House of Five Leaves 1

Natsume Ono – Viz – 2010 – 8+ volumes

I usually don’t like period manga, and despite the handful of period titles I rave about on a daily basis (I just ordered five volumes of Blade of the Immortal, like, thirty seconds ago), I try to avoid them. This is the Ikki title that seems to get the most praise, but I have such a hard time with period stuff that I avoided it. We kept getting the first volume at work, though, and when I ran across it unclaimed in the dollar bin, I figured I’d give it a try. Natsume Ono’s 50/50 with me right now, since I liked Not/Simple but not so much Ristorante Paradiso.

And… yeah, I really liked House of Five Leaves. It made me happy. I disliked Ristorante Paradiso, because it was so freaking mundane it was like listening to one of those boring people that can only talk about themselves, but it was good at putting focus on the characters, even if I didn’t think those characters were very interesting. House of Five Leaves takes that knack for making a story out of character quirks and applies it to an out-of-work yojimbo and the band of “honorable thieves” he winds up working with, which is inherently more interesting than a girl with a bad relationship with her mother and a restaurant full of cranky old men, a situation I could walk in on and be bored with right now if I wanted.

Masa makes for a sad samurai, slouching and timid and afraid of people in general. He is constantly fired from bodyguard positions for not being intimidating enough. Eventually, he meets Yaichi, a man who is looking for a “bodyguard” in name only. Yaichi takes a liking to Masa, who is actually a decent samurai who is only trying to get over a fear of people, and invites him to join him on various odd jobs. The problem is that Masa is an honorable samurai, and Yaichi is a kidnapper and blackmailer. Masa finds himself in the middle of Yaichi’s situations with a moral dilemma on his hands, since he agreed to do the job and must carry through on his promise as a samurai, but he wants no part of blackmailing. Yaichi seems to only blackmail people who deserve it, a fact that doesn’t ease Masa’s mind much at all. Even so, Yaichi makes a friend out of Masa, and Masa quickly falls in with several other characters who are all somehow connected to Yaichi’s blackmailing organization, the “Five Leaves.”

It is a very character-driven story, and its interesting how the plot progresses based not on character actions, but on how Masa finds out about things. Frequently a character will be chatting Masa up, and will drop a bit of evil on his conscience while making him feel welcome, needed, or appealing to his skill as a samurai (it’s the last that frequently lands Masa in trouble). While Masa objects to what the Five Leaves is doing, all the members make him feel welcome, and he can’t help but be attracted to his new friends, their questionable deeds revealed to him only a little at a time.

All the characters have just a little bit of a story in this volume. No mysterious pasts, no “something terrible will happen later on” complications, they just have jobs and a little bit of personality that comes out while they are simply doing what they do. It’s well-written, and I have to say I’m very interested in seeing how these good people and their kidnappings will be justified both to Masa and the reader.

See? This is what happens when you don’t at least try all the free stuff on the Ikki website. Good stuff slips through the cracks. I have to say, I have yet to read Saturn Apartments, the other series I always hear good things about. It doesn’t sound like my flavor, but this was even less so, and House of Five Leaves is a great series so far.