【The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses】

It’s hard to imagine there’s a large target audience for a hyper-violent animated show about an unloved old man who gets blown up by aliens shortly after a cancer diagnosis and The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Rosestransformed, immediately, into a weapon of mass destruction intent on defending the dignity of the homeless and other cast-outs — but here it is anyway, Inuyashiki: Last Hero, a miserable and addictive sci-fi action series streaming now on Amazon.

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Often quite upsetting (if you don’t think you can get past watching an infant drown in a tub filled with his dad’s own blood, this is, assuredly, not the show for you), Inuyashiki nonetheless serves as a remarkable and unexpected superhero story for 2018, when everything feels cynical and each new entry in an unending supply of phone notifications makes the bile rise just a bit higher in your throat.

If you’re curious, the first episode almost serves as a kind of short movie, an aggressively modern, funhouse-mirror take on Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru. Kurosawa’s story is a quiet indictment of Japanese society in which a middle-aged man keeps his stomach cancer secret from his colleagues and family, then dies from it. In Inuyashiki, the sick old man turns into an assault robot and launches a bouquet of missiles at horrible teenagers.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The show is about a man, Ichiro Inuyashiki, who has become invisible to everyone around him. He buys a house for his family; his family thinks the house is garbage. His lips stick against the glass of a too-full subway car on his commute to work. He fantasizes about standing up to some loud kids, but doesn’t. Doctors press him against a sterile machine and remark on his cancer like it’s a cloud in the sky.

One night, he reaches rock bottom and sobs in a park. He looks up and sees a young man staring into space. Then, from nowhere, an alien vessel bursts into reality, killing them both.

Panicked, the aliens decide to replace the dead men with two robotic bodies, which, to keep things interesting, happen to be advanced weapon models.

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Inuyashiki wakes up and discovers his transformation. The cancer is gone, he feels better, and also, he’s a mechanical being stuffed with guns. Most intriguing, he can heal serious ailments and even bring people back to life.

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But while Inuyashiki decides to do good with his powers, the teenage boy... doesn’t. Hiro Shishigami, no doubt corrupted by years of exposure to junky shōnencomic books and the internet, turns into a monster. He tortures and kills innocent people, seemingly because he’s bored and can.

As you’d expect, old and young collide, but the conflict feels less about two super-powered men and more about the moral balance of the world. Inuyashiki believes in dignity for all, civic responsibility, redemption. Shishigami is nihilistic, greedy, emotionally broken — all of the things we fear in violent young men.

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And we should say, speaking of men: The show is not, by any stretch, what anyone could call progressive. Most of the plot revolves around dudes with messiah complexes, the oldest trope in all superhero fiction, and episode 4 should be prefaced with a warning for its depictions of sexual violence against women.

That episode, "Samejima," stands out like an ugly duckling in an array of white swans. Its villain is a cartoonishly rancid yakuza gangster who rapes and drugs and kills with delight; at the center of his interaction with Inuyashiki is a woman hostage whose good looks are frequently referenced and contrasted against her schlubby boyfriend's. In a show filled with remarkable, heady ideas, "Samejima" feels like an amateur hour, perhaps a nod to the pulp comic books the show often references, though the commentary doesn't coalesce into anything worthwhile.

But there's a lot admire in Inuyashikiif you can stomach its worst bits. Few entries in the action genre give legitimate weight to violence and death; this show is unblinking in its portrayals of murder, almost as if it's challenging you to be entertained. In an era of children killing children while the world shrugs, the confrontational aspect of Inuyashiki's violence feels like our just desserts.

Yes, the show references Ikiru, but its concerns are also contemporary. It may look ridiculous when the CGI-dipped characters activate their robot powers and fly around, but it's hard not to experience the work as a criticism of post-Iron Man superheroics, where scores of people die in bloodless puffs of dust while an audience gnashes popcorn. 

Inuyashiki isn't always easy to take seriously — pathetic moments in the old man's life are played up for laughs — but that's kind of the idea. The characters are outcasts in a society that, by the show's own reckoning, values conformity and effortless perfection.

As it hurtles toward an apocalyptic conclusion, the audience is left to reevaluate who we expect heroism from — really, who we dignify at all. If you're unmoved by the strange old man and his young counterpoint, what does that say about you?

All 11 episodes of Inuyashiki: Last Hero are available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. The comic upon which it's based, by Gantz creator Hiroya Oku, is available from Kodansha.

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