Benkei in New York

Do you believe in murder if it was justified?
Do you believe in what goes around, comes around?

For once, I have read a story that wasn't a tragedy. Nor was it a comedy. Nor was it a romance. It wasn't a horror either.
It's not a story of blood, gore and meaninglessness.

It's a not a story for those who live in a two-dimensional world.

Benkei, that's who the story surrounds. An exquisite painter and a hit-men that isn't blood-thirsty. You see the story is realistic. It's so realistic, it's hard to think that it's a fiction. That it all came down to creativity and an idea.

Not everything's black or white, not everything's set in stone. Not everyone with a goal is an intellectual or a 'good' person. In this story you have a man in another walk of life, one in which society very much looks down upon but after reading this book, could you honestly say that he's pure evil?

Boundaries? It pushed a myriad of them. It's not lacking in that aspect. The art was fantastic. It wasn't mainstream. It didn't have people with abnormal, E.T. eyes, it was realistic. Proportional. And it had detail.

The characters seem to have walked out of the pages. Truly they are a work of art. The people in the story are real people; you can imagine them walking around doing the things they do. It's easy to believe that they're real and it takes a great author to blur the lines of fiction and non-fiction. What is real and what is not.

I'm awe-struck. This story is fantastic, finally after complaining so much about not finding a story worth scratch; I find this beauty. A gem.

It's a story that has an idea, it's a question.
Now how you will answer that question is up to you.

And that's what I love about this story: the questions.

The title page reads: Diabolical Hard-boiled Story. With this goal in mind, we follow the life of Benkei. Drawing heavily from the Noir genre, this story is chock-full of murder, mystery and mafia. The story has as much development as you can get in 7 chapters from a combination of hits and Benkei’s personal life. Where the story falls short is the personal side. While that could be a stylistic choice, several developments happen behind curtains and later are just evident from the new state of affairs.
7/10 Story

The art is nothing special either way. It is stronger during the assassination parts, but falters during more generic scenes and shots.
5/10 Art

The characters are the strongest point of this manga. While several follow classic murder-story archetypes, this fits the overall style well. Benkei is the cold-blooded paid avenger he is advertised as, but he shows his depth outside of murdering. He shows not only a job-oriented pragmatism, but also his ability to deal with the people he associates with in his line of work.
8/10 Characters

I personally enjoyed this manga quite a bit, although I was disappointed there wasn’t more. I liked the majority of the story as well, although it occasionally played too much to its tropes, with a foolish upstart Mafioso and the old, emotional Don, served by cutthroat second-in-commands. It was enjoyable seeing how Benkei handled all of these characters.
9/10 Enjoyment

I would recommend this manga to anyone who likes noir-style stories. In this case, the synopsis is a pretty good indicator of how much enjoyment you’ll draw from it, I believe.
8/10 Overall