Manga doesn't get much more noir than this. Benkei is just another expatriate Japanese artist living in the Big Apple - or so it appears. As their "diabolical hard-boiled stories" show, surfaces aren't always what they seem. Flashbacks delve into sordid, secret past lives, and old scores, long festering, emerge without warning, asking to be settled.

And Benkei's secret? Maybe it's just that he's the only artist in town who isn't having fantasies of being a hitman-for-hire - he is one.