About four years ago, the podcast "Donguri FM" was raving about a manga called "Hakozume." Normally I let the hosts' idle chatter wash right over me, but for some reason that time my hand froze mid-scroll and I bought it on Kindle.

Fast-forward four years. I am now a huge fan of the author, Yasu Mikoto.

So this post is exactly what it sounds like: an unabashed love letter to Yasu Mikoto.

Down the Hakozume Rabbit Hole

"Hakozume: Kōban Joshi no Gyakushū" (published in English as "Police in a Pod") follows two women: rookie cop Kawai Mai, and Fuji Seiko, a former ace of the detective division who, for reasons unknown, has been shipped off to a neighborhood police box. The clumsy, over-eager rookie Kawai and the sharp, unflappable senior Fuji who sees through everything. I could read the banter between this odd-couple pairing forever.

Lost items, drunks, weird status games over career track. It gives you a comical look at the "behind the scenes of the police" that you'd otherwise never get to peek at, and the early volumes move along briskly as one-shot episodes.

But around volume four the mode shifts, and incidents within the precinct start weaving together as threads that stretch across volume after volume. Wondering where those threads would lead, I'd suddenly realize I'd been reading until the middle of the night. Everyday comedy and serious drama coexist beautifully here.

...Okay, laying it out in my own clumsy words, it suddenly started to sound kind of boring. Wait, why did that happen?

The author, Yasu, is herself a former policewoman, and the strange authenticity that comes from that is the real draw. Apparently she spent about ten years actually doing the job — from the police box to lost-and-found, vice cases, general affairs and accounting — so the portrayals have a texture you'd never get from mere research; this is someone who's lived it.

And here's the kicker: aside from "a former policewoman from some prefectural force," she reveals nothing about her identity. A masked author. The premise alone is delicious. Surely everyone in police circles has already figured out exactly who she is.

For the record, Part One wraps up at 23 volumes with a "Part One Complete," and it apparently got a TV drama adaptation too (which, full disclosure, I haven't watched).

And Next Up, for Some Reason: the Bakumatsu

The stage Yasu chose after finishing Part One was, of all things, the Bakumatsu — the final years of the shogunate. Talk about a pivot.

If Hakozume is "the police of today," then Dan Doon is "the moment the police were born." Yasu is tracing the theme of "the police" backward along the timeline.

The protagonist of "Dan Doon" is Kawaji Shōnoshin — the man who would later become Kawaji Toshiyoshi, remembered as "the father of the Japanese police." As a samurai of the Satsuma domain, he's spotted and taken under the wing of the lord of Satsuma, Shimazu Nariakira, and races through a turbulent era alongside Saigō (Takamori) and the rest.

Yasu herself has said something like, "If I'm going to draw a manga about the police, I need to go all the way back to its origins and understand the background," and she draws while researching old texts.

The title "Dan Doon" is supposedly the sound of the gunshot that rings out at each turning point in the story. How ominous.

Note: there really is a scene in the manga where this sound effect gets used.

No matter which Bakumatsu work you pick up, it's chaos: heroes everywhere, black ships arriving, calls to topple the shogunate, calls to expel the foreigners. Most of them leave you feeling like you sort of get it, but also sort of don't. People even change their names halfway through.

But "Dan Doon" renders this Bakumatsu in full-blown Yasu Mikoto style, so it reads as something much softer and more comical.

Best of all, wherever the sources run dry or the facts are unclear, Yasu owns up to it right there on the page: "I've taken the plunge and colored this in with fiction."

When someone insists "this is all historical fact," I brace myself. But when they hand it to me saying "this part's imagined — but it's fun, right?", it slides right in.

(An aside: apparently one of the reasons Yasu fell for Kawaji is a pair of, um, lowbrow anecdotes — "the testicle incident" and "the dung-throwing incident." That seamless continuity between the earnest and the ridiculous is, once again, the exact same tic I feel in Hakozume.)

My Designated Bakumatsu Manga

As I confessed back when I wrote about NATO, I'm hopeless at history, and most of my knowledge is made of manga. For the Sengoku period it's "Sengoku," and for the Bakumatsu, "Dan Doon" (there are others, but) currently holds the post.

It's up to volume 11 right now, but the story of Kawaji building up the police from scratch still has a whole lot left to go. Is this thing really ever going to end? That worry aside, I plan to enjoy my favorite artist's work at a leisurely pace.

Either one is a fine place to start, but if you're torn, go with Hakozume volume 1 first. You can slip in easily from the present day. Trust me and give it a shot.

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