Hokuto no Ken (pilote)

Hokuto no Ken (北斗の拳) is a one-shot by Tetsuo Hara, published in the April 1983 issue of Shueisha's Fresh Jump. The first of two short stories preceding the serialization, it lays the foundations in a contemporary Japan setting for what would become, a few months later, the Hokuto no Ken series. Its hero, Kasumi Kenshiro, avenges the woman he loves by confronting a criminal organization with his family's deadly art, Hokuto Shinken. Published at the back of the magazine, the story took first place in the readers' survey and led to the commissioning of a second installment, followed by serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump.

Synopsis

Kenshiro leads an ordinary life, splitting his time between training at the family dojo and his fiancée Yuki, until the evening she witnesses the murder of her next-door neighbor. An inconvenient witness to a political scheme, she is eliminated in turn, and Kenshiro hears her death in real time over the phone. To avenge her, he will have to use the assassination art his father passed down to him.

Hokuto no Ken without the post-apocalyptic world

In the courtyard of a dojo surrounded by buildings, Kenshiro fells a fighting bull with a single blow before the eyes of his fiancée, Yuki. His father passed down to him Hokuto Shinken, a deadly art that destroys the body from within by striking secret pressure points, but the young man still doubts whether such a discipline has any place in a world at peace. The answer comes swiftly. After witnessing the murder of her neighbor, an upright politician assassinated on contract, Yuki is silenced in turn. Kenshiro listens helplessly to her death over the phone, until a chewing sound reveals the killer's identity: the hulking Gōda, whom he had encountered on the day of the politician's murder. When he returns home, the organization is already waiting for him. His father is shot while protecting him, and a police force in the criminals' pocket arrests both men for a murder they did not commit. From their cell, his father identifies the school responsible for the killing by the nature of the wounds: Taizanji Kenpō, a martial art from Mount Tai and the only deadly rival of Hokuto Shinken, now in the service of the powerful.

Humiliated in the visiting room by Gōda and Yazaki, the Taizanji emissary who infiltrated the police chief's inner circle, Kenshiro finally bends the bars of his cell to escape. His father lets him go, convinced that Hokuto Shinken was created for situations like this. In the office where the conspirators are celebrating their victory, Yazaki is neutralized with a strike to a secret pressure point before being obliterated under a rain of blows. Facing Gōda, Kenshiro shatters the giant's hand with a mere flick, concentrates his energy to the point of bursting his jacket apart, then unleashes the seventy percent of power the human body never uses. Gōda believes he has won, but ultimately succumbs to the delayed effects of the Hokuto Sōryūha. That leaves the police chief. Kenshiro tells him he will walk out of the room without looking back, on the condition that the chief does not shoot, then presses his index finger against the man's forehead. The man immediately breaks his promise and takes aim. Without even turning around, Kenshiro then reveals that the technique had already been delivered: he is already dead. The story ends with Kenshiro walking away alongside his father, now convinced that this world still harbors too many criminals for Hokuto Shinken to die with him.

From trial run to serialization

After the cancellation of Tetsu no Donquijote, Tetsuo Hara and his editor Nobuhiko Horie set out on a martial arts project. Depending on the source, the idea came either from Hara, who wanted to draw Chinese kenpō, or from Horie, who was looking for a subject suited to his author's art style. The story was published at the back of the magazine in the April 1983 issue of Fresh Jump and took first place in the readers' survey, a rare result for a story published at the back of a magazine, which immediately earned the commissioning of a second installment, published in the June issue. In light of this double success, the editor-in-chief of Weekly Shonen Jump, Shigeo Nishimura, approved serialization in the flagship magazine. It began in issue 41 of 1983, with Buronson writing the script, as the weekly pace was deemed unsustainable for Hara alone.

Reading the one-shot holds a surprise. Indeed, most of the series' conceptual toolkit is already in place. The body's secret pressure points, the doctrine that the human body uses only 30% of its power, the delayed death, Kenshiro's long battle cry, the jacket ripping apart under concentration: it is all there, right down to a prototype form of the series' most famous line, placed as the story's closing beat. The differences stand out all the more clearly: a contemporary setting, father-to-son transmission within the same family, and a rival school that is not Nanto but Taizanji Kenpō, a brotherhood of assassins from Mount Tai. The opening page, finally, traces Hokuto Shinken back to the China of the Three Kingdoms, 1,800 years ago. Hara would reprise this opening almost identically in Souten no Ken, nearly twenty years later, and its hero would also bear the family name Kasumi.