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Samurai Boogie by Peter Tasker is essentially an anime graphic novel in book form. The story itself is fun, something one might expect to read in a graphic novel or see in an action movie. The reader essentially follows around an old grizzled private eye as he deals with Yakuza gangsters, rich and powerful politicians, and other assorted characters.

When 24 the TV show first came out, it had a novel gimmick: the show would cut to a split screen format and show events simultaneously unfold in different parts of the story in “real time”. Over time, that gimmick went away; it remains only in the teaser leading and ending clips just before and after commercial breaks.

Samurai Boogie has a gimmick of its own. The text for the first few pages reads like the text of a graphic novel: short terse semi-sentences, leaving the reader free to draw the frame in his mind:

At the top of the stairs, a logn corridor. At the end, a sliding door with panels of translucent paper. Behind it, a hunched silhouette. Human, male.

Mori takes a half-step backwards. A floorboard groans. The silhouette stays motionless. So does Mori. Stillness. The only soudn the patter of the rain.

Go forward or back? Mori’s instincts decide. He moves down the corridor like a cat, slow motion, rolling his weight over each step forward. At the sliding door, he waits a lifetime. Then his fingernails open a millimetre of light; he lines his eye to the crack.

The gimmick is fun for a chapter or two, but Tasker thankfully backs off and allows the story to tell itself without gimmicky narration.