included in anthologies of Old Norse literature and mythology quite early on. See Minoru Ozawa’s chapter in this volume, pp. 28–31. Due to the impact of Wagner’s operas, there seems to be a confusion between the Middle High German Das Nibelungenlied and the relevant Old Norse materials in the popular Japanese reception. While Japanese creators tend to adopt the German version for character names and background stories, they nevertheless recognise them as Old Norse mythological figures. One example would be the Asgard arc in Masami Kurumada, Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac, which, despite the incorporation of Siegfried’s story into the animated TV series, is dominated by characters and locations exclusively from Old Norse myths and literature. With Ogami being a pun on
ōkami, ‘wolf’ in Japanese, the Ogami clan is as much a wolf clan as the
Vǫlsungar/
Ylfingar, ‘wolflings’, and both Itto and Sigmundr are metaphorical wolves in terms of their appellation, personality, and legal status as outlaws.
3 Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, ‘The Werewolf in Medieval Icelandic Literature’, Journal of English and German Philology, 106:3 (2007), 277–303, at pp. 284–8; and Minjie Su, Werewolves in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: Between the Monster and the Man (Turnhout, 2023), pp. 44–5. Both the Ogamis and the Volsungs are physically distinguished by their eyes: while the Volsungs’ piercing eyes paralyse their attackers, Itto and Daigoro are said to have
shishōgan, ‘the eye of death and life’ that ‘any man who lives by the sword and would die by the sword seeks to achieve’ (Vol. 11, 1988, p. 52) as it is proof of total self-control and fearlessness.
4 Vǫlsunga saga – The Saga of the Volsungs, ed. and trans. R. G. Finch (Edinburgh, 1965), chap. 32, p. 48, and again, chap. 42, p. 76. See also Köhn, ‘Glimpses of the Past’, p. 133. Moreover, the admittance to both lineages is approved not by birth but by a willingness to embrace pain and death, thereby conveying a similar conceptualisation of heroism and warrior existence. Both fathers are ‘lone wolves’ treading a path of revenge, and the sons, despite their young age, must prove themselves ‘man enough’ to accompany them: whereas Sinfjǫtli is tried in a series of life-or-death tests, Daigoro at the age of three is asked to choose between a
temari ball (symbolising an easy life aligning with his mother) and a samurai sword (symbolising the warrior existence aligning with his father – ‘within your body flows the blood of the Ogami clan… your heart will decide’, Vol. 1, 1987, pp. 4–5). Should he prove himself unworthy by choosing the ball, Itto would kill him there and then, as Signý and Sigmundr do to Signý’s other children, whose fear effectively denies them the Vǫlsung lineage.
5 For Sigmundr and Signý’s tests of the children, see Finch (ed. and trans.), Vǫlsunga saga, chaps 6–7, pp. 8–10; see also Manuel Aguirre, ‘Narrative Composition in The Saga of the Volsungs’, Saga-Book, 26 (2002), 5–37, at pp. 8–10. Although Daigoro barely speaks in the manga (as is realistic for his age), his indifference to pain, suffering, and even death is repeatedly commented on by narrator and other characters, echoing on the one hand
Hagakure’s supposed doctrines and on the other Sinfjǫtli’s famous exclamation: ‘Lítit mundi slíkt sárt þykkja Vǫlsungi’.
6 ‘No Volsung would think much of a pain like that’, Finch (ed. and trans.), Vǫlsunga saga, chap. 7, p. 10.That Daigoro’s choice should be portrayed as one between his father and mother reveals a binary of what are considered to be masculine and feminine lifestyles, which further aligns with the gendered language employed in discourses about
bushidō and medieval Japan. As mentioned above, the Japanese Middle Ages – ended in either 1603 or 1868 – are positioned in direct contrast to the Heian period, a historical period that is characterised by a booming courtly culture imported from Tang China: a culture of
bun/
wen, ‘letteredness’ or ‘civility’, as opposed to
bu/
wu, ‘martiality’.
7 Bun and bu are Japanese, wen and wu Chinese; both correspond to the Chinese/kanji characters 文武. While ancient Chinese thinkers tended to prioritise the former and attributed the latter to ‘barbarian people’, Japanese thinkers in the Edo period reversed it and developed the notion of Japan being inherently martial, which was later adopted in the nineteenth-century nationalistic discourse.
8 Benesch, ‘Medievalism, Modernity, and Militarism in Imperial Japan’, p. 62. See also Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai, pp. 28–33. As Keirstead demonstrates, this binary is also reflected in the view of Japanese historiography and literature as a whole in the Meiji period: to his ‘triumvirate’, the Heian period is ‘an age of culture’ marked by literary achievements mostly authored by women (such as Lady Murasaki, who wrote
The Tale of Genji); the era’s ‘indulgency in foreign finery’ is thought to have been responsible for the empire’s failure. The Middle Ages, on the other hand, are both a reaction and a correction, as they transfer power from ‘ladies and lady-like men’ to ‘sworded men’ and lay down ‘a more “masculine” set of standards’.
9 Keirstead, ‘Inventing Medieval Japan’, p. 59 and p. 67. See also Tomiko Yoda, Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Constructions of Japanese Modernity (Durham, NC, 2004), pp. 67–76. Read against this context, the choice of the
temari as an opposite to the samurai sword, along with its association with femininity and maternity, seems to be deliberate and symbolically charged:
temari balls, which had their origins in
kemari which was imported from Tang China and became popular amongst Heian aristocrats, are said to have first been made for ‘the princesses in each feudal domain’ and are meant to have been passed down from mother to daughter.
10 An introduction to temari balls is found on the bilingual website of the Sanuki Kagari Temari Preservation Association: <https://www.eiko-temari.jp/about-temari/> [accessed 24 Jun. 2024]. Choosing the
temari, therefore, would be as if Daigoro had unmanned himself – to become a ‘lady-like man’ who cannot survive, and therefore would not be allowed to enter the world of the samurai.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that
Lone Wolf & Cub continues to impress manga readers as ‘a masculinist manga’ or ‘a manly story’.
11 Occam’s Press, ‘Lone Wolf & Cub: Power, Masculinity, and the Graphic Novel’ (2021) <https://medium.com/@occamspress/lone-wolf-cub-power-masculinity-and-the-graphic-novel-346b79c5a6f4> [accessed 26 Jun. 2024]; and Megan D (pseudo.), ‘Review: Lone Wolf and Cub’ (2020) <https://mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2020/09/review-lone-wolf-and-cub.html> [accessed 26 Jun. 2024]. This, on the one hand, has its roots in the romanticised samurai masculinity born out of the eighteenth-century nostalgia (of which
Hagakure is also a product): ‘fearless, chivalrous, very masculine, possessing high moral standards and standing for law and order’.
12 Köhn, ‘Glimpses of the Past’, pp. 138–9. On the other hand, the reception of the manga indicates that Lauryn Mayer’s remarks on gender and medievalism in general are also applicable to
Lonely Wolf & Cub’s reimagined ‘medieval’ past: both are ‘a world of men’, in which women, albeit they are allowed to participate, ‘usually only serve(s) to reinforce the values of the patriarchy’, and Itto’s chivalry – or, as one reader labels it, gentleman-ness (Vol. 40, 1990, p. 60) – is hardly at odds with the manga world’s generalised violence towards women, as they both ‘operate under the assumption of feminine inferiority’.
13 Lauryn Mayer, ‘Mythogyny: Popular Medievalism and Toxic Masculinity’, in Karl Fugelso (ed.), Studies in Medievalism XXVIII: Medievalism and Discrimination (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 21–32, at p. 28 and p. 24. See also Berger, National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 143–5. Furthermore, the possibility of medieval Norse-related materials being an inspiration for
Lone Wolf & Cub and the similarities between the Ogamis and the Vǫlsungs invite us to compare Itto’s samurai masculinity with that of the ‘popular-culture Viking’, who is also seen as ‘symbol(s) of hardihood’ and even ‘the ultimate example of masculinity’.
14 Roderick Dale, ‘From Barbarian to Brand: The Vikings as a Marketing Tool’, in Tom Birkett and Roderick Dale (eds), The Vikings Reimaged: Reception, Recovery, Engagement (Boston and Berlin, 2019), pp. 214–31, at p. 218; and Eirnin Jefford Franks, ‘Nordic Giants: Using Left-Wing Post-Rock to Deepen Our Understanding of White Supremacist Interpretations of Viking’, in Mary Boyle (ed.), International Medievalisms: From Nationalism to Activism (Cambridge, 2023), pp. 173–88, at p. 181. This is further manifested in a shared obsession with what would be considered to be ‘a good death’ – one to die ‘the samurai way’, the other ‘the Viking way’ in the hope of gaining admittance to Valhalla. Both are readily picked up on and eagerly embraced by popular culture: one example we would like to (albeit briefly) draw attention to is
seppuku and the blood eagle, the alleged Viking execution method. In addition to their cinematic potential for producing impressively sensational visuals, both executions are highly mystified, ritualised, and supposedly redeeming in nature, in which how a character reacts to it draws a line between a true samurai/Viking or a false one. As Itto used to be the Shōgun’s
kaishakunin – that is, the ‘second’ who beheads the condemned samurai after the latter disembowels himself – scenes and plots of or involving
seppuku are woven through the entire series and, having been mostly retained in the redacted version, easily stand out as a determinant of a samurai’s courage and sense of honour.
15 Curiously, a similar pattern is also seen in FX’s Shōgun (2024), a TV series that condensed James Clavell’s 1975 novel into ten episodes and won Best TV Series–Drama at the eighty-second Golden Globes in 2025. Although James Clavell draws heavily on Hagakure bushidō, actual mentions and performances of seppuku are rather dispersed throughout the one-thousand-page book, whereas in the TV adaptation seppuku is performed, contemplated, attempted, or referred to nearly every episode. Some of these episodes only exist in the TV shows: for instance, in the first episode, a vassal who is simply killed in the book commits instead seppuku (together with his infant son and all who bear his name), albeit offstage, so as to redeem his name and honour for the disgrace he inflicts on his lord. Towards the end of the same episode, whereas Yabu in the book climbs down a cliff without his outer clothes and swords (as is practical) and prepares for his potential death by trying to find inner peace in a zen-like manner, the TV adaption has him descend with two katanas and ready to cut himself open in gushing water. Shōgun, TV series, created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, USA: FX, 2024, Episode 1. See James Clavell, Shōgun (London, 2017), pp. 157–61. Likewise, despite its debated historicity and feasibility, the blood eagle is depicted in great detail in the History Channel’s
Vikings (2013–20), inflicted first on Jarl Borg (a Norseman), and then on King Ælla (a Saxon): although both are ‘villains’ of the show, Borg’s endurance gains the onlookers’ and the audience’s respect, while Ælla’s incessant begging and screaming only works to the opposite effect.
16 Vikings, TV series, created by Michael Hirst, Canada and Ireland: History Channel and Amazon Prime Video, 2013–2020, Season 2, Episode 7 and Season 4, Episode 18. For a summary of the Old Norse accounts of blood eagle, the debate over its historicity, and its feasibility, see Luke John Murphy, Heidi R. Fuller, Peter L. T. Willan, and Monte A. Gates, ‘An Anatomy of the Blood Eagle: The Practicalities of Viking Torture’, Speculum, 97:1 (2022), 1–39. Visually, their difference is also reflected on their physique, as close-up camera shots of Borg’s muscular body stand in stark contrast to the rather plump figure of Ælla: another signifier of manliness or its lack thereof.
The samurai and the Viking therefore provide us with yet another potential middle ground on which the two Middle Ages and medievalisms converge. In addition to their function as symbols of masculinity, both the samurai and the Viking are transferred in similar ways to, on a smaller scale, tourism and commercialisation, such as the sales of replica samurai swords and Viking drinking horns. On a larger scale, they are used to brand the underlying cultures: for instance, Japan is portrayed as ‘the Land of the Samurai’, just as Iceland is ‘the Land of the Vikings’; both shape and are shaped by (neo)medievalist media, and as a result both countries are perceived as ‘some
where else and some
when else’.
17 For Iceland’s and Japan’s medievalist tourism, see, respectively, Hannah Armstrong, ‘“The Northland of Old”: The Use and “Misuse” of (Medieval) Iceland’, in Boyle (ed.), International Medievalisms, pp. 95–110; and Frost and Frost, Medieval Imaginaries, pp. 216–26. A search on Google also renders various tours with names such as ‘the path of the samurai’, ‘samurai experience’, and ‘the way of the samurai’, and, to catch the popularity of FX’s Shōgun (2024), Forbes published a blog article upon the show’s premier introducing an itinerary based on the show, including attendance at a kenbu (sword dance) and a visit to a sword master, so as to ‘channel your samurai’. Sandra MacGregor, ‘Discover The Land of The Samurai: 7 Immersive Shogun Tours In Japan’ (2024), <https://www.forbes.com/sites/sandramacgregor/2024/04/07/discover-the-land-of-the-samurai-7-immersive-shogun-tours-in-japan/> [accessed 03 Jul. 2024]. See also Mary Boyle, ‘Introduction’, in Boyle (ed.), International Medievalisms, pp. 1–15, at p. 8. Unlike chivalry and Malory’s knights, we have little or no evidence of any potential influence or impact of the Vikings on the samurai (or vice versa), and much of the analysis above is rooted in our observations. However, in spite of – or perhaps precisely because of – this speculative nature, the comparison between the samurai and the Viking can be particularly useful in shedding light on what would be considered ‘popular’ and popularly connected to the medieval(ist) world. Admittedly, it is within human nature to admire bravery and fearlessness, and above all the courage to rise above the mortal condition of our life, but what does the nearly concurrent rising popularity of the medieval North and medieval Japan say about us and our time?