Bonus review! I spent today selling paperback books at the Wellfleet Flea Market, and read this manga during my downtime.Title: Rurouni Kenshin
Issue: Volume 1
Publisher: Viz
Date: 2004
Writer: Nobuhiro Watsuki
Artist: Nobuhiro Watsuki
A period romantic adventure, Rurouni Kenshin is set in the early years of Japan's Meiji Restoration. It tells the story of Himura Kenshin, once a feared assassin, who has now renounced killing and wanders as a vagrant swordsman.
In Tokyo, he encounters Kamiya Kaoru, a young woman who is running the sword dojo that her father founded. When an enemy tries to extort Kaoru into giving up her deed to the dojo, Kenshin intervenes, and when Kaoru loses her students to hard times, Kenshin enters into a partnership with her to get the dojo up and running again.
Kenshin is a pretty interesting and quirky character, a fighter who makes every possible effort to avoid a fight. He's a bit of a manipulator, and comes off as slightly odd, especially with his habit of referring to himself in the third person as "This One".
The dialogue and character interactions are great. The fight scenes suffer a bit from Kenshin coming off as so invincible that outcomes (at least in this volume) never feel like they're in doubt. There is also a tendency to make the fights very stylized with sword-slashes and blood flying around. And then after giving every visual clue short of decapitation to indicate that the outcome is lethal, it gets revealed through dialogue that the bad guys only suffered broken bones. The whole thing feels a bit like it's saying "Dead! Oh... Just kidding."
Aside from the handling of the fight scenes, I liked just about everything else about this book. Good dialogue, good plot with some interesting twists, good character development, all combine with a nice historical perspective and some political intrigue.
Rating: 7/10
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