Atsushi Kaneko Uses Action To Reveal Character in Search and Destroy Vol. 1
Search and Destroy is a revenge thriller you feel in your bones.
There are two sides to Atsushi Kaneko’s Search and Destroy Volume One. One is about a brutal warrior, waging a war in a Russian city against the robots who control the city’s crime. This wild child, herself more robotic than human due to the prosthetics that she bears, brings a frenzied chaos to these epicurean crime lords who try to experience the best sights and tastes that this world has to offer them. This girl is a true wild child, untamed by society as she wages her war. The other side of this story focuses on a girl out in the wilderness with only one person, an older man Tsukumo, to look out for her. This girl is that same wild girl, but much younger and sheltered from a world that has taken from her more than it should ever have.
When we first encounter her in the city, that first side is alone and on her own but in the second part, a flashback to her youth, she has someone, a father figure who feels responsible for Hyaku. In these two parts of this first of three books, Kaneko wants us to understand these two facets of Hyaku, a young woman on her mission of revenge. First, he shows us what she’s capable of, her ruthless drive to hunt down these robots while in the second part, he gives us the reason for this. He shows us what she can do and then he shows us why she’s doing it in an engrossing way that opens up this story and this character to us.
The brutality of this book hits on both a physical and emotional level. Kaneko’s line work, drawn on an iPad, possesses a boldness that matches the character Hyaku. As she attacks her robots, Hyaku is pulling human organs from them— eyes, a tongue, and a liver— that Kaneko makes you look at and witness. There’s no turning away from her actions short of just closing the book and putting it down. The way that he draws Hyaku is all about her character— her physicality is a reflection of her spirit— wild, untamed, and patched together. And that’s contrasted with Doro, another young child abandoned by society, forced into the role of looking like a good, young Leninist when you can just tell that she chafes at that. Doro sees Hyaku in action and comes to idolize her.
Kaneko visually shows us who these people are before we ever hear a word from them or see them in action. It’s the same for their world— the ugliness and loneliness of it. Perfectly, this is set in Russian because you can sense the freezing temperatures of the Russian nights and days. It’s all part of how Kaneko shows what this world is without ever having to tell you about it.
Even when he does explain it— what happened to Hyaku, why she is the way she is, and why she’s tracking down these criminals—it still brings up this physical dread and revulsion at what this Russia has made this young woman into. His storytelling is compelling and evocative. He knows that he’s dropping you into this world where he needs to keep you on the edge of your seat to stay with him. He asks enough questions during the action scenes to keep you turning the pages and then when he goes into explanation mode, he flips the script and dives into the background of this character while using action and suspense to show you just who and what Hyaku is.
Hyaku’s story is about her loss and search for her own agency. As we come to understand what happened to her, and what was taken away from her, Kaneko takes on this search to find what was taken from her and what is lost to her. Her body parts are only a portion of that search. We can see the prosthetic blades that have replaced her arms and legs. Those are the obvious things that have been taken from her. It’s the missing parts of her that we can’t see which makes her the terror that she is. It’s the things that she can’t even recognize that she lost that make her this wild child raging through this Russian city.
That’s really what this story looks to be about— the unseen missing things and what they mean to us. What doesn’t it mean to have essential parts of you ripped away before you could even recognize that they were parts of you? And what kind of world does Hyaku live in that allows these things to be ripped from a young girl? Hyaku is the main character but Kaneko is telling a story about a society that places the values of the powerful above everyone else. It’s a story of the haves and the have-nots. It’s a warning about that kind of society and does end up striking a little too close to home as we have to fight for the body autonomy of women in our society.