Kagurabachi #1-10

Kagurabachi #1-10

Originally released in 2023

Written by Takeru Hokazono

Art by Takeru Hokazono

Most of the manga that I've read for this blog tend to be older series, and even the newer ones that I've read started roughly ten years ago.  I wanted to try a brand new series, and I remember there being a lot of buzz surrounding Kagurabachi a few months ago. (Though I'm not sure how much of it was a meme - for all I know, this is a Morbius-type situation where the success is impossibly exaggerated, though in this case, there weren't claims that the series made three Kagurabillion dollars)

The nice thing about going into this series is that I've heard very little about it, so I know basically nothing, even through osmosis.  My first thought was that this was going to be the manga equivalent of a crime drama or a revenge movie, with the manga starting off with the protagonist (Chihiro Rokuhira) cutting down a bunch of characters who seemed to be gangsters.

Chihiro is the son of a legendary swordsmith who's training in his father's ways.  Chihiro's father is the bumbling kind of dad, to the point where Chihiro seems more mature than his dad is, but Chihiro's father is so skilled that wars have been won by the swords that he's made.

Over the course of a three year time-skip, it's clear that something went wrong - Chihiro's father was killed, and Chihiro was left with a scar on the side of his face that serves as a constant reminder to hunt down those responsible and kill them.  The ones responsible have ties to a group of yazuka, gangsters, so Chihiro pays them a visit.

As it turns out, the people who killed his father were a group of sorcerers, so there goes my expectation that the series will be grounded. Chihiro's father put some sorcery into his blades, and the one that Chihiro uses is the sword that his father sacrificed his life to make.

Just when he thinks he has a lead, the yakuza boss that he's interrogating has a tree explode out of his body as soon as he starts talking about the Hishaku, the group of sorcerers who killed Chihaku's father and stole his weapons.  With this proving to be a dead end, they head for Tokyo, where one of their associates has picked up a tip on the location of one of the weapons.

Unfortunately, the source of the tip is a young girl who claims she saw someone using the strongest sword ever, so it doesn't seem very reliable at first. Even though it seems like she's freeloading off of them at first, the girl, Char, did see one of the weapons that Chihiro is after, and the Hishaku are pursuing her because she comes from a clan with powerful self-healing abilities.

Various gangsters and sorcerers chase after Chihiro and Char, with one of them forcing Chihiro to relive his most traumatic memory.  However, this just makes Chihiro angrier and motivates him further.

The first major villain of the series, Sojo, seems fairly no-nonsense; he's introduced by slaughtering everyone who just failed him (and their families for good measure) before heading straight for Chihiro's informant to find Char.  It's only the intervention of Chihiro that keeps her from being captured right away.

The action throughout this series is pretty fluid so far, so I can see why it's praised for that.  Sojo insists that he knows the intentions of the man who forged the swords that both of them are using, which naturally gets under Chihiro's skin - Sojo doesn't know that Chihiro is the son of the man that he claims to know so much about, but he proudly declares that these swords were made as the ultimate weapons for slaughter and death.

Using his understanding of his father's weapons, Chihiro takes a lightning blast head-on to protect the ordinary people around him, knowing that an attack like that requires a recharge time before it can be used again.  The scary thing is the reason why Sojo doesn't know about that limit - he's only had the sword for a week, and yet he's already gotten insanely skilled with its enchantments.

The authorities arrive, forcing Sojo to retreat, though not before he learns that Chihiro is the son of the man that he idolizes.  Chihiro's too worn out from all of the fighting from the past day or so, though he intends to kill Sojo to keep him from ruining the reputation of his father's weapons.

I'm enjoying this opening arc so far, and the fact that this series is so new means that I'm already 1/6 of the way through it (there are 60 chapters as of this writing), so catching up should be fairly easy. Sojo seems like a good introductory villain, and the enchanted swords seem like they allow for some interesting fights without being too overpowered (it seems like they have three abilities each). I'm not sure how much of the fandom was ironic, like the movie Morbius or the video game Knack 2, but it's an entertaining and bloody action series.