Books: Oldboy Vol. #4

So why would someone kidnap a total stranger off the street, lock him in a custom prison cell for ten years for no apparent reason, and then just as blithely let him back out again? The fourth volume of Oldboy begins with the first real hint as to why all this happened to Goto, the Everyman hero of the story whose life as a cipher in urban Japan ended when he was spirited away a decade ago. “Look into your childhood,” a woman moans to him after she agrees to trade sex for secrets, and Goto soon begins digging into everything from his high school yearbooks to his estranged family members.

In an attempt to determine if something in his past led him here, Goto reaches into his own history and excavates an unexpected amount of unease. He wanted to be as unextraordinary as possible, he confesses to his girlfriend Eri (his sole confidant for now), and he eventually slid into gambling and alcoholism — and then one day he ended up in that little cell. Was it something he did in a fit of drunken rage, or something deeper — something that he hasn’t been able to unearth yet?

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.