殺し屋１

KOROSHIYA 1

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
10
RELEASE
April 5, 2001
CHAPTERS
113

DESCRIPTION

Ichi is a cowardly man-until he's pushed into a mental breakdown and becomes a ruthless killer. When he gets mixed up with the sadomasochistic yakuza boss Kakihara, it triggers an orgy of blood and unmatched depravity.

(Source: Seven Seas)

CAST

Kakihara Masao
Shiroishi Hajime
Jijii
Shuuji Kaneko
Jirou
Saburou
Inoue

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO KOROSHIYA 1

Cover Art for Koroshiya 1 THE ANIMATION: EPISODE 0

OVA ActionKoroshiya 1 THE ANIMATION: EPISODE 0

MANGA Action1

REVIEWS

Komatarusa
90/100
Pure Psychological Brilliance
Categorizing Ichi the Killer can be hard. It might not be a horror manga, but it’s definitely horrible.

Full disclosure here, Ichi the Killer is one of the most graphical and most disturbing pieces of manga out there. It’s also one of the best manga I’ve read in my entire life. Which might say a thing or two about me.

The manga was created by Yamamoto Hide. He’s outdone himself by creating a manga in which almost every character is batshit insane.

I first got to know Ichi the Killer by watching Takashi Miike’s movie of the same name. It’s a damn fantastic movie and as insane as the manga.

There’s a key difference, though. The movie’s overdrawn and almost comical in its depiction of violence and depravity. The manga is not.

Ichi the Killer is the story of the titular killer, but more so of the Yakuza Kakihara. After Kakihara’s boss vanishes, he first searches for him and later for Ichi. This eventually leads to a confrontation between the two. The main story may lack some depth but it tries to add some by revealing the past bullying experiences of Ichi, which led to his current state of mind. Although it doesn’t seem to do a good job at relating it to the present, it manages to tie it in with Ichi’s current target. In the end the story does have a repetitive cycle but there are plenty of exciting twists to spice things up.

Ichi the Killer is less a horror manga, but predominately a mature and psychological tale about two characters who are downright insane. The artwork is unusually great because there’s lot of detail put every panel and character designs, however most of the character designs are quite unsettling. Also this manga is pretty creative in its depiction of extreme gore and horrific violence, so expect to see the most nauseating thing you can imagine.

It heavily explores themes such as sadism, masochism, identity disorder, manipulation and mixes them into one of the most depraved manga of all time. Overall Ichi the Killer proved to be one of the most disturbing and gruesome manga ever created, with a twisted story that didn’t make much sense until you get deep into the story. Some trigger warnings: necrophilia, body mutilation, assault and abuse, sexual contact, blood and gore, murder

It's an amazing piece that features on a lot of the many tropes of cult horror - see the trigger warnings listed above. Nothing in this manga series is light-hearted if the first issue is absolutely anything to go by. It's dark, it's twisted, and you're either going to enjoy it or be utterly disgusted. This isn't for the faint-hearted, although the manga seems somewhat milder compared to the film in terms of its content so far.

This is a dark story that is set up beautifully and is only going to get darker and wilder.I like to warn you again. Ichi is fucked up, at times disgusting, and features graphical content. If one’s up for that though one’s treated with an amazing manga.

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Terajima
82/100
Trauma Driven Killing Machine
I already watched long time ago the live action adaptation by Takashi Miike (really recomended movie for anyone who is interested). I'm a big fan of Miike and I thought his adaptation was the interesting thing, not the original work itself. A few months before I realized Koroshiya 1 author was the one of Homunculous, I haven't read that one yet but I know it's a respected manga and so, so I decided to give it an oportunity.

The movie has some different aesthetic / style choices, but everything else was already in the manga, Miike did not expanded the original with his imagination but Koroshiya 1 by itself is really original, interesting, deep, dark and risky in many aspects.

The most important thing is the importance of Ichi and his story, in the movie Kakihara is the important one (because you don't have the time a manga has and you need to decide on what to focus). Here the story is expanded and better explained and you know each one of the characters and motives. As an example Kaneko in the movie is just an extra, here he could be the counterpart to Ichi, someone who because of being bullied can't really activate the switch and just pretends, when Ichii uses those moments as his activation.

Ichi was bullied as a boy / teen and all those traumas are used by Jijii (the mastermind behind everything, and really interesting too as the ultimate voyeur, spectator, creator, not an actor or someone who participates but someone who creates that playground).

Jijii creates with Ichi the ultimate killer, a deranged guy who revives his traumas and expands / intermingles them with current reality to enter in a killing mood in which he destroy everyone since Jijii made him think everyone is another bully, another one of those guys that made him suffer so much in the past. That psychotic panic attack is much better aproach to that idea than other similar things like Crying Freeman, that is just a romantic ideation without real sense behind those tears.

I really like many things about this, the aesthetic, the locations, taking place almost in its entirety in a building, all those psychological explanations that may be or not real but I like them because they are not the comfortable ones, they create some twisted but sincere explanations and motives behind things and behaviours of everyone, Kakihara, women, Ichi; in line with his past work Voyeur where all this surface behaviour vs secret desires / pulsions / motivations / nature are what really drive the characters.

Enters into my top 20 favorite manga.

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