The Eastern Edge

Mysterious bald man, murder, gangsters, prostitutes and cults -- and we're only on chapter 5!

Billy Bat hasn't exactly turned out to be the "Sin City meets Disney" that I thought it might be when I first saw it in Weekly Morning, but then I didn't see the promo art before I read the first chapter and didn't see through Urasawa's ruse. I was fooled!
But, while Disney has a mouse at its helm named Mickey, we have a psychotic flying one named Billy. And, while they may not be the gun-totting, scantly clad, accessory laden, badass working girls of Frank Miller's imagination, it looks like prostitutes are going to have a major influence on our protagonist in this story too. So my original impression isn’t totally off the mark, right?

Anyway, not knowing and being completely fooled was a lot of fun. I wish it happened more often (I write just as I’m about to give away the story so far), but that would mean never communicating with anyone who shares my interests in anything lest they spoil something, or going back in time to before the internet. The world has changed and people want to know everything now - Or, if possible, even before it happens.

Before get into this, I'd like to point out that no tags I can find work with my security settings and XHTML validation requirements, undoubtedly written by Dracos himself. Because of my lack of proper spoiler tags and other such devices, I will walk that fine line between providing information to starved fans everywhere and being one of those assholes who yells out the ending from his car to fans lining up for the final Harry Potter book.
I will, however, do my best to warn people the old fashioned way…

SPOILER ALERT!!!!

Although I am not summarizing whole episodes or giving away everything, but if you don't want to know what happens in Billy Bat, do NOT read any further!

Follow up:

Now that I've absolved myself of responsibility for anything I may give away to people who didn't want to know, let's get on with this, because I know most of you didn’t come here to not find out what happens – you want to know!

I mentioned before that the body count already began in chapter 4, but this time I'm giving it away. Chapter 5 opens like this:

But before I tell you want happened there, let's rewind a little:

Chapter 3 saw Kevin have an encounter with a little boy who asks him if he's okay after getting run down by a crowd looking for handouts at the U.S. Military GHQ - remember it’s 1949 occupied Japan.

The kid then asks Kevin for chocolate or something (American soldiers - other than looking to get laid as much as possible - quickly became known for handing out gum and chocolate and stuff to kids during the occupation, so kids really did go up and ask them. I've talked to elderly Japanese men who told me they got stuff from soldiers). Kevin pulls out his Billy Bat comic and asks the kid if he's ever seen anything like it. The kid says no, but he also says he loves comics so Kevin gives it to him and he runs off.

Jump forward to later when Kevin is leaving GHQ and the same kid comes up to him and has Kevin follow him to an old man's place.

Chapter 3 then ends with the old man telling Kevin that he has seen his character before in a tattoo on a certain person's back.

Chapter 4 kicks off with Kevin pursuing his lead through the slums of Tokyo until he’s lead to a gang boss, who starts going on about his son being a fool and having been shot dead in the war. Kevin isn't sure what to make of this and is ready to move on when the old man says that his son said something weird about;
"The bat he has is a good bat but... The bat the other person has... Is bad."
(This translation is pretty literal, so please forgive the awkward dialogue. This isn’t mean to be an adaptation.)

Kevin doesn’t get a chance to ask any questions because the kid shows up again with a note from Charlie to meet him (When did this kid end up back at GHQ, how did he hook up with Charlie, and how the hell would Charlie know to give this kid a note for Kevin? Sound suspicious yet?).

I’m going to cut right to the chase here, Kevin later has dinner with Charlie, who "just happened" to find a very old Japanese document in the American GHQ archives that has an illustration of the bat symbol. Apparently the U.S. military is interested in the significance of the bat symbol, too. While Kevin and Charlie are eating, drinking and talking at a yakitori place, they are being watched the by the creepy proprietor:

The tone of the conversation suddenly changes when Charlie tries to get Kevin to bribe him not to talk about his successful Billy Bat character probably being a rip-off of that Japanese one, just as both Kevin (and possibly Charlie, too, but it’s hard to tell) begin to get dizzy. Kevin has a vision of his Billy Bat character walking off a comic page and telling him to kill Charlie to protect himself.

The next instant is also the opening scene of the current chapter.
Now that you know roughly how we got here (assuming also that you know a little about chapter one and two, of course), chapter 5 goes a little something like this…

After a brief exchange with the unusually-calm-after-witnessing-a-murder old man who runs the yakitori shop (the other character we see in the opening scene), who tells Kevin that he “Karate chopped” his victim, killing him with one blow (yes, he actually says “karate chop”), the plot thickens further with the entrance of the aforementioned “mysterious bald man”.

This is one bad looking dude, who warns Kevin about going to the authorities and tells him exactly how to cover his tracks.

Get it? "Cover his tracks"
Har har har!
Anyway...

We later find Kevin wandering the streets, likely still feeling the effects of whatever was slipped into his drink and feeling sick about what just happened. After violently rejecting the solicitation one of the many prostitute’s walking the streets, Kevin throws-up and staggers into a pile of garbage.

Queue the angelic prostitute who helps him out, thinking Kevin to be just another hopeless drunk.

She tells Kevin that when things are so bad that life doesn't seem worth living anymore, they (meaning the prostitutes) come here to pray to the "god".

Yup, you guessed it!

Just in case you didn't pick up on it, here is the bat from the old document from the GHQ archives again that I posted a while back:

Remember the old gang boss mentioning two bats? The bat the prostitute shows Kevin is different from the one in the document, and is also the exact same one Kevin had the flashback of seeing scrawled on a wall, which he now knows must be this same one.
Thus ends chapter 5.

Unfortunately Urasawa is going to make us wait again.
Chapter 6 doesn't come out until January 22nd.

Until then...