Blade of the Immortal 9

Hiroaki Samura – Dark Horse – 2002 – 27+ volumes

YES. This volume was amazing. As much as I liked the last one, this is exactly what it lacked, and what it was building up to. Even Rin gets to shine.

There are two halves of the story here, now that Manji and Rin are split up. In the first half of the book, we see Manji’s fight. The last volume ended with Manji up against three travelers, with his arm out of commission, for all intents and purposes. Of course, we know this doesn’t really matter to him. This fight is absolutely insane. It is horribly bloody, and Manji uses everything from deception to brute strength to try and take them out. From trees to the river to a rice paddy, it goes everywhere. He uses a dead body as a blood smoke screen in the river. There is one man that won’t go down, who is killed again and again and again. He’s not immortal, just tough. And for every time they lock horns, Manji is put at a further disadvantage. For all his weapons and for not being able to be killed, Manji is as fallable as the next man. Things don’t end well here, and Manji has help. And all for the Tegata so that he can go chase after Rin.

It’s crazy, but not nearly as suspenseful as what Rin gets up to. Because while we know that Manji will probably come out on top, Rin has no such special skills. While Manji is fighting for the Tegata, Rin is trying to bluff her way through the gates into the next han as a family member of a local that lives on the border. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and the guard breaks out the family register and goes as far as a full-body inspection. If she and the innkeeper she’s with are caught, they will likely be executed, and Rin is taking a big risk. You don’t know how prepared she is for scrutiny, and the questioning gets more and more intense. I loved it. I gained a lot of respect for Rin after that scene.

I’m sure the next volume won’t be nearly this spectacular, since all there is to tell next is probably… well, whatever happens to Manji, and Rin’s travels. But if it was always like this, I wouldn’t appreciate volumes like this. This series is spectacular. I loved every page this time around, and I think I’ll probably burn through the rest of the volumes I have pretty quickly now.