The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

Blade of the Immortal

What's It About? 

Manji is an amoral swordsman, who has been cursed with eternal life. He has grown tired of living with all the death he has created. He has no skills other then those of killing, thus he forms a plan to regain his mortality: he shall kill one hundred evil men for each good one he has killed. The old witch who afflicted Manji with immortality agrees to Manji's proposition and Manji is set on his path to kill one thousand evil men. On his journey he meets a young girl, Rin, who has her own vengeance to seek against the sword school whose members slaughtered Rin's family. Rin and Manji journey together, each hoping to find some kind of peace. In their way are many varied enemies. Rin and Manji are almost constantly under attack and must learn to live their lives, avoiding being consumed by revenge.

Blade of the Immortal is scripted and illustrated by Hiroaki Samura. Dark Horse Comics is releasing the manga in a "deluxe" release, with the first volume slated for October 20. Each volume of the deluxe release will compile three volumes from the original manga (Dark Horse Comics released the 10th and final omnibus volume last November).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Why should you indulge in this deluxe edition of Hiroaki Samura's Blade of the Immortal manga? Well, if you've never had a chance to read it, this is a good opportunity, but beyond that, this is a gorgeous edition. Like Dark Horse's Berserk omnibuses, this is a hardcover with a faux-leather cover, thicker paper, and a ribbon bookmark, as well as a full-color appliqué on the front cover. That means, among other things, that it won't show fingerprints easily and it will look very classy on your shelves, if displaying books is your thing. But mostly this omnibus edition of the first three volumes is simply a good book.

Blade of the Immortal is a revenge story and a samurai story, but it also seems to reject and reshape both of those genres to its own ends. Manji, the male protagonist, has been granted immortality from a mysterious eight-hundred-year-old nun who basically infected him with “bloodworms” that repair his body in ways that are exactly as gross as they sound. In order to make up for past killings he feels guilty about, he's vowed to slay one thousand actual bad guys, at which point he hopes to somehow be rid of the bloodworms. Counting on this, Rin, the female protagonist, seeks him out and asks him to help her get revenge on the dojo-wrecking anti-samurai who murdered her parents, and somewhat against his better judgement, Manji agrees.

While at sixteen Rin is wholly convinced of the justice of what she's doing – and yes, her parents died horribly for things that they themselves didn't do – but Manji is perhaps less convinced. It's not hard to see that the people he and Rin are hunting are bad guys (one is wearing her mother's head sewn to his shoulder, not usually a mark in fiction of someone good), but given that her parents were killed in the name of vengeance it's hard to say that Rin's actions are all that different from those of the villains. This really comes to the fore in the third collected volume, when we get a bit of the main bad guy's backstory; he clearly had a miserable childhood filled with abuse, as did Makie, the woman he's involved with. But does that mean that they all get a free pass to just go around killing the people they might feel are responsible for their unhappiness? Makie thinks not, at least by the end of the omnibus, and the shift in her thinking is striking not just because of how it reflects back on Rin, but also in terms of how she views her mother, who was a sex worker, and how her change of viewpoint destigmatizes the woman and other sex workers she has come to know.

Manji and Rin have a fairly standard will they/won't they relationship that's already evolving by the final third of the book (her age is making it much more of a won't they), but that's less of a draw than the way the story plays out and the fascinating artwork that shows us how – two page, framed spreads end every major fight, panels that look like they were done in charcoals highlight some scenes, and the whole thing is just interesting to look at. It is gruesome in a variety of ways, and per Samura's request the Western reading order (or “flopped” artwork) remains from Dark Horse's original volumes, but if you've never experienced the story, now is your moment.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

Blade of the Immortal has been out in the US since before I was an anime fan, which to me, basically means it's been around forever. It came out back when publishers figured the only way to sell manga was to treat it like any other comic book: make it read left-to-right, publish a couple chapters at a time, skip chapters that seemed too “Japanese”, and market it to men. Although I certainly knew of Blade of the Immortal, as other fans were positively reverent, I never really touched it. Everything about it seemed too gory, too rugged, too masculine.

Today, I broke that twenty-year streak and finally read the first volume of Dark Horse's Deluxe Edition, which includes the first three volumes. At first, I wasn't feeling it. I found the rapidly-shifting art style, going between pen-and-ink and what looks to be charcoal or soft-leaded pencil, dense and hard to follow. I didn't care for the gore, the gritty dialogue, or watching the brutal murder of a mentally-disabled woman. I didn't know who these characters were or why they were swinging swords at each other, and they weren't well-established enough to make me care. The unusual method of localization – instead of flipping the art, manga panels are cut and pasted to make them read left-to-right – exacerbated my difficulties with reading it. I was fully prepared to write it off as the kind of edgy nonsense that had earned anime the unsavory reputation it had in the '90s.

But I persisted, albeit mostly because it's my job, and lo, I was rewarded. Once Manji meets Rin, things clear up. The art got cleaner and easier to read, using the pen-and-ink methods in ways that were much more reasonable. What's more, there was now a clear story instead of just endless blood and gore. Sure, it was still gory, but I don't mind that so much when there's a context for it, a compelling story that gives meaning to the violence.

It's not a particularly original story – a young woman and her bodyguard seek revenge for her parents' murder by rogue swordsmen. In fact, it reminded me of a more mature Rurouni Kenshin, minus the gentleness of the latter. Muji and Rin have a fun dynamic, and the way his gruff nonchalance plays off her earnestness adds both levity and heart.

I probably won't continue to read Blade of the Immortal, unless it falls into my lap – even if this edition is gorgeous, $50 per volume is a hefty price tag, especially for a series this long. However, for people who love this story, or samurai stories in general, this will look beautiful on your shelf.