Sakura Hime 1

Arina Tanemura – Viz – 2011 – 8+ volumes

Wow, I liked this an awful lot more than I thought I would! After reading Mistress Fortune, which I was not very fond of, I started to worry that I had lost my taste for Tanemura’s particular brand of whimsical fantasy-ish series. This has some of her sense of humor in it, but is set in ancient Japan and deals with the myth of Princess Kaguya.

Princess Sakura is engaged to be married to Prince Oura. She’s very much against being married off at the age of 14 to a prince she’s never met. An emissary for the prince named Aoba shows up. To nobody’s surprise, he’s really prince Oura, and Sakura says many terrible things to him both about Prince Oura, her feelings about the wedding, and to Aoba in particular since he seems fond of tormenting her.

So it has that going for it, and save for the setting, the characters and situations read a lot like Tanemura’s other work. But here’s where it gets interesting. Sakura is the direct descendant of Princess Kaguya, a princess from the Moon. When her household is attached by a rather savage yokai-like demon, it turns out that only she can wield Princess Kaguya’s sword, the only thing that can really kill the demons. She’s got a Sailor Moon-like transformation for this and everything, and she slowly learns to wield the sword and keep people safe from demons.

Except… with the ability to transform and kill the demons, which probably came from the moon anyway… and her bloodline is from the moon… so doesn’t that make her just as much a demon as them? The story takes a pretty terrible turn about 2/3rds of the way through the book. I was a little shocked at just how ugly things turned for Sakura.

She does have an adorable little mononoke maid named Asagiri (yet another notch on Tanemura’s belt for adorable mascot-like characters), and by the end of the volume, Sakura has also met the very likable kunoichi named Kohaku. For those two alone, I’d keep reading, but at this point I’m very interested in the mythology behind Sakura’s bloodline and how her being branded a demon will work, especially since that means life as she knows it is gone. I don’t think it will get too terribly interesting, or explore those themes too far in depth, but I know it will touch on them before all is said and done.

But yes, this is an awesome start! Tanemura is good at writing first volumes, and I was just as sucked into Full Moon and Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne when I started them, too. I can’t wait to read more, and I’m very lucky I’ve got the second volume handy.