Ryo Saeba (City Hunter)

Created by Tsukasa Hojo

“Mokkori!”

I stumbled across City Hunter, a 1993 Jackie Chan action flick out of Hong King late one night on some streaming channel, turned my brain off, and settled in to watch Chan — as a private eye, no less! — kick the bejesus out of a bunch of bad guys.

I didn’t expect much, and that’s about what I got. The typical Hong Kong phooey Chan specialized in at the time, featuring the typical paperweight plot, a lot of cultural in-jokes I didn’t get (“You damn gays, may you all get AIDS!” is funny?) and some astounding stuntwork; a high-spirited blend of Die Hard and the Marx Brothers’ Coconuts, with a healthy dash of cartooney madness tossed in, as Chan and his assistant (plus a beautiful secret agent) try to thwart a gang of terrorists who have hijacked a cruise ship.

But there was also far more going on here than I expected; a lot more goofiness and even a touch of where’d that come from? surrealism. The BIFF! BAM! POW! opening recalled the Batman TV from the sixties more than your typical Jackie Chan flick. And the jokey, smirky tone Chan adopted when he directly addresses the audience suggested that I was watching some sort of spoof. But a spoof of what?

Turns out it wasn’t so much a spoof as yet another installment in a global phenomenom–a global phenomenon I’d been completely unaware of.  I had missed the whole manga thing and so I didn’t know that the original manga series the film was based, written and drawn by Tsukasa Hojo back in the eighties and nineties, was already pretty much a spoof.

RYO SAEBA is a handsome young Tokyo private eye, a deadly shot (his speciality the “one-hole shot”, wherein a series of shots land in the exact same spot repeatedly) and a relentless womanizer (some translations from Japanese label him a “pervert”). He only takes on beautiful women clients, much to the dismay of his love-struck young assistant, Kaori.

The joke here is that Ryo thinks of himself as a suave, James Bond type (he often sports a white dinner jacket) but really? He comes off more like a obnoxious horny teenager.

And how does Kaori deal with it? By whacking her boss on the head with a giant oversized mallet straight out of a Looney Toons cartoon, of course.

But wait! There’s more!

Kaori is the kid sister of Ryo’s murdered partner, former police officer Hideyuki Makimura, who insisted, with his dying breath, that Ryo promises never to seduce Kaori. Ryo agrees because he figures Kaori is just a kid. But then Kaori begins to mature!

Oh, the hilarity!

When the perpetually horny Ryo isn’t chasing some babe or another, often in a cringingly crude manner, he does actually work as a private eye. Or at least a “city hunter”–a job description that seems to be amazingly malleable. Depending on plot requirements, he’s acted as a secret agent, a bounty hunter, a police officer, an assassin, a mercenary and an anti-terrorism agent.

Discovered at the age of three at the site of a Central America plane crash, Ryo has no idea who his parents were. He was raised as a guerilla fighter by the people who found him, and eventually made his way to Tokyo where he formed the City Hunter Detective Agency with Hideyuki, a former cop.

So saying the City Hunter franchise is popular might be a little bit of an understatement–this franchise just will not die! It remains one of Weekly Shönen Jump‘s best-selling series of all time, with over 50 million copies sold in Japan alone, and has spawned a multimedia tsunami. The strip has spawned several anime television series and specials, an animated feature film or two, several live-action feature films (including the Jackie Chan one I caught), several direct-to-video one-offs, video games, and most recently, a 2024 Netflix film, originally filmed in Japanese but enthusiastically if clumsily dubbed into English.

UNDER OATH

• “It’s an adrenaline-spike cocktail of hard-boiled action, slapstick comedy, cheesecake, melodrama, and raunchy jokes (‘mokkori‘ the sound effect indicating arousal that accomplishes Ryo’s ‘small soldier standing to attention,’ per the translator’s notes, is the manga’s catchphrase.”
  —Publishers Weekly

COMICS/MANGA

• CITY HUNTER
  (1985-91, Weekly Shõnen Jump)
  Written and illustrated by Tsukasa Hojo

GRAPHIC NOVELS & COLLECTIONS

• City Hunter #1 (2003) | Buy this book
• City Hunter #2 (2003) | Buy this book
• City Hunter #3 (2003) | Buy this book
• City Hunter #4 (2003) | Buy this book
• City Hunter #5 (2004) | Buy this book
• City Hunter Special: The Secret Service (1995)
• City Hunter Special: Live on Stage (1999)
  The various permutations of manga editions and collections are seemingly endless, and the various translations (Spanish, French, English, Korean, Italian, etc., etc., etc.) make it almost impossible to keep track, but the ambitious run — by publisher Gutsoon — may be a good place to at least start for English readers. Except the company apparently folded and the series sputtered to a stop after five issues.
• City Hunter Omnibus: Volume 1 (2025)  | Buy the graphic novel | Kindle it!
  For the first time in English in decades! Contains the first three volumes of the series, with all of the original art, including a 4-page full-color insert. 
• City Hunter Omnibus: Volume 2 (2026)  | Buy the graphic novel | Kindle it!
• City Hunter Omnibus: Volume 3 (2026) | Buy the graphic novel | Kindle it!
• City Hunter Omnibus: Volume 4 (2026)  | Buy the graphic novel | Kindle it!
• City Hunter Omnibus: Volume 5 (2027)  | Buy the graphic novel | Kindle it!

TELEVISION (ANIME)

• CITY HUNTER | Buy this Blu-Ray
  (1987-88; Yomiuri Television)
  Animated series
  51 episodes
  Premiere: April 6, 1987
  Directed by Kanetsugu Kodama
  Produced by Sunrise Studios
• CITY HUNTER 2 | Buy this Blu-Ray
• (1988; Yomiuri Television)
  Animated series
  63 episodes
  Premiere: April 6, 1988
  Produced by Sunrise Studios
• CITY HUNTER 3 | Buy this Blu-Ray
  (1989-90; Yomiuri Television)
  Animated series
  13 episodes
  Premiere: October 15, 1989
  Produced by Sunrise Studios
• CITY HUNTER ’91 | Buy this Blu-Ray
• (1991; Yomiuri Television)
  Animated series
  13 episodes
  Premiere: April 28, 1991
• CITY HUNTER: THE SECRET SERVICE
  (1996)
  Animated special
  Air date: January 1996
• CITY HUNTER: THE MOTION PICTURE
  (1997)
  Animated special
  Air date: April 1997
• CITY HUNTER: DEATH OF THE VICIOUS CRIMINAL RYO SAEBA
  (1999)
  Animated special
  Air date: April 23, 1999)

TELEVISION (Live Action)

• CITY HUNTER
  (2011)
  Premiere: May 25, 201
  Starring Lee Min-ho as RYO SAEBA
  Also starring Park Min-young, Lee Joon-hyuk, Kim Sang-joong, Kim Sang-ho, Hwang Sun-hee, Goo Hara, Chun Ho-jin,,Lee Kwang-soo.
  Filmed in Korean, it borrows the name but seems like a completely different ballgame.
• CITY HUNTER
  (2024, Netflix)
  Premiere: April 25, 2024
  Based on characters created by Tsukasa Hōjō
  Written by Tatsuro Mishima
  Directed by Yūichi Satō
  Starring Ryohei Suzuki as RYO SAEBA
  and Misato Morita as Kaori Makimura
  Also starring Masanobu Andô, Fumino Kimura, Tetta Sugimoto, Ayame Misaki, Asuka Hanamura
  Filmed in Japanese but dubbed in English. Enthusiastically juvenile, full of action pieces, single entendres and over-acting.
  

STRAIGHT TO VIDEO

• CITY HUNTER: BAY CITY WARS
  (1990)
  Animated
• CITY HUNTER: MILLION DOLLAR CONSPIRACY
  (1990)
  Animated
• CITY HUNTER CLASSIC MOVIES AND TV SPECIALS COLLECTION  | Buy the Blu-Ray
  (2023)
  Includes TV specials and movies in Japanese language, with English subtitles, and English dubs. Collected here are .357 Magnum, Bay City Wars, Million Dollar Conspiracy, The Secret Service, and Goodbye My Sweetheart. Also includes the never-before-released TV special Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba in the original Japanese language with English subtitles.

FILMS

• CITY HUNTER: .357 MAGNUM
  (1989)
  Animated feature film
  Written by Akinori EndÙ
  Directed by Kenji Kodama
  Starring Martin Blacker as RYO SAEBA
  Also starring Jonas Allen, Yõko Asagami
• CITY HUNTER: SHINJUKU PRIVATE EYES  | Buy the Blu-Ray
  (1991)
  Animated feature film
• CITY HUNTER | Buy this DVD  | Buy the Blu-Ray | Watch it now!
  aka “Sing si lip yan”
  (1993, Golden Harvest)
  Cantonesee, with English subtitles
  Based on characters created by Tsukasa Hojo
  Screenplay by Jing Wong
  Directed by Jing Wong
  Producers: Eric Huen, Hei-man Chan, Lam Chua, Wai Sum Shia, Wing-Cheung Ho
  Starring Jackie Chan as RYO SAEBA
  and Joey Wang as Kaori Makimura / Carrie
  Also starring Kumiko Goto, Chingmy Yau, Gary Daniels, Carol Wan, Leon La, Lap-Man Tan, Ken Lo, Eric Kot, Jan Lam, Richard Norton
• MENG BO
  (aka “City Hunter 2,” “Mr. Mumble”)
  (1996)
  Written by Michael Man-Kin Chow, Tsukasa Hôjô, Kam-Fai Law
  Directors: Chun-Man Yuen,Michael Man-Kin Chow
  Starring Michael Man-Kin as RYO SAEBA
  and Jessica Hester Hsuan as Kaori
  Also starring Chow, Paulyn Sun, Françoise Yip
  According to reader bbally81, this is an “unofficial” adaptation made in Hong Kong that’s more faithful to the manga than the 1993 Jackie Chan film. Apparently, it’s unofficial because they didn’t acquire the rights to the character.
• CITY HUNTER: SHINJUKU PRIVATE EYES
  (2019)
• CITY HUNTER: ANGEL DUST
  (2023)
  Premiere: September 8, 2023

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.