Book Review: The Mantis by Kotaro Isaka

Kabuto is many things: a family man, an office supplies salesman, and a shockingly good assassin. While he initially got into the latter two pursuits for the money, he’s long lived by the ideal of fairness. He doesn’t like it when one side vastly outnumbers the other, and he prefers to use only his bare hands when dispatching targets. As he’s gotten older, he finds himself preferring as well to take out other assassins, as that seems far more fair to him than murdering an unsuspecting civilian. 

Fairness is something he tries to inculcate in his only child Katsumi. Neither Katsumi nor Kabuto’s wife have any idea what Kabuto does for extra income, which often leads to him walking on eggshells around them both. But some things, he believes, are worth making the effort to discuss, as he says to his son:

[‘If] there’s something that you feel fine doing but you don’t like when someone does it to you, that’s unfair.’

 

‘Fine for me to do but not fine for someone else. Okay, how about when you come home late and Mom gets mad because she says your footsteps are too loud and she can’t sleep. But when you have a day off, she runs the vacuum cleaner while you’re trying to sleep. So that’s unfair, right?’

 

When he heard his son say that, Kabuto’s eyes almost welled up. He felt the deep emotional impact of finding someone who truly understood his plight. But he couldn’t suddenly throw his arms around his boy. If he expressed out loud his appreciation for his son’s empathy, there was a non-zero chance that his wife would find out.

For all that Kabuto is a hardened criminal, there’s only one thing that really scares him: his wife. Much of this third novel in Kotaro Isaka’s Assassins series – excellently translated, as with the others, by Sam Malissa – revolves around Kabuto’s relationship with his family, and his near-obsessive need to keep his wife happy. Readers only find out why at the very end, in a heartbreaking passage that perfectly completes this compelling portrait of a complex man. 

While Kabuto spends much of this book in search of empathy and understanding, this is still an Assassins novel. As such, there are fights and murders aplenty, with lots of insect references and the occasional cameo from characters we’ve come to know and love (or loathe) from the prior books. As an assassin whose preferred target is other assassins, Kabuto is unsurprised to learn that the killer known as The Hornet is after him. He spends a good amount of time mulling over this, even as he’s trying to deal with, ironically enough, a wasp’s nest in his family’s back garden:

Kabuto has been in life-or-death situations countless times. Facing down the barrel of a gun, or the blade of a knife, while he himself brought only his fists to the fight. He’s used to the threat posed by another human, so much so that in a confrontation his pulse barely even quickens.

 

But now, a single wasp passing by roots him to the spot. He has to laugh at himself.

 

You’re the first thing that’s had that effect on me in a long time, little guy, he wants to say. Well, you and my wife.

 

He tries to shift his mindset. He tells himself it’s not a wasp, but one of his fellow professionals. Just as he hoped, that calms him right down.

This character study of an unusual man, one who’s trying to get out of the assassin business while still providing for and protecting his family, is filled not only with poignant moments of insight but with breathtaking plot twists too. One particular development at about the sixty percent mark actually had me screeching aloud, though I can’t even hint as to why for fear of major spoilers. 

Kabuto is probably the most sympathetic of the characters Isaka has created to date, and I felt so much for him and for his efforts to do right by his family. Whereas the first book in the series Bullet Train was a dazzling romp, and the second book Three Assassins was a masterpiece of cross-cutting narratives, this novel is a deep meditation on hope and regret and the pain of being seen. I loved it.