Manga Review: Master Keaton Vol. 1

To describe Taichi Hiraga Keaton in a high concept premise statement, you’d say he was “Indiana Jones as an insurance investigator.” However, the hero of Master Keaton is much more than that juicy pitch. To begin with, his unique skill set was developed at two preeminent British institutions, Oxford and the Special Air Service (SAS), and while he lectures in archaeology at Kotozawa University for his day job, he moonlights for Lloyd’s of London uncovering both buried secrets and insurance fraud. Keaton was a survival skills master in the SAS, and he continues to use the most rudimentary of weapons to overcome all obstacles, as if he was a minimalist MacGyver.

In the first of twelve chapters in Master Keaton, “Labyrinth Man,” Lord David Marques sends Keaton to Isidoros, on the Dodecanese Islands in Greece, to investigate the dubious death of Leon Pappas. Leon had a Lloyd’s insurance policy worth one million pounds, and Marques was the underwriter. Keaton investigates Pappas, his death, and the beneficiary, Ochs Fine Art Ltd, and this leads him to an epic battle in which he brings a miniature catapult to a gunfight. Or, considering Keaton wins, you could say that the villains make the mistake of bringing guns to a miniature catapult fight. Half of the chapters in this book follow the formula of this first chapter, but you won’t want to be distracted by the action, as the thrust of the narrative when examined as a whole turns out to be very different.

Many reviews of this book use the phrase “one-off stories” to describe this book, but what is more true is that Master Keaton is an experiment in postmodernism and constructed of linking vignettes instead. The adventures appear to be serial one-off stories, but each adventure gives the lead or the MacGuffin to the next adventure, in a magnificent latticework of episodic fiction that revolves around the family triangle of Master Taichi Hiraga Keaton, Taihei Hiraga (Keaton’s father), and Yuriko Keaton (Keaton’s daughter). Of the 318 pages in this first novel, 62 of them directly feature or concern the Keaton family, and on many other pages he’s thinking of them or discussing them with others, and it is this 20 to 30 percent of the manga that is the continuity between stories and brings us to the point of Master Keaton.

The heart of the narrative is the fallout from Keaton’s divorce and also the separation of his mother from his father when Keaton was a child. A child of divorce, Taichi is experiencing a painful divorce as well, and while his low-key personality is suited for subtle investigations and defeating villains, he finds himself eclipsed by the shadows of his parents and his wife. We never see the wife in this volume, but in the way Taichi and his daughter discuss her, and in the foreboding way that Keaton receives and anticipates phone calls from her, the wife’s personality has a palpable effect in Master Keaton. The parents are much more vivid in Volume 1. Taichi’s father is a Japanese zoologist, and his mother an English mathematician. While he’s a master at piecing together the mysteries of the insurance and archaeological world, he’s not so much a master at piecing together his own life, and he is still unearthing family mysteries, such as whether a young woman his father’s seeing is his half-sister, or finding his mother’s pennyroyal garden.

Overall, Master Keaton is an excellent manga that uses adventure story tropes to rope the reader into a poignant story of a man whose most significant parts of his life are as a son and father. The best chapters, “Small Blue Lady,” “Back Alley Education,” and “Long Ago Summer Pudding” are great stand-alone manga short stories in their own right, and they do not involve a single cobbled-together weapon, but instead show Keaton trying to get close to the family he has at hand, his daughter and his father. “Long Ago Summer Pudding” is a heartwrenching tale in which Keaton tries to make childhood memories of his mother more vivid through finding just the right spice to make his mother’s recipe.  The good news for readers that are not looking for something postmodern or experimental is that this book works as a series of adventure tales, too.  It just happens to be one of those excellent books that doesn’t set out to shortchange its readers by meeting low expectations.

Master Keaton was published in December 2014 and is available wherever quality manga are sold, such as comic book shops and book stores.  You can also buy it on the VIZ Manga website and app.