Blade of the Immortal 6
Posted: October 2, 2010 Filed under: Blade of the Immortal 2 Comments »Hiroaki Samura – Dark Horse – 2000 – 26+ volumes
I probably mentioned this before, but as cool a name as “Blade of the Immortal” is, the Japanese name “The Inhabitant of Infinity” somehow trumps it in every way. I can see how it’s a little too… ambiguous, given the time period this was initially released in the US. But still. Awesome.
This was… a strange place to jump back into the series. The first half of this volume isn’t about Manji and Rin, but rather opens the story up on Anotsu’s side. There’s some politics and revenge plots involved, but in particular we see a lot of Magatsu, and see things from his perspective. The rogue Itto-ryu school is about to become an official sword school under the shogunate, and there is at least one group who is more or less out to kill them all. A group that has a whole lot more drive and skill than Rin. We see two or three of the devious traps they set for members of the Itto-Ryu here, but the Magatsu segment is the most heartbreaking.
I do love it when villains are properly humanized and given perspective, and I like the apparent shift in tone here, where things are becoming less black and white and we’ve got more than two sides at play now. Of course, the whole point of Blade of the Immortal is that things are never black and white, that’s been the theme all along. While Rin kills the henchmen that killed her parents, she’s also killing people with lives and families of their own.
There is a Rin segment at the end, when a rowdy-type guy tries to recruit Manji to team Kill Itto-Ryu. Manji passes the ball to Rin, who is the one that wants the revenge, and the tough guy and Rin wind up having a very, very interesting conversation.
While I do like Rin for the perspective she brings, she can be a little frustrating in a story like this. She wants revenge, but is wishy-washy and physically not up to the task. That’s the point, of course, but when scenes like the one in this book happen, the beef scene, it makes me like her a little less. Perhaps that’s only because I wouldn’t have puked or been horrified, but maybe I’m more callous.
I do love the way things are beginning to open up, though. I like all the new characters, but I also hope that Manji continues to play a big part. But where is the immortal’s place in all this, really?
Ah yes, this was the point where BoTI started to seriously slow down its scenes to the point where people who were reading it in pamphlet form were almost aggravated at how little action was actually happening within these pages. So when it finally got back to the violence they’d been waiting for, it was SUCH a huge shock to their system that they almost regretted wanting to see blood in the first place.
Seriously, the next volume will test your limits in a way that the previous volumes didn’t. As the old Chinese curse goes, “May you live in interesting times…”
I kinda wondered about the content of this volume, because it was a lot of talking. I can imagine it being pretty slow in pamphlet form. But now I won’t sit on the next volume forever, because I need to know just how crazy it gets. It sounds awesome.