Leiko Wu

85 ALBERT EMBANKMENT, LONDON SE1, ENGLAND

Real Name:

Leiko Wu. The given name is Japanese. This site has long recorded that it means “arrogant.” The surname is Chinese. The passport is British. Moench stacked the three and then wrote the arrogance into the first scene, so that a dictionary would be redundant. She is a Marvel invention. Sax Rohmer never wrote her. Fleming’s girls last an episode. She lasts the book.

She is what Doug Moench built when the series required a British field agent who was not Reston and not a prize. Younger than Reston, older than Shang-Chi, already finished with the man who will spend the rest of the run failing to be finished with her. Paul Gulacy drew her as if a Bond girl had walked out of a Hammer picture and refused to die in act three. That is not coincidence. It is the joke the book is in on.

Aliases:

Personal Use: Leiko Wu, Miss Wu, Agent Wu.

Cover / Operational: whatever MI-6 and, later, Freelance Restorations Limited require. Hypnotic courier for Project: Ultra-Violet — the copy of the ozone-war file that Putnam locked in her mind, and that she was commanded to forget she carried. Expediter kit in the Arctic. Ripper bait in Whitechapel. The woman in Reston’s bathtub is not a cover. It is a withdrawal in progress.

Nicknames: None that stick. Reston says Leiko. Shang-Chi says her name as if it were a vow. Tarr does not call her “Chinaman.” The absence of a nickname is not a class marker. It is a refusal to be reduced.

Known Relatives:

Mr. Wu (father, deceased; in her words, “a Hong Kong Cultural Attaché — and sometime spy for the Crown — stationed in London”), unnamed mother, David Wu (older brother; diplomatic service; Hong Kong embassy, New York; will not do the other family trade), Clive Reston (husband, after the original monthly run; formerly lover), Shang-Chi (lover; not kin, which is the entire problem).

The father served two masters and called it attaché work. The son refused the second master. The daughter took the second master as a career. That is not a rebellion against the house. It is the house completed.

[ Chronology, this site, 1949. ] [ Master of Kung Fu #88–89. ] [ The Family Tree, this site. ]

Physical Traits:

The Official Handbook tradition files her at 5′8″ and 133 lbs. Dark hair. Dark eyes. A beautiful Chinese-British woman in her twenties throughout the classic run, dressed, off duty, as if the clothes were a private joke, and on duty as if the joke had been issued a sidearm. She is handsome in a way the Bond pictures spend money to fake. In a room of spies she is the one you were not supposed to find in the tub.

Gulacy, a film buff, modeled faces on movie stars. Juliette is Dietrich. James Larner is Brando. Richard Blaine is Bogart. Ward Sarsfield is Niven. Reston occasionally resembles Basil Rathbone or Sean Connery. Leiko is frequently read as Ingrid Pitt: Hammer’s countess, British by career, foreign by face, and not in the bath for your benefit. The artist is telling you the genre the lawyer will not let the balloon say. Pitt is the horror picture. Connery is the spy picture. Leiko is what happens when the two pictures share a cast.

The voice is educated London with the edge still on it: sarcasm first, tenderness later, and only if the mission has a later. Publication History on this site has already said the useful sentence: though initially sarcastic and self-possessed to the point of arrogance, her relationship with Shang-Chi causes her to become more contemplative. The sentence remains the right one. What follows is only the mechanism.

Occupation:

British intelligence officer and field agent. Objective: the mission as written. To locate, oppose, and destroy Dr. Fu Manchu when that is the brief. To survive the brief when it is not. To remain, if possible, her own woman in a firm of men who keep trying to file her as someone’s, which is a different assignment and the one she keeps having to repeat.

Formerly an officer of MI-6 under Sir Denis Nayland Smith. Founding operative of Freelance Restorations Limited. Returned to MI-6 after Bleeding Black. Reston, introducing her, does not hedge:

You'll like her, Chi. Leiko's one of the best agents Smith's got — you and I included ... and a classier woman you won't find anywhere.

[ Clive Reston, Master of Kung Fu #33. ]

He is not flattering her. He is reading the file aloud. The compliment is also a surrender he has not admitted yet.

Known Base of Operations:

85 Albert Embankment — London, England (Secret Intelligence Service / MI-6).

Stormhaven Castle — England (Freelance Restorations Limited).

A London flat of her own — the rooms to which Shang-Chi is relegated, after War-Yore, to a couch, and later the rooms in which Fleetwood Mac and pizza try to be a life.

Formerly an apartment associated with King’s Row, London — Reston’s, in whose bathtub she is already waiting when Shang-Chi first meets her.

David Wu’s world at the Hong Kong embassy — New York City, New York.

Hong Kong, for the months she takes leave of the firm to sit with a dying man.

Various safe houses, hotel rooms, motorcycles, hourglasses, Arctic caves, and other people’s operations in France, Switzerland, Morocco, the East China Sea, Whitechapel, and wherever Smith pointed next.

Group Membership:

MI-6. Freelance Restorations Limited.

Affiliations:

Shang-Chi, Clive Reston, Black Jack Tarr, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, Dr. Petrie, Fah Lo Suee (rarely, and never for free), Dark Angel (Mia Lessing), Melissa Greville, James Larner, Rufus “Super Midnight” Carter, Ducharme, Pavane (when the brief requires protecting her), Shen Kuei (when the brief, or the woman, requires him). Temporary and professional alliances with anyone Smith still trusted after the last bombing. The personal alliances are fewer, and they cost more.

Enemies:

Mordillo, Brynocki, Fu Manchu, Fah Lo Suee (typically), Shockwave (Lancaster Sneed), Golden Daggers, Oriental Expediters, War-Yore (Eric Slaughter), Maximillian Zaran, Ward Sarsfield, Leopard Cult, Si-Fan, Pavane (when the brief requires surviving her), Shen Kuei (in love, which is a different kind of enemy), Ghost Maker, Death-Dealer, Razor-Fist, Carlton Velcro, Kogar, Samisdat, Argus and the Red Wolves, the Whitechapel Ripper (Phillip, elixir-mad), Skull-Crusher, Shadow-Slasher, and the men on her own side who keep deciding, in a crisis, that she is the thing to be saved instead of the agent doing the saving.

Skills & Abilities:

- She is not Shang-Chi’s equal in a room, and she is not Tarr’s equal in a doorway. She is their equal in the rest of the spy’s catalogue: infiltration, cover, sabotage, vehicles, the gun, the lie, the timed exit, the charm that opens a door kung fu would only break. Reston has the same catalogue. Reston, introducing her, ranks her with himself and with Shang-Chi, and then above both of them for class. Tradecraft is the craft. Kung fu is other people’s craft. She can do enough of the second to survive the first.

- She is a first-rate marksman. On the Swiss road in Master of Kung Fu #44 she takes down Golden Daggers with the pistols before a grenade does what the men could not. In Lausanne she escapes a truck and shoots two Expediters. Shang-Chi will not finish a man with a gun if he can help it. Leiko will. That is not a moral defect in a service that sends her into rooms where the other side has already chosen lethal force. It is the difference between a philosopher on loan to MI-6 and an officer of MI-6.

- She is a competent, sometimes dirty, close-combat fighter of the British school with enough Chinese method in it to make the comparison to Shang-Chi a standing insult she does not need. She knocks Mordillo down with her wrists just untied. She jumps a War-Yore tower to a rampart. She swims into Kogar’s grotto. She walks Whitechapel as bait. Cowardice is not the file. Being used as a hostage is the file’s recurring clerical error.

- She can ride what the plot requires. A motorcycle to Switzerland while the men take Reston’s Ferrari. A stolen Expediter identity onto Fah Lo Suee’s Arctic flight. A parachute onto Mordillo’s mutated island. Reston is the one who slips aboard the Doctor’s machine. Leiko is the one who gets Shang-Chi out of the death the machine was built for, and who is already running when Reston is still making a speech on a Swiss shore.

- She is a linguist of the serviceable kind, an actress of the professional kind, and a courier of the kind MI-6 prefers not to advertise: the file that lives in the agent’s head, locked, until a dead man’s code word opens it. Project: Ultra-Violet is not a gadget. It is Leiko. Mordillo spends an island trying to unscrew her and dies in the beam of his own sun. The hypnotic lock holds. So does she.

- She can talk. Not Reston’s puns. The other talk: the kind that almost brings War-Yore back to himself before the men she loves decide that shooting him is cleaner. The kind that offers Fah Lo Suee a place with the heroes in an Arctic waste, which is either naïveté or the only diplomacy the daughter of Fu Manchu has ever been extended by this firm. The kind that confesses in Casablanca because Shang-Chi is owed the truth and Reston will not give it. Talking is not a soft skill in this book. It is the skill the gun cannot do.

- She is not immune to gas, concussion, abduction, hospital time, or the particular wound of being good at a job that keeps putting her in other people’s traps. The last of these is the one she keeps volunteering for by remaining in the Service. It has never been quite bad enough to keep her from doing the job. It has been bad enough that the job has had to be done from a hospital bed, a couch, and, once, Cat’s arms. That is not a Bond girl. That is Leiko.

History:

Leiko Wu was born in 1949, the daughter of a Hong Kong cultural attaché who was also, when the Crown required it, a spy stationed in London. The year is this chronology’s speculation, based on apparent age: older than Shang-Chi, younger than Clive Reston, who was born in February 1947. The brother’s name is David. He follows the father into diplomacy and stops at the door marked espionage. She does not stop. By the early 1970s she is Smith’s woman in the only sense that matters to Smith: not the aide-de-camp (that is Tarr) and not the living weapon (that will be Shang-Chi) and not the gentleman you send into the party (that is Reston), but the agent you send when the gentleman is not enough and the weapon has not yet been hired. Reston is already in the file as lover. That relationship will not survive her first scene. Reston will spend the rest of the book failing to accept that. [ Chronology, this site. ] [ The James Bond Chronology by Win Scott Eckert. ]

The comics will not give her a big origin issue. They give her a bathtub, a dead courier’s code, and a man who introduces her as the best agent in the room. Origin is for people who need to be explained. Leiko is already at work.

First Appearance:

Master of Kung Fu #33 (cover-dated October 1975; 3MAC placement July 1975), “Wicked Messenger of Madness,” by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy. Leiko is introduced as a lover in the act of being former. That fact is not a wrinkle. It is the other half of Reston. Reston is the gentleman you meet in Smith’s parlor. Leiko is the woman you meet in Reston’s tub, after the gentleman has already failed to mention she would be there.

Shang-Chi has survived Velcro’s fortress and a robot with gun-barrel eyes at Victoria Station. Reston takes him to the new London flat. Leiko is using the bathtub. Reston strongly hints that they were lovers. She hints just as strongly that they are not. Smith calls them to Scotland Yard. The bullets that missed Reston are inscribed MY FAIR LADY. Agent Norris Putnam is dead. Simon Bretnor is missing. Project: Ultra-Violet will open holes in the ozone. A copy of the research lives in Leiko’s mind, hypnotically locked, and she has been commanded to forget that she carries it. When she hears Putnam’s name, she slips out of the meeting. That is her first professional act on panel: she does not wait to be briefed. The note Reston finds at her place is from “Simon.” Bretnor is Mordillo. She is taken. [ Master of Kung Fu #33. ]

Shang-Chi, meeting her, is looking at a woman who resembles Sandra Chen — Len Wein and Gulacy’s agent, already dead, already a lesson. Moench does not replace a corpse with a quieter girl. He replaces a corpse with a woman who will not stay replaced.

The Hourglass:

Moench’s reconstruction of the book into an espionage thriller is also Leiko’s reason for existing. Smith becomes the head of a team. Tarr is already there. Reston arrives in the Giant-Size. Leiko arrives in Master of Kung Fu #33. Shang-Chi is folded in as an informal agent. The Rohmer hunt acquires Fleming weather: villains with islands, gadgets, femme fatales, and nuclear punch lines. Leiko is the Fleming weather that refuses to be weather. She is personnel.

Mordillo’s island is the template. He wants the ozone file she does not remember she holds. He unties her wrists. She knocks him down. Brynocki lassos her. Reston flies a rocket plane into the East China Sea because there is no landing strip, and because Leiko is on the island. Tarr tells Smith that Reston has a “personal involvement” and that he, Tarr, should have gone instead. Smith says there is far more at stake than the lives of three agents. There is. There is also a woman in an hourglass while two men argue about whose feelings are operational. Shang-Chi smashes the glass. Reston cannot find Mordillo in the smoke. Shang-Chi and Leiko embrace as Reston looks on. The pattern is set. [ Master of Kung Fu #34–35. ]

The rescue is the beginning of Shang-Chi and Leiko. Reston remains on the team. Remaining is not the same as accepting. Being rescued is not the same as being a damsel. The hourglass is a prop. The woman who walks out of it will spend the next hundred issues proving the difference, and the plot will keep building hourglasses anyway.

The Triangle:

By Master of Kung Fu #44 Reston has stopped pretending the fire is out. The Golden Daggers war is on. Smith has been shot. Petrie is the mole. Fah Lo Suee is back. Leiko, who can do almost anything a field woman is asked to do, cannot do the one thing the men now require, which is to be a prize they can split without asking her.

She takes the motorcycle. The men take the Ferrari. She is ambushed, drops two of them with the pistols, and is knocked out by a grenade, which the book will file as another abduction. She escapes. She rescues Shang-Chi and Reston from certain death. Reston, having swum Lake Geneva, having talked too much, having been tattooed by Fah Lo Suee’s mimosa, delivers the triangle as a speech on a Swiss shore. Leiko shuts it down. Fast. That is her answer to Reston’s “I fight dirty.” She does not fight him. She ends the subject. He drives off alone. [ Master of Kung Fu #44–46. ]

Master of Kung Fu #47, “Phantom Sand,” is Leiko’s issue in the way the Arctic wireless is Tarr’s and the spider on the chest is Reston’s. The narration is hers. Shang-Chi and Leiko ride Fah Lo Suee’s Arctic flight in stolen Expediter gear. They unmask. Death Angels in jetpacks. Griswold dies. Ducharme is still the Doctor’s. Fu Manchu means to knock the moon from orbit. Leiko offers Fah Lo Suee a place with the heroes. That offer is not sisterhood. It is a professional recognizing another professional who has run out of fathers. In a cave they take what warmth the Arctic will give. Reston sabotages the Doctor’s machine. Shang-Chi faces the Devil Doctor. Leiko and Tarr retreat, which is not retreat. It is the extraction the philosopher will not perform on himself. Then Shang-Chi walks out of Smith’s game, and so does everyone else. Leiko included. She quits with him. [ Master of Kung Fu #47–51. ]

They come back. They always come back. A renegade faction inside MI-6 tries to have Shang-Chi, Leiko, Tarr, and Reston murdered by War-Yore, so that the Service will not have to sign the order. She is gassed and taken. She escapes a cage and jumps a tower. She almost talks War-Yore back to himself. Shang-Chi’s attack snaps the spell. Reston shoots War-Yore dead. Leiko condemns both of the men for killing someone she might have saved, tells Shang-Chi she is not “his woman,” and walks out. Reston blames Smith. Shang-Chi believes the romance is over. The fire, it turns out, cannot be owned. Ownership was the men’s subject. It was never hers. [ Master of Kung Fu #54–58. ]

Stormhaven and Freelance Restorations:

She yearns. Reston, when she turns to him, gives her the brush-off; he is already substituting Melissa Greville. Shang-Chi sails off with Juliette. The book is not gentle about any of this. A month after Hong Kong they try London anyway: pizza, Fleetwood Mac, sparring at a thinning kung fu school, Close Encounters, a carriage ride. He wonders if he chose her because she is familiar. The evening ends when a battered Nayland Smith collapses in their doorway. He has resigned. The private life lasts one issue, which is about as long as private life lasts in this firm. [ Master of Kung Fu #71. ]

MI-6 turns on the team in earnest. Shockwave. Brynocki. Ward Sarsfield. Shang-Chi and Leiko parachute onto Mordillo’s island for Tarr. Zaran blows out her tire. Shang-Chi carries her unconscious into a village. A concussion takes her out of the Stormhaven fight. Smith, having been hunted by his own office, founds Freelance Restorations Limited and hangs a shingle on the stones. Leiko goes with him. Of course she does. The father was a spy who called it attaché work. The daughter does not know how to go anywhere else. [ Master of Kung Fu #72–83. ]

Before the shingle is dry, Morocco. Smith is taken by the Leopard Cult. Reston and Leiko go to get him out. They receive unexpected assistance. They also decide, at the precise moment when the most helpful thing they could do is not this, to give each other an orgasm. Leiko later confesses to Shang-Chi. Reston, confronted, denies it, thinking he is defending her honor. Shang-Chi cold-cocks him. The friendship is strained. The book does not pretend otherwise. Leiko is not a femme fatale in the Victorian sense. She is a woman who will take comfort that was once hers if it is offered, and then tell the truth about it in a way Reston believes is unnecessary. That is better than the lie. Shang-Chi hits Reston for the right reason. The confession is hers. The punch is not. [ Master of Kung Fu #84–87. ]

Fu Manchu is beaten in New York. Smith and company plan on returning to London. Shang-Chi chooses the Big Apple. Leiko stays with him. That choice is the nearest thing the original book gives her to a resignation that is not a storming-off. It does not last either. It becomes Chinatown, her brother’s embassy, a gang war, a bullet Shang-Chi takes, a Si-Fan gorilla in the sewers, and then Stormhaven’s first jobs. She bails him out. She investigates. She is still the agent. Staying was never the same as retiring. [ Master of Kung Fu #88–97. ]

Whitechapel, Cat, and the End of the Hunt:

The hundredth issue is three eras. In the present, Leiko walks London as Ripper bait. The killer is Phillip, elixir-mad, Fah Lo Suee’s old white lover. Fah Lo Suee, who loved him, shoots him when he lunges at her. Leiko survives. Survival, this time, takes six weeks in a hospital. Barely able to stand, she reconnects a dying man’s machine and tells Shang-Chi he died naturally, which is a kindness and a lie in the proportions this job requires. Then she is compelled to prove herself. Tarr has a lead he refused. She takes the solo Hong Kong job. Shang-Chi follows. He finds her in Shen Kuei’s arms. The two masters fight for honor, victory, and love, which is three words for the same bruise. Leiko takes Tarr’s gun, stops the duel, and leaves with Cat. At a crumbling temple the two couples face off until Juliette and Leiko threaten each other into a truce. The Nazi wreck is sunk. Each man leaves with the woman who chose him. [ Master of Kung Fu #100–104. ]

That choice is not a replacement of Shang-Chi. It is Leiko declining to be convalescent. Cat is the mirror. Juliette is the other woman. Leiko is the agent who would not sit in the hospital while the men finished her job. They come back together anyway. They parachute onto Velcro’s island in samurai-style armor. They spar while Dark Angel talks Ghost Maker. Ghost Maker leaves Paris with a weather weapon and Leiko hanging from his boot. Death-Dealer rockets her flat. In the Honan finale, while Shang-Chi pours out the last of his father’s blood-work, Leiko and Mia save Smith from the Si-Fan in London. The philosopher tells Smith he is the father he never had. The woman who is not “his woman” is the reason Smith is alive to hear it. [ Master of Kung Fu #105–118. ]

Brynocki, still talking to Mordillo’s skull, raids empty Sunday MI-6 to kidnap her and prop her bones on a throne beside his dead boss. She swims out of the Thames instead. Reston is hired to recapture a mad double agent who once hunted Reston and Leiko; it is a drug-and-asylum trap; she and Shang-Chi pull Reston out. There is no payday. The original monthly book ends in 1983 with Shang-Chi a fisherman in Yang Yin. Leiko is not in that village. She is in the Service’s weather, where she belongs. [ Master of Kung Fu #119, #122. ]

After the Original Run:

Marvel Comics Presents #1–8 (1988) reunites the cast. Leiko is taken by Argus and the Red Wolves. Shang-Chi is poisoned and given, by doctors, no more than a year. Reston’s drinking meets Shang-Chi’s mortality and loses. Leiko, Tarr, and Reston help him take a sample of the Elixir Vitae from Shadow-Hand. Marvel Comics Presents #156–158 (1994; in-world 1989) is the Midnight Slasher from Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #8. Shang-Chi’s imminent death has caused Leiko to take leave of Freelance Restorations and spend the last months living with him in Hong Kong. She is kidnapped. He runs the gauntlet. Master of Kung Fu: Bleeding Black (1990) is the last of the Doctor’s medicine. Whether it cured the toxin is uncertain. Shang-Chi faces extended life or imminent death with inner peace. Leiko is there for the hunt. She is there for the months. She is not invited into the peace. Peace, in this book, is a room that holds one. [ MCP #1–8. ] [ MCP #156–158. ] [ Master of Kung Fu: Bleeding Black. ]

After Bleeding Black, on this chronology, Shang-Chi returns to seclusion. Leiko returns to London. Tarr, Reston, and Leiko go back to MI-6. Reston and Leiko marry. The triangle closes in the only way a spy story can close it without killing someone: the philosopher leaves the board, and the two agents remain on it together. Fah Lo Suee no longer holds any high-ranking position in the Service. The circumstances are not revealed. [ Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu #1–6, in-world 1990–1993. ]

Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu #1–6 (2002; in-world 1994) is Moench and Gulacy again. Tarr and Reston request Shang-Chi’s aid against a mastermind called the Ghost, believed to be the Comte de Saint-Germain, in possession of Nikola Tesla’s Hellfire Objective and of Leiko. The Ghost is Fu Manchu. Shang-Chi and Leiko are still attracted. She remains faithful to Reston. Fu Manchu and Moving Shadow appear to die. Shang-Chi goes back to the island. Leiko is last seen doing the thing she was built to do: surviving the Doctor one more time, and then remaining the officer, married to the other officer, in the Service that will always have another Ghost.

In Journey into Mystery #514–516 she appears only in a photograph, with Shang-Chi, Reston, and Tarr. The photograph is the correct last image. The original Leiko is a member of a firm. She does not photograph well as a girlfriend. She photographs well as a woman standing next to people who would be incomplete without her.

The Character:

Smith is the hunt. Tarr is the body. Reston is the Bond picture that the book hangs on the wall and then refuses to let you enjoy without cost. Shang-Chi is the conscience. Leiko is the equal. Publication History on this site has already said the useful sentence: she is introduced as a femme fatale, not unlike those of the Bond films; a beautiful Chinese-British woman; torn, at the beginning, between a romantic history with Reston and a growing attraction to Shang-Chi; sarcastic and self-possessed to the point of arrogance; a Japanese given name this site records as meaning “arrogant”; the relationship with Shang-Chi makes her contemplative. The sentence remains the right one. What follows is only the mechanism.

She is introduced in a bathtub. That is the structural joke. Tarr is the trap. Reston is the handshake. Leiko is the Bond entrance, and then the book spends a decade refusing to let the entrance be the character. Shang-Chi has spent his life among Fu Manchu’s instruments, who bow and then try to kill him. Leiko is wet, sarcastic, and already done with the handsome man in the doorway. The done-ness is the problem. Reston is not done. Shang-Chi is not done. The plot is not done: it will put her in an hourglass, a truck, a War-Yore cage, a car wreck, a Ripper’s street, Cat’s arms, Ghost Maker’s boot, Brynocki’s throne-fantasy, Argus’s hands, the Ghost’s. Being taken is the plot’s habit. Getting out is hers. The original Shang-Chi — the man of Honan and MI-6 and the fisherman’s retirement — is incomplete without a woman who can do the job he will not keep. She is that woman.

The Bond pastiche is the surface. Moench is not writing a pastiche. He is writing the bill. Bond’s girl knows something, gets captured, gets saved, gets a fade-out. Leiko knows something, gets captured, gets out, shoots two Expediters, shuts down the triangle on a Swiss shore, narrates the Arctic, almost talks a madman back into his name, and then tells the hero she is not his woman. Bond’s girl does not quit MI-6 because the Service was ready to nuke Asia. Leiko does. Bond’s girl does not take a solo Hong Kong job six weeks after a Ripper put her in hospital. Leiko does. Bond’s girl does not marry the other agent after the philosopher has gone back to an island. Leiko does, and then remains faithful when the philosopher is called in one more time and the attraction has not died. That is not a fade-out. That is a career.

The arrogance is professional. She is as good as Reston and she knows it, and Reston said so first, which is the only time in the triangle he is gracious without being asked. The contemplation is Shang-Chi’s gift and his tax. He makes her think. She makes him stay in the world. The Writer’s Guide on this site has already said the other useful sentence: Leiko Wu is not the girlfriend who gets kidnapped; she is the female lead, an MI-6 operative who is better at the job than the men who send her. The kidnappings still happen. The sentence is still true. The book can use her as a hostage and she can still be the lead. That is not a contradiction. It is the job. Agents get taken. Leads get out, and then they file the report.

She is brave. That should be said without the sneer the damsel plot sometimes earns her. She slips out of Scotland Yard because Putnam is dead and the file is in her head. She knocks Mordillo down with her wrists free. She rides into Fah Lo Suee’s helicopter in the other side’s clothes. She walks Whitechapel as bait. She takes the job Tarr refused. She sits the last months in Hong Kong with a man the doctors have already buried. Cowardice is not the flaw. The flaw, if it is a flaw, is that bravery, in Leiko, is entangled with the Service. She needs the work. Shang-Chi does not need the work. Tarr does not know how to be anything except the work. Reston inherited the work from a father the balloons cannot name. Leiko took the work from a father who called it attaché duty and a brother who would not touch it. Vanity is Reston’s leak. Belonging is hers. He is compromised by wanting to be seen. She is compromised by having a chain of command, a pension, and a career that requires her, occasionally, to lie to the one man who will not lie to her. Trust is the real MacGuffin. The romance is only the expensive way the book keeps score.

Morocco is the ugly version of the same belonging: not a femme fatale’s victory over a hero, but two professionals taking comfort because the cultists will be there in the morning and because the philosopher is in another hemisphere. She confesses. Reston lies to protect her. Shang-Chi hits the lie. Years later she marries Reston, after Shang-Chi has gone back to an island and the board has only agents left on it. That marriage is not a theft. It is what remains when the third point of the triangle chooses peace. Whether it is happy is not the original book’s business. That it happens, and that she remains faithful in 1994 with the attraction still in the room, is the original book’s honesty. Reston got the girl. She got the job. Shang-Chi got the island. Bond never had to divide those three. That is why Bond is a fantasy and Leiko is a supporting character in a tragedy that belongs to someone else — except that “supporting” is the clerical error again. Remove her and the team is three men and a hunt. With her it is a firm. The original book is a firm.

Call her a femme fatale. Call her the attaché’s daughter and the diplomat’s sister and Reston’s wife. Call her the woman in the bathtub, the woman in the hourglass, the woman who narrated phantom sand, the woman who was not his woman, the woman who told the truth in Casablanca, the woman who walked Whitechapel as bait, the woman in Cat’s arms, the woman who sat the last months in Hong Kong. She is Smith’s officer, which is employment, and Shang-Chi’s equal, which is an achievement the kidnappings were designed to obscure. The original Shang-Chi — the man of Honan and MI-6 and the fisherman’s retirement — is incomplete without her. The philosopher needs a spy who stayed sharp enough to look like the enemy’s cinema and stubborn enough to be real. Leiko is that spy. She inherited a Japanese name, a Chinese house, and a British brief. She earned the arrogance. Then, over the length of a long book, she earned the contemplation. That is the character. It is not tidy. It is why she is worth the dossier.

Clarifications:

Leiko Wu should not be confused with:

- Sandra Chen, the MI-6 agent who precedes her on Gulacy’s paper and dies before Leiko’s first scene. Shang-Chi notes the resemblance. Resemblance is not reincarnation. Moench did not reprint a dead girl. He hired a living officer.

- The Bond girls she is costumed as. They get an episode. She gets the run. The bathtub is the costume. The file is the woman.

- Fah Lo Suee, who shares the book’s talent for surviving fathers and switching sides, and who is a different kind of equal. Fah Lo Suee is the Doctor’s daughter. Leiko is the Crown’s. They recognize each other in the Arctic. Recognition is not kinship.

- Leiko “the Black Lotus” Smith, who appears in James Reasoner’s Mike Shayne stories and is, depending on the genealogist, granddaughter or great-granddaughter of Fu Manchu. The given name is a coincidence the Wold Newton habit will not leave alone. The original Leiko Wu is not the Doctor’s blood. She is the woman who hunted him.

- The later Marvel officer who, in Secret Avengers, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (2014), and the Gene Luen Yang decade, is murdered, occulted, resurrected, and promoted into a director’s chair opposite a Ten Rings society this continuity does not recognize. That is Marvel’s Leiko. It is not this one.

- The Leiko of Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings (2022), who arrives as an old flame with a mission to rescue Reston so that someone else can steal a set of rings. The original Leiko is not a ten-ring errand. She is a field officer in a world of pistols, islands, and Fu Manchu.

For a more detailed exposition of Leiko Wu’s activities, See: Chronology.