Blade of the Immortal 8

Hiroaki Samura – Dark Horse – 2001 – 27+ volumes

Man, this is still some heavy stuff. I still find it hard to sympathize with Rin. She is the most realistic character in the series, a person driven by revenge who is not a monster and cannot truly hope to achieve her goal, but tries anyway. She’s the moral anchor of the series, too, something it desperately needs in order to keep it from getting too ludicrous. She’s a great character. And yet, you can’t help but hold it against her a little bit when she fails to measure up to the insane creeps that keep coming out of the woodwork to fight her and Manji. It’s difficult to get through the parts where morality is questioned too, since in the world of the series, violence and death are acceptable by everybody except Rin.

She needs to be there, because otherwise the act of killing innocents and things like that becomes insignificant. She keeps the depravity from escalating, in a way. I do like that Blade of the Immortal is somewhat reigned in, compared to other seinen work where things spiral out of control and violence and intricate fight scenes only increase as the series goes on. I love that type of series, but there’s something to be said about keeping things real. Or as real as they can be when your main character is an immortal badass, and your villains walk around with women’s heads sown into his shoulders, anyway.

Anyway. As important as she is, it’s really hard to like Rin when she splits from Manji in this volume. It feels like an exercise in futility on her part to go down the path without Manji to take care of the monsters for her. So the story is now in two main parts, following Manji and Rin as they try to cross a heavily guarded border where they will surely be stopped. Rin decides to use deception and the kindness of strangers to cross, while Manji decides to obtain a pass through any means necessary.

Rin’s story is the more interesting this time around. Her plans hit an early hitch when she finds herself on a wanted poster for the brutal murder committed by the group member she and Manji were with last time. With her face on the wanted poster, she can’t even walk through a town, let alone cross a border without being executed. She absolutely breaks down, both for falling into the trap of having her face recognized, and also for gaining recognition as a criminal, something it seems she’s struggling with. She’s not a murderer, but murder is her ultimate goal, and she’s not a criminal, yet she and Manji regularly get themselves into problems that the law would not agree with.

Manji… he just tries to get a little information. And fight. The fight lasts into next volume, and hasn’t gotten to spectacular. Yet. Hopefully both Manji and Rin’s story will get a bit more interesting next volume. This was mostly exposition, I think, but it’s hard to tell since this was all still fairly interesting stuff.