Blade of the Immortal 17

Hiroaki Samura – Dark Horse – 2007 – 26+ volumes

Okay, so this prison arc is not as agonizing as I thought it was going to be. I find the story to be quite interesting. And again, I was most afraid of torture, but compared to what Manji’s been through in battle, in prison he seems to be getting three hots and a cot, at the very least, and the experiments that the doctor is putting him through weigh more heavily on his conscience than they do his body. And even then, the burden of morality lies mostly with the doctor, Manji is merely a bystander.

The main thrust of the story here is that the doctor that attends to Manji is trying to transfer his immortality to someone else’s body. They experimented on Manji’s body in the last volume in order to test the limits of his immortality, but here the doctor is doing a physical experiment with some degree of success. Manji bonds with the man who is becoming immortal, and as they swap limbs back and forth courtesy of the doctor, they grow closer. This prisoner is a decent man, but there is a long line of others after him who are not. Terrible things seem to happen to him, but the fate of the prisoners is, as I mentioned, more of a question of how the doctor feels about doing human experiments. He’s not okay with it, and it weighs on him after the first man, when he has to make a fast and terrible decision.

Elsewhere, the character that was introduced last volume, Doa, is more than just a simple girl, though I’m still not quite sure what will become of her and her attendant. Interestingly, I read Itsuwaribito a day after this one, and a plot point came up surrounding a facial tattoo very similar to the one Doa sports. In Itsuwaribito, it identified convicted murderers. It made me wonder if that was based in fact, or if it was just a coincidence that it came up both places. Doa is young, and she makes no attempt to cover hers.

And there’s Rin, who has teamed up with Hyakurin to find Manji. Hyakurin asks Rin about her relationship with Manji, and Rin brushes her off, of course, but the essay that I mentioned at Dark Horse a few entries back (it’s gone now, sadly) hinted at a possible romance. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but it is touching how hard Rin is trying to look for Manji. The two do find Giichi, and try and figure out what’s become of the Mugai-Ryu.

And now I’m reading the next volume. There’s not a whole lot of action in these books, but it’s interesting how much there is to chew on here, even with some of the funnest bits of the story absent for the time being. Now it’s a fantastic page-turner simply because I need to know how successful the doctor will be in transferring Manji’s immortality. I tore through this volume thinking he was certainly going to do it.