Trigger warning for suicide.
Kōtarō Isaka continues his tales of Japanese assassins in The Mantis (impeccably translated by Sam Malissa), after Bullet Train and Three Assassins. So far, these books don’t have to be read in any particular order. Characters might refer to events in other books or make cameo appearances but each book in the series has featured its own unique protagonists. In The Mantis, our protagonist is Kabuto, a man living a double life as an assassin and a humble salesman who only wants to make his wife and son happy.
Kabuto is getting too old for this. His handler disagrees and pushes Kabuto take on one more job, then another. The handler—a truly sinister doctor—constantly tells Kabuto that he needs to save more for retirement or that their clients insist on having someone exprienced take care of things or that maybe something might happen to Kabuto’s family if he decides to leave the business. The only way to retire, Kabuto decides, is to take out his handler before anyone the doctor hires takes Kabuto out first.
The Mantis is a meandering novel, especially when compared to the tightly plotted Bullet Train. But the wandering suits the novel’s reflective protagonist as he wonders about his ethics (he only kills people in more or less fair fights) or about keeping his snappish wife happy or hopes that his son succeeds in life. The plot jumps around in time and between the two halves of Kabuto’s life. At times, the jumps are jarring. One chapter sees Kabuto creating a set of armor for himself out of layers of clothing to take on a nest of hornets in a tree near the carport while the next sees him fighting for his life against a series of assassins sent to kill him. The tone grows very somber towards the end of The Mantis, when Kabuto tries to make his exit from killing for hire. Kabuto’s son, who always wondered why Kabuto put up with his mother’s moods, has to solve some last mysteries and help with his fathers last deadly job.
The assassins Isaka has created for his series are psychologically rich, much more interesting than many of the protagonists of other thrillers (even, I daresay, more interesting than Jack Reacher). Even though these characters are utterly lethal, Isaka makes them incredibly human. They worry about hornets and their bad luck and ethics and reputation and revenge and wives and children and lots of things that us mere mortals worry about. On the outside: stone cold killers. On the inside: completely preocupied with mundanities and murder. The juxtaposition is wildly entertaining.