Steel of the Celestial Shadows Vol. 1-2

There’s no shortage of chanbara (samurai) stories out there, especially in manga. Trends may change but the appeal of a grim-faced dude in samurai garb (with or without a topknot) coolly slicing down his opponent with one sword stroke is eternal.

The way to make one’s samurai story stand out then is in the details. Do you present the most clear-eyed version of history possible a la Mike Richardson, Stan Sakai and co.’s 2014 miniseries 47 Ronin? Do you put your own unique spin on the life of a national legend, as Takehiko Inoue has done with Musashi Miyamoto in Vagabond (although the series has been on hiatus since 2015)? Or do you bring Japanese myth and fantasy into it, a la Hiroaki Samura’s iconic Blade of the Immortal?

If you’re Daruma Matsuura, evidently, you do that last one. But what makes Steel of the Celestial Shadows (published in Kodansha’s [enf_note]Full disclosure: This writer occasionally works as a proofreader for Kodansha’s USA imprint, Kodansha Comics, which has published Matsuura’s previous series, Kasane, digitally.[/efn_note] semimonthly magazine Big Comic Superior since 2020 and available on the VIZ manga app, with two volumes out now and the third volume out July 16th) stand out is that, while other high-concept historical manga like this tend to frontload their world-building (using the typically extra page count afforded to their first chapter to do so), Matsuura takes her time, teasing out the details of her larger world while grounding the character first and foremost. The result is an engaging series that starts off in an interesting place before expertly throwing the curveballs it needs to set up its main thrust.

To wit: Konosuke Ryudo’s an extremely down-on-his-luck samurai. Well, make that would-be samurai. Due to a lifelong quirk of his where metal of any kind repels away from him like he’s an opposingly charged magnet, Konosuke’s a joke by the standards of the samurai class he aspires to be a part of and by the standards of nineteenth-century Japan (the exact date isn’t specified, but it’s clearly sometime before the Meiji Restoration of 1868). He has to wear and wield a bokken (a wooden sword, as anyone who read 1980s Wolverine stories could tell you) and shave with an obsidian dagger. In short, he’s a mess, seen as a joke by his fellow villagers and unserious by the official who could assign him any samurai work.

With only one retainer on hand (the elderly Otokichi, who’s apparently the only person in his life who doesn’t hate him), Konosuke’s reduced to pawning his family heirlooms for what little cash he can. What’s more, he’s haunted by how his bodily aversion to metal led to (as he sees it, anyway) the death of his mother at the hands of vagabonds in his childhood.

Given the sordid state of his life, small wonder then that Konosuke is thrown for a loop when a beautiful woman named Tsuki (meaning “moon” – fittingly, the chapter titles all correspond to lunar phases) turns up out of the blue and proposes to him, claiming she’s always loved him while, as far as he can tell, they’ve never met.

To Konosuke’s extreme disbelief, Tsuki also insists what he sees as a curse is actually an asset. How does she know? Well, she’s not telling — and certainly not telling where she came from — but her sheer loveliness and sweet determination eventually win Konosuke over and, after he saves her life, he falls in love with her and something like happiness finally enters his life.

Without spoiling anything, this doesn’t last. Tsuki is eventually whisked away by nefarious agents of the mysterious Tsuchimikado clan, who seem to have control over all magic wielders in Japan, and manipulate Konosuke into forgetting her. But the arrival of Aki, an ichiko (blind Shinto spirit-medium) undoes said manipulation and seems to finally give Konosuke the magical edge needed to discover why he has his strange power and take back the wife he never knew he needed.

As I said above, the smartest trick Matsuura pulls is making the reader feel sympathy for Konosuke first and flesh out the world surrounding him second. By foregrounding us in our hero’s struggles first before fully introducing the supernatural elements involved (as of the most recent volume, the specific head of the Tsuchimikado clan has been revealed but his ultimate goals are still left unsaid), she ensures her readers are fully invested in Konosuke’s problems and are just as confused by what’s going on as he and Aki (who make for a really appealing fishes-out-of-water double act) are.

Said investment, by the way, is greatly enhanced by the team Viz has working on this. Caleb Cook (translator of, among other things, the most widely read superhero comic in the world, My Hero Academia) is one of the best in the game at making characters feel real and human, no matter how outlandish they are, and he makes Konosuke’s crippling self-loathing agonizingly felt.

Letterer Steve Dutro is, like the best in his profession, so good at his job, he’s practically invisible. But he knows how to make both the SFX stand out and perfectly places Cook’s explanations of archaic terms like ri in panel gutters and asides so you absorb the information without getting dragged out of the story.

If Shadows has a weak point, it’s the art. Well, one key part of it. While Matsuura’s excellent at character acting, emotion, and pacing, and uses photo reference (when appropriate) to great effect, her action scenes are hard to follow. Specifically, the way she composes and lays out fight scenes is very hard to visually track, with one left to fill in the gaps via follow-up panels. (Sanada’s Blade of the Immortal had this problem too, although Matsuura avoids the abstractness Immortal had in its dismemberment scenes that were sometimes beautiful, sometimes confusing.)

Still, hard-to-discern action is hardly a deal breaker and Matsuura’s considerable skills elsewhere more than compensate. Overall, Konosuke and Aki are worth following to see what they get up to and who they fight. Plus the ultimate reveal of who Tsuki actually is and just what the Tsuchimikado clan want with her promise to be worth the journey. 

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