The 1930s Shanghai setting strips away the post-apocalyptic mysticism and gives you something rawer: a man learning to kill in a city that's already decided death is the only currency that matters. Every fight is about territory, face, or survival in a place where the government itself is just another gang with better uniforms. You watch Kenshiro before he becomes legend, when he's still just trying to stay alive in a city designed to kill him.
Shanghai in the 1930s is a lawless place. Foreign governments and Chinese factions have split the city into quarters with their own rules, corruption runs everywhere, and local gangs rule the streets. Years ago a fighter called Yan Wang, the King of Death, cleaned out the worst of those gangsters using Hokuto Shinken, a deadly martial art, then vanished. He is Kasumi Kenshiro, the 62nd successor of that art, now working as a professor in Tokyo. When word arrives that his old Qing Bang Triad friend Pan Guang-Lin and Pan's sister Yu-Ling, whom Kasumi loves, are in danger, he gives up teaching and heads back to Shanghai. There he clashes with the three Hokuto families and rises against the corrupt Hong Hua Triads to restore the Qing Bang's honor and strength. The action series serves as a prequel to Fist of the North Star.
