Manga / Goku: Midnight Eye

He has an eye on you.

Goku Midnight Eye (Midnight Eye ゴクウ, or just ゴクウ) is a Cyberpunk manga series by Buichi Terasawa, the author of Space Adventure Cobra and Takeru. It ran from 1987 to 1989, with the first two chapters being adapted into a pair of OVA by Madhouse under the direction of Yoshiaki Kawajiri. It takes some superficial inspiration from Journey to the West.

In the faraway year 2014, private eye and former cop Goku Furinji has a bad night. He is investigating a number of suicides of police officers when he encounters the person responsible for those suicides, a mysterious woman who promptly ensnares him in her hypnotic trap, and the only way to survive is to stab his own eye out. Fortunately for him, he wakes up fitted with the God's Eye, a cybernetic implant that allows him to access nearly every computer on Earth, and the Sun Wu Kong rod, a multipurpose weapon that can extend to quite a length. Now turned into the most powerful man in the world, Goku resumes the investigation only to find out it falls deeper into the net of underground rulers.

A live action adaptation was announced in the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 and is still waiting as of the 2020s.

---

This series provides examples of:

• Action Prologue: The second OVA adapts the beginning of chapter 6, "The City of Heaven", before the title card. After Goku is done killing Mr. Wong, the rest of the OVA is an adaptation of chapter 2.
• Advertised Extra: The “Motorcycle Girl” is prominently featured on promotional material and the cover of the DVD but is really a minor character, although a visually striking one.
• And the Adventure Continues: After killing Cassandra the Enchantress, the shapeshifting villainess of the manga's final arc, Goku is briefly seen reflecting on the experience before he polevaults into a cityscape for more adventures.
• Boom, Headshot!: Genji Hakuryu is killed this way by a laser blast from the severed head of the gynoid Goku killed earlier, sending the rest of him into a Disney Villain Death.
• The Brute: Zhang, Genji's giant enforcer who tries to help the brainwashed Yoko kill Goku.
• Butterface: At the end of her battle against Goku, Cassandra transforms into a winged demon creature with the appearance of a monstrous head on top of a beautiful and nude female body.
• Cartwright Curse: Goku’s love interests don’t tend to live very long.
• Character Title: Goku is the protagonist and the "Midnight Eye" is his powerful artificial eye. Also, the original manga was simply called "Goku" (ゴクウ).
• Compressed Adaptation: The pachislot version of the "Yoko" arc, CR Goku, only featured a few scenes of Goku fighting generic minions, blowing up a cyborg samurai and then hacking into Genji's helicopter to make it crash into the building. It was also made very Tamer and Chaster by the removal of all the nude female characters involved in the story.
• Cyborg: A recurring quality among the cast.
  • Goku, of course, has an Electronic Left Eye. These make him a super hacker and allow him to control the Sun Wu Kong rod.
  • The peacock assassin has a Cybernetic Peacock Tail, with which she hypnotizes people. She's the reason Goku lost his eye, because stabbing himself was the only way he could break her hold on him and survive.
  • Mr. Wong, a human trafficker, has Cybernetic Legs. He hides them by pretending to be in a wheel chair with a blanket covering his legs, but not only is he as mobile as anyone with their own legs, he goes beyond that by having build-in roller skates. Unfortunately for him, Goku destroys his boat when he tries to make an escape by river and his own metal legs ensure he drowns.
• Died Standing Up: Cassandra is killed by Goku when he opens a trapdoor in a foundry that pours a lot of molten metal on top of her, leaving her petrified in place.
• Downer Ending: The "Bonnie" arc is the fifth in the series but is placed at the very end of the 4-volume versions of the manga. It ends with Goku failing to protect yet another love interest, a motorcycle racer named Bonnie, and somberly riding off into the sunset with her corpse on his back after killing her murderer.
• Drop Dead Gorgeous: Like in any other erotic Pulp Magazine series of its time, the author's Space Adventure Cobra included, most of the female characters in the story are barely dressed and tend to be killed while topless or completely naked.
  • The peacock assassin feels empowered from hypnotizing people to death while standing around nearly nude and untouchable, but is shot down by Goku in a pathetic way and, particularly in the OVA, is prominently shown sprawled on the floor as she dies. In the same scene, a nude Yoko is lying mortally poisoned next to Goku but she isn't subject to this trope when she dies in the hospital.
  • The cover of the series' artbook is of a mournful Goku standing over Yoko's unconscious, mortally poisoned body in underwear. One of the colored illustrations in the book is the volume 3 scene of Li-Chen Li's corpse being left nude and covered in toxic tattoos to spite Goku, in a reference to the signature scene of Goldfinger. Said scene is followed by two pages of her corpse being examined in a morgue.
  • In the series' next-to-last page, Cassandra is killed by a bath of molten metal while in a nude demoness form. She's left dramatically petrified with her back arched backwards in agony, breasts pointed toward the ceiling.
• Electronic Eyes: The title character receives a cyber-eye that does everything an eye, a computer, a microscope, a telescope, an infrared camera and the fabled X-Ray Specs can do. Plus the thing can tap into some kind of Electronic Eye in his ranged weapon to assist targeting.
• Everything Is Online: Which is justified by the cyberpunk setting. It is stated that Goku could hack even the Russian and American nuclear missile systems, even though this is never relevant to the plot.
• Eye Scream: It features one of the most horrifying instances of this trope, involving Goku stabbing his own left eye trying to survive his encounter with the peacock assassin.
• Fan Disservice:
  • There is a regular erotization of female corpses much like in the author's Space Adventure Cobra, but it gets even more violent when one villainess is inflated until she explodes and is left as a nude bloody torso on the floor.
  • Cassandra takes on a nude demonic form that looks mostly stunningly beautiful, except for her monstrous face.
• Fanservice: Female characters are constantly seen casually topless or nude.
• Faux Affably Evil: Genji Hakuryu acts very polite and calm, however it's very easy to see his true sadistic personality oozing through.
• Femme Fatale: Naturally, being a cyberpunk work, Goku encounters a few, among them the peacock assassin with the hypno-tail (whose only cloth, for bonus points, is black).
• Full-Frontal Assault:
  • The peacock woman goes around in only panties, possibly for extra hypnosis.
  • Also Yoko, who was hypnotized by the peacock woman, attacks Goku with a knife while naked.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: In volume 2, a female ninja is bitten in half by a shark and Reiko, an assassin who tries to kill Goku during sex, is instead blown in half by her own bug robot.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • The midget assassin is killed by his own gynoid when it blasts him through the head with a laser.
  • In volume 2, one of the kunoichi attacking Goku in a pool releases sharks in it but this only gets one of her companions killed. A few scenes later, Reiko seduces Goku but is caught and horribly killed by her own trap.
• Horse of a Different Color: The armored midget rides into combat a feral, laser-shooting, topless stripper cyborg with a motorcycle handlebar on her back.
• Hotter and Sexier: Goku is very close in tone to Terasawa's own Space Adventure Cobra, but with the advantage that outside the confines of Shonen Jump he could insert as much boobage with defined nipples and on-panel sex as he desired. Interestingly, once Cobra got installments sold for the seinen demographic, Terasawa still kept them consistent with the original series instead of raising the violence and sex level to that of Goku.
• Human Pet: The topless, laser-shooting female android in the first story arc has animalistic behavior and acts like a Right-Hand Cat to Genji. Another minor antagonist even rides her in battle by holding to the motorcycle handlebar on her back. Terasawa would later release a sequel story to Space Adventure Cobra where the main villain owns two robo-women like her, which he walks around on leashes.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The manga's volumes organize the story in arcs rather than individual chapters and the first five are named after the Girl of the Week featured in them.
• Instant Expert: At least in the OVA, Goku masters the Sun Wu Kong rod offscreen and apparently quite fast. One can almost forget he is supposed to be a detective and not a pole vaulting champion when watching him Roof Hopping with the damn thing. The manga states he has training in bojutsu, the Japanese art of staff fighting, but that still doesn't explain all of it.
• Jekyll & Hyde: In one adventure Goku investigates a celebrity targeted by a gang and it turns out she not only has a raging case of Hollywood dissociative identity disorder but her other persona is the leader of the gang.
• Mind over Matter: The villains of the second OVA have telekinesis thanks to military experiments.
• Ms. Fanservice: Nearly every female character in the story is virtually and gratuitously naked, with the peacock woman being Terasawa's portrayal of femme fatales in a nutshell — literally all she does is silently stand around topless, looking all smokin' hot, until she's killed for it.
• No Ending: The series after the first chapter is a sequence of only six self-contained incidents investigated by Goku with no Myth Arc or resolution. Chapter 5 gets pushed to the end depending on the version, so the series either closes with Goku happily polevaulting into a city in the "Cassandra" arc or somberly riding into the horizon with the dead body of Bonnie on his back.
• No Name Given: The name of the peacock woman in the "Yoko" arc is never given, although the manga's notes name her aptly as "Kujaku" or "Peacock". The armored midget and the motorcycle woman are also never named.
• No Shirt, Long Jacket: Goku wears no shirt under his jacket and tie.
• Nothing Personal: The English dub of the first OVA by Manga Entertainment had Goku say this as a Bond One-Liner after killing the peacock assassin, which doesn't fit the scene at all because he executed her while she was unknowingly defenseless purely out of revenge. In the original manga, he even talked down to her corpse with a look of contempt on his face.
• Off with His Head!: The female motorcycle-like cyborg gets killed when she smashes her neck on Goku's pole at full speed and her disembodied head's laser is used to kill both the midget assassin and Genji.
• One-Steve Limit: Three major and unrelated love interests happen to be named "Yoko", "Ryoko" and then "Yuuko".
• "Pop!" Goes the Human: In volume 2, Reiko has sex with Goku while aiming to kill him with a bug robot that inflates its victims until they explode. In the end it is her who gets stung and blown in half by the thing while Goku just watches the gruesome scene with a cruel smile.
• Product Placement: A scene in the "Cassandra the Enchantress" arc prominently shows a Coca-Cola billboard above a movie theater that's showing an unspecified James Bond film.
• Production Throwback:
  • "Yoko", "Yuko" and "Bonnie" were also names of love interests in Space Adventure Cobra. In fact, there were two Yukos tied to creators of Cobra's arsenal who were otherwise unrelated.
  • The topless red-haired cyborg woman who shoots lasers from her mouth and runs on all fours is very reminiscent of Rajaki from Space Adventure Cobra. Terasawa later introduced even more henchwomen like them in The Psychogun sequel arc of Cobra, and it's worth noting that all of them are killed by head explosion or decapitation.
  • In the "Leila" arc, Leila/Risa sings a song written by Buichi Terasawa that was originally used in the Hell Crusaders arc of Space Adventure Cobra.
  • The anime adaptation drops a reference to Yoshiaki Kawajiri's Cyber City Oedo 808 when "OEDO 808 EXPRESS" is briefly seen written on the side of a truck.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: The peacock assassin kills in this fashion, taking control of her victims' minds and forcing them to kill themselves.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: When Yoko is mortally poisoned as a result of the peacock woman's scheme, Goku kills the assassin without hesitation even though his God's Eye made him immune to her brainwashing and rendered her defenseless. Yoko dies soon after she's taken to a hospital, leading Goku to declare war on Genji in public via a satellite transmission and storm his headquarters.
• Sexy Packaging: The covers for most of the manga's volumes focus more on the alluring and provocatively dressed women found in the story than on Goku himself. Some of them are even way less significant than implied by the covers.
• Shout-Out:
  • Ryu is obviously based on Roy from Blade Runner.
  • Li-Chen Li is killed by drug overdose from being tattooed all over her body with heroin and her nude corpse is left for Goku to find, evoking the signature scene of Goldfinger. One background also shows a theater advertising a James Bond film.
• Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: This shameless pulp comic is between levels 2 and 3, so every female character is either a helpless damsel or an evil nude henchwoman, and all of them get sexualized on every opportunity, all the way to the grave.
• Small Role, Big Impact: The peacock assassin barely appears in the first arc and is effortlessly killed by Goku, but it's because of her hypnosis that he's forced to stab his own eye and ends up getting it replaced with an all-powerful augmentation.
• Spot the Impostor: In volume 2, Goku is attacked by a group of kunoichi who resemble Yuuko and crowd around her in a pool to confuse him. With his cyber eye, Goku can tell the real Yuuko apart from the imposters specifically because he just had sex with her and she was still aroused.
• Taking You with Me: Zhang is easily killed by Goku but removes the top of his head to unleash a swarm of deathly venomous mosquitoes to kill Goku. The protagonist escapes, but fails to save the nearby Yoko who soon dies in the hospital.
• Telefrag: The Arc Villain of the "Ryoko" arc, Zenzo, is an overwhelmingly powerful psychic that could block and deflect anything thrown at him. With his cyber-eye, Goku does research on a weapon that could overcome the villain's telekinesis and finds the answer is interdimensional missiles. In the end, Zenzo has Goku on the ropes but is too distracted to notice the hero's car shooting a missile from the side and is blown to Ludicrous Gibs when it warps into his body.
• Telescoping Staff: This is Goku's weapon (and means of transportation) of choice.
• This Cannot Be!: The peacock assassin kills several men with her hypnosis while standing around half-naked with a smug smile on her face until an immunized Goku shoots her down. She dies with eyes open in shock, with her only words uttered in the story being disbelief that her ability could have failed.
• Token Motivational Nemesis: The peacock woman's failed assassination attempt of Goku is what ends up causing him to become a super powerful cyborg. He kills her without hesitation on their next encounter and also kills her boss Genji within the first volume of the manga.
• The Unreveal: It is never revealed who gave Goku his eye and rod.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: As said above, Goku doesn't wear a shirt on his suit, yet nobody points this out. Apparently, either future dressing codes are that weird or Goku has a pass because he is a hunk.
• The Vamp: Yoko is turned into one by the peacock woman, setting her up to seduce and kill Goku.
• Would Hit a Girl: Goku is characterized as a ruthless and cold-blooded anti-hero in part by his willingness to kill female opponents, not unlike how the author frequently wrote Cobra killing hot villainesses in dispassionate and even cruel ways.
  • To avenge the dying Yoko and the policemen driven to suicide by peacock assassin, Goku kills the woman in cold blood while she was inoffensive due to being both unaware of his immunity to her hypnosis and unarmed aside from that.
  • In volume 2, Goku is attacked by a squad of female ninjas who he kills in increasingly gruesome ways. One is impaled on his pole, another is bitten in half by a shark and the last two are trapped by Goku inside a boiler room and burned to death. When their leader gets herself blown up while having sex with Goku, the protagonist actually smirks at her horrible fate.

---