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Ryo Saeba (City Hunter)

kevinburtonsmith

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.

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Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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