Who is Ryo Saeba?

Ryo Saeba is Shinjuku’s sweeper: a cleaner for hire who takes the jobs, bodyguard work, investigations, the occasional assassination, that begin with three chalk letters on a station noticeboard. He is also a man with almost no past. The sole survivor of a plane crash at age three in Central America, he was raised as a guerrilla fighter by the people who found him, grew up with a gun in a war that was not his, and came to Tokyo by way of the United States knowing nothing of his own birth or name’s origin.

The craft is legendary in his world: the “one-hole shot”, every round of his Colt Python .357 Magnum passing through the same hole. Around him, the comedy that keeps the darkness priced right: the lechery that earns him Umibozu’s nickname, “the Stallion of Shinjuku”, and the partnership with Kaori Makimura, who inherited the business from her murdered brother Hideyuki and polices Ryo with a 100-ton hammer. A replica of that hammer, sold for charity on Yahoo Auctions in 2007, fetched ¥1,832,000 (about $17,150), the service’s biggest charity item of that year.

In Japan the character is inseparable from his voice: Akira Kamiya has played Ryo across four decades of anime, films and specials, and returned even for the 2015 XYZ edition’s bonus DVD. On paper he belongs to Hojo’s first readers; on screen he belongs to Kamiya; in France, entire other generations know him as Nicky Larson, and under that name he is no less loved.