Blade of the Immortal 18
Posted: May 15, 2011 Filed under: Blade of the Immortal 1 Comment »Hiroaki Samura – Dark Horse – 2008 – 26+ volumes
This volume’s all about Rin and Doa. Well, not all about Rin and Doa, as there is still quite a bit about Manji’s situation and the doctor that is trying to transfer his immortality to others. This is a really, really great volume. I’m sorry I had my doubts, prison arc.
As agonizing as it is watching the scenes with Manji, most of what makes them powerful isn’t based on torturing him, as I expected. There’s a lot of tension surrounding the procedure itself – will they be successful? Will there be at least one other immortal? I’m thinking yes, since this is an awful long story, and it seems like it might take two immortals to get Manji out of prison. But what will another man do with Manji’s particular brand of immortality?
And while it’s true that Manji isn’t being tortured, there are a lot of prisoners being killed in the name of science. That gets taken to grotesque proportions as other doctors replace the successful one and aren’t as familiar with the procedure, or even human anatomy in general. Then the successful doctor comes back, completely cracked and crazy, and that doesn’t go anyplace good. That in itself creates a lot of turmoil, but things are starting to come to a head as it becomes less and less feasible to hide their experiments. Not only are the side effects spilling out of the prison grounds, the methods used to obtain the specimens are becoming very extreme.
Meanwhile, there is Rin and Doa. Both are looking for their guardians. Interestingly, the man with Doa is a christian, something that puts more of a target on him than anything else, and Doa is worried for his welfare. It turns out that both guardians may be in the prison, so Rin and Doa’s goals are beginning to overlap, and they come up with plans to sneak in.
I like Rin more and more in every volume. She’s still not a physical match for anyone, or really prepared to deal with the physical consequences of her reactions, but she seems to make up for it by pairing with people that can help her out with that. Doa is quite a fighter, but Rin is the one that does all the investigation and gets results. I was a little afraid that Doa would face off against Rin eventually, because I really don’t want to see Rin get beat up again. But the two of them form quite a team.
I can’t get enough of this stuff. On to the next volume.
When all those bodies were being piled up during the prison arc, I thought it would be a convenient shortcut to Manji’s vow of not resting until he’d killed a thousand criminals. So what if he wasn’t actually cutting them down with his sword? It would be an alternate way of using his immortality to justify his mission statement.
Of course, there’s the problem of not every prisoner being actually guilty of the crime they’d commited. Not to mention that Manji wouldn’t have personally met and developed a relationship with each individual bad man before killing them. Having the entire procedure done against his consent through an intermediatary kind of defeats the purpose.