THE IMPOSSIBLE HIT - My Death & Resurrection
Dedicated to my brother.
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Originally released in 2016 in Study Group Magazine #4 (available here), as edited by Milo George, designed by Françoise Vigneault, and published by Zack Soto. All quotes from the Book of Games employ the 2003 translation by Sonja Musser Golladay, whose 2007 dissertation Los libros de acedrex dados e tablas: Historical, Artistic and Metaphysical Dimensions of Alfonso X's Book of Games is invaluable reading.
This version of the text has been altered to correct historical errors.
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PART 1 - AUTHORITARIAN DISCOURSE
It was in 1283, in Seville, in the twilight of the reign of Alfonso X, the wise king, that the Book of Games was divined, finally, into words and pictures. Seven treatises in twelve sections, befitting seven celestial bodies swimming in twelve hours of night, twelve months in the year. Libros de axedrez, dados e tablas, the manuscript detailed three species of leisure: chess; dice; and tables.
Gaming is not idle time; it is instruction, and revelation, shared by men and women, the able and disabled, regardless of place, or capture or liberty. A parable begins the Book of Games, evoking the court of an ancient India.
A king ponders the nature of the supremacies that command the fortunes of man. First, there is the supremacy of skill, which vindicates the absolute control of man over his affairs. Then, there is the supremacy of luck, which renders man powerless before the caprice of circumstance. Finally, there is the supremacy of prudence, which demands tireless navigation of the strait between knowledge and circumstance - the art of coping.
And so chess was devised to embody the supremacy of skill.
And so dice were rolled to embody the supremacy of luck.
And so tables, backgammon and the rest, were built so that prudence could be practiced and understood.
“Because God wanted that man have every manner of happiness, in himself naturally, so that he could suffer the cares and troubles when they came to them, therefore men sought out many ways that they could have happiness completely.”
Gaming, in this way, is a metaphor for living in trial, which is to say living.
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PART 2 – A CARPET THE COLOR OF TELEVISION, TUNED TO A DEAD CHANNEL
Golgo 13 No. 1: The Impossible Hit was a 48-page black & white comic book, released in English by Lead Publishing Co, Ltd. in 1989. I do not know the exact year in which I first read it, yet I can recall the day.
It was Easter Sunday. As usual, my parents had wrapped wicker Easter baskets in thin colored paper, filled to the brim with candy and small gifts. At that time in my life, I was prone to discussing the minutiae of Nintendo games with anyone willing to tolerate me; this succeeded a master's knowledge of game show hosts on the USA Network and trivia regarding the planets of the solar system, the latter of which I had memorized from a Mickey Mouse game on our Tandy 1000 home computer, thus inadvertently justifying time spent on gaming in the eyes of my parents.
Vic Tokai, a Japanese cable provider and computer services company founded by a natural gas utility, had turned to video game development in the mid-1980s, some time after the debut of the Nintendo Famicon, a games console released in North America as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). In 1988, Vic Tokai served as development studio and publisher for Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode, an eccentric action, shooting and 'dungeon'-crawling title, its text subsequently translated to English in a barely-coherent manner and released for the pleasure of NES consumers overseas. That's the game I got for Easter. It was not a new release.
Shrink-wrapped with my new holiday copy, perhaps to bolster its dubious commercial appeal with a free gift, was The Impossible Hit. BY TAKAO SAITO, barked the cover. Inside, it detailed the story of Duke Togo (the perfect sniper “Golgo 13”), his hiring by the Securities and Exchange Commission to murder a prominent Wall Street raider cum mafia don, the fulfillment of that contract via a bullet between the target's eyes, fired through a 31st floor office window from a hotel room approximately 500 yards across town, and, primarily, his escape from police scrutiny after knocking a spent cartridge to the street below when surprised by a skittering cat behind him on the balcony.
This is the most important panel:
“How did he draw that?” I thought. I had never read a Japanese comic. It certainly looked nothing like any superhero or Mickey Mouse comic I'd read before. It wasn't the blood -- which thrilled me, yes, as I'd not quite grasped how depicting so illegal an act as making somebody bleed was allowable in art -- but the carpet soaking up the batter of the target's split head.
How do you make those little marks? The blood is ink, obviously, but the carpet? I had no idea what 'tones' were, how you'd cut out strips and place them down on the page, but, latently, I grasped the inhumanity of the technique. The rug was evidence of automation, drinking the hand-dabbled life force of a cartoon cadaver.
The absence of gesture in this image suggested the nature of death itself, and that was my introduction to manga.
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PART 3 - HYPERGEOMETRIC DEATH WISH 20XX
A few months ago, my brother sent me the following text, concerning the circumstances of my demise in an alternate universe of his creation:
My brother will not know it until he reads this, but his puzzle completely destroyed me. It was all I thought of for the better part of a week. There have been times in my life in which I have suffered from an occasionally debilitating preoccupation with the idea of my own death and the conviction, strong above logic, that it was imminent. But here it was the details that really got to me: the presence of long-dead relatives at the funeral; the incompetence of a newspaper syndicate we used to write for; the Yankees fandom; my brother's trips to see them with our father.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine lost his dad, and I was asked to be a pallbearer because they did not have very many able-bodied male relations. I can't imagine the death of my father. When I am with him we don't talk very much, because I don't talk very much to anybody, except about comic books or something on a podcast, I guess. I will regret everything so much, someday.
There is a hidden poignancy when my brother writes about wanting to share his game with me. We were very close for years, all the way through college, for me, and then we fell significantly out of touch, and I sense his sharing this text with me as a means of playing that game, in a form tolerable to my inattentive nature, so that I needn't stare into his eyes that he might witness my attention stray.
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PART 4 - NO ONE MAN CAN DO THAT
Throughout that crucial Easter -- I think it may have been 1990, at which point I was eight years old -- I would be enamored with Golgo 13. How the police had him; they really had him, they even found the sniper rifle he'd thrown down the trash shoot, but when he said they couldn't take him in on a hunch they tried to recreate the circumstances of the impossible hit and couldn't, because they could not even contemplate being as good as him, and Duke Togo just walked away free.
He was my kind of superhero; in command and contemplative. Frequently, he emits a thought bubble consisting only of “......”, paradoxically indicating silence through elements of comics grammar - not too unusual a manga trait, but very much a point of separation between Japan and the west. Similarly, there was no color in The Impossible Hit, no captions for narration, and no apparent distribution of labor into writers, pencilers, inkers, etc. The Impossible Hit identifies only “TAKAO SAITO” as its author, only on the front cover. There is no credited translator.
In truth, Takao Saitō probably did not draw much of The Impossible Hit; since 1968, when the Golgo 13 series debuted, Saitō has functioned less as an auteur than a pragmatic commercial director, assigning different aspects of each story to different work groups in Saitō Production, the studio under his care. The Impossible Hit actually originates from 1971; its original title is “ROOM・No. 909″, printed in English. I now own a Japanese copy. Some Japanese editions of Golgo 13 list credits for all the people who worked on individual stories; mine does not. But The Impossible Hit doesn't even acknowledge Saitō Production until the copyright notice, presumably to conform to U.S. expectations of comic books as works driven by individuals or small teams, not a whole studio. That would smack of dehumanization, and offend the American idea of liberty, if not life and perhaps the pursuit of happiness. If you remember the '80s, in fact, you'll recall that Japan threatened the global standing of the good ol' stars 'n’ stripes with its tireless, emotionless, inscrutable corporatization, and the USA was the slobs to their snobs - winning, in the end, per the plucky self-driven innovation narrative of its own invention.
Yet Golgo 13 himself is not a team player. He is the ultimate individual, sitting above the world in his hotel room -- its exterior no doubt drawn from a photograph by Studio Hand A, its carpet a strip of tone pasted down by Studio Hand B -- paid well to settle matters of life and death at the pull of a trigger. “Golgo” evokes the Golgotha of Christ's crucifixion, on the Friday before Easter, and “13” the attendees at the Last Supper the day before that, when the 13th delivered Christ's life in exchange for silver. The Golgo 13 logo depicts a skeleton dressed in a crown of thorns, posed inhumanly between life and death.
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PART 5 - CARELORD LONELY NIGHTS
“Don't think I wasn't thinking about the predeterminate nature of the game,” my brother said. The purpose of “A Solitaire Semester” was not simple play. It was an assassination, of me, for pay: concocted to serve as a lecture demonstration given to students in tandem with an academic job interview. Teaching jobs are hard enough to find that murdering a sibling sounds like the least you can do.
It was also, in a way, a magic ritual; a play enacted among symbols, aimed at shifting reality.
Through my tears, I had not understood the meaning behind the colors chosen for the deck of cards; my brother gladly explained their hermetic significance. Contextually, blue-black represents the feeling of depression (blue), and the funereal state of mourning (black). In the setup of the two-player game, my brother is seeking to return me to life, so that I too may play. He does not win (or, rather, he loses by 'winning'), because to even hold a contest is futile; upon picking any card, the sequence continues until the endgame occurs, and because he selected a blue-backed black card, all of the cards are cleared, representing the supremacy of desolation. Moreover, because the selection of a blue-backed black card is arbitrary, to study the game is to realize the powerlessness of the individual in dictating their own fate.
“During the talk I emphasized the meaninglessness of even playing the game,” he said, “lol.”
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PART 6 - DESTINATION OF THE MELANCHOLY KING
Alfonso X was a poet, and took great personal interest in the authorship of the Book of Games, but he could not do it alone. Rather, he directed the scholars and craftsman of his scriptorium, Christian, Jew and Muslim alike, to devise an illuminated work of text and image drawn from formidable bodies of knowledge, regardless of nationality or creed. So many games are Arab in origin; translation was crucial to this project, as it was the only means of ascertaining patterns and common practice in manners of play.
Gaming is not idle time. Alfonso X had suffered the death of his eldest son in battle in 1275, and his second son -- over Alfonso’s preference for his dead son’s heirs -- had staked a ferocious claim for the throne, and forced his father’s concession. By 1283, Seville was nearly all the king had left. His fascination with gaming, then, can be interpreted as a desire to explore the perimeters of game design as a model world, and gameplay as life in that world; to assume, temporarily, the eyes of God, to assess what has happened - the checkmated king, as above, so below. When he died, the Book of Games was placed near the body of Alfonso X, in the Cathedral of Seville, where it sat for 309 years.
They write about hybridization in the scriptorium, there in the crypt - of modification. They write about novel and esoteric, symbolic methods of play in the king’s studio. Have you tried four-player chess? There are pieces of four colors: green; red; black; white. “And this similarity they made according to the four humours that grow in the body of man, like blood, which they gave to spring; and choler, to summer; and melancholy, to autumn; and phlegm, to winter.”
Not content to rest upon three supremacies, the Book of Games then describes the makeup and symbolism of cosmic checkers, “very noble, strange, beautiful, and of great understanding, for learned men and primarily for those who know the art of astrology.” Seven players gather around a seven-sided board to represent the seven planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, and if the scientific obsolescence of these local facts seems to disrupt the metaphor, know, of course, that literature, ritual and gaming has never been entirely stable.
But then, neither is existence impossibly random. Probability theory exists so that patterns may be discerned, even upon the throw of dice, so that even if we cannot peer over the shoulder of God, we may at least calculate the trajectory and resistance facing our bullet shot through life from the barrel of his gun.
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PART 7 - TRANSUBSTANTIATION
So, when it came time to present his vignette, my brother added a very basic perceptual shift. Like inverting a tarot card to shift its meaning, he adopted green-red as the successful draw, rather than blue-black. Green, by its position in the text, represented money, and red violence; these are the colors embodying the dealers from Jersey who sold me bad junk.
Because the result is predetermined, with the values switched, drawing red (blood) equates to immediate victory over black (desolation). This, I realized, had weaponized the allegory, removing my brother from the contemplative role of witness and installing him into the role of assassin. But because this was no longer a simple text, but a performance subject to its own particular context, green was also the money he would collect upon getting the job, and red the forcible victory he would enjoy over his fellow applicants. And, regardless, death and depression were his opponents, which by the nature of the game would be inevitably be vanquished.
Fittingly, the ritual then self-destructed. During his exit interview after the presentation, my brother got a text stating that a college he'd interviewed with earlier had decided to accept him for a position, rendering the whole game as meaningless as he'd told his prospective students it was. I have yet to die for the benefit of his actual job.
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PART 8 - ONE PERFECT SHOT
“...There's only one thing I don't get,” muses a demoralized police detective at the conclusion of The Impossible Hit, after Golgo 13 has evaded their grasp. “How could such an incredible pro like that ever make the dumb mistake of dropping his cartridge...?”
“He was playing games with us,” his partner replies.
In truth, Duke Togo is overly cautious. In other stories, as detailed in other publications later in comics history, he refers to himself frankly as a coward, attributing much of his success to pure luck. There is actually a tic, established in his very first adventure, in 1968, that has him spin around to strike anyone he suspects of approaching from behind him.
This is why he drops the spent cartridge. It's a reference to a personal, human weakness that American monoglot readers could not possibly know of this most marvelous man.
It didn't matter to me then, and it doesn't matter to me now. Because Golgo 13 is a perfect sniper -- 'overpowered' in the superhero and video gaming parlance -- his stories tend to focus more on the people who hire him, and the people who find themselves drawn into his orbit. The police detectives, then, are the main characters of The Impossible Hit: tragic heroes.
It's funny. I was so thrilled by Golgo 13 back then, that I never realized the tremendous identification I obviously had with the police in the story. They are little people, trying to make sense of death and chaos, living in trial. And yet, when they gauge the wind resistance, and factor in the distance between the hotel and the fated 31st floor office, and stare themselves through the rifle scope, they have to let Duke go.
This is not what real police would do; real police would haul him down to the station, hunch or not, and apply pressure to elicit information that might bolster their assumptions. But The Impossible Hit is an allegory, and by the terms of that allegory, they realize that they can never win the game Duke Togo is playing, because he has already played it too well. Nobody will accept that a man could make a 500 yard shot at sundown, with so much wind, because to do so would constitute an admission that skill is supreme, and that anyone who has not accomplished such feats, and played so well, has not done enough with themselves
And to live in that way is realize that you are alone with yourself, with nothing greater that what you could be. If Golgo 13 wasn't real, we'd have to invent him: a parable for the necessity of God.
