Shigurui

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Shigurui is a masterpiece like none other.

From the incredibly detailed anatomy of the drawings, to the accuracy of the historical setup along with the narration style, it is a perfect portrait of a incredible story.
It is nothing like any other manga you migh have encountered. It is a seinen with the most rights, no filling, no jokes or senseless storytelling. From the beginning to the end is a continuous narration of a grueling duel by two archenemies, once students of the same school.

Fujiki Gennosuke and Irako Seigen will be part of a grueling tournament in the Sunpu Castle with real blades. This would be the ... final encounter between this once brothers.
To the public that was present for the duel, it was a farce, as one is missing an arm and the other one is blind. Unaware of the story of how the honed their skills beyond their loss and the past that made them mortal enemies, the skills of Seigen and Fujiki far surpassed what any samurai could expect.

This manga is filled with violence and gore, as the Kogan-Ryu style students performed the most inhuman trainings, showing no mercy even in their trainings and skill demonstrations agains other students, breaking and cutting is in almost every page, but justified.

Read this if you liked Vagabond or Berserk.

Starts out fairly absurd with a crazy depiction of a senile teacher, really out there characterization, and "typically shonen" battles and techniques. Near the end, though, as the extravagant elements start to fall away, the core of the story is exposed as a tragic story about obsession and obligation. It really comes into its own as it heads toward the conclusion, and it makes me wish it had calmed down a little bit to give the earlier events more weight. I think I'm probably the only person that feels that way, though.

Most of the characters aside from the two leads (including their female love interests) ... are much more shallowly drawn. Some of them have a "hero of another story" air about them, which is probably because they featured more in the novel Shigurui is based on, but others feel more like caricatures. Some people will probably enjoy that, like the more out-there tone of the earlier parts of the series, as mentioned previously. For me, Kogan was a sticking point. The master of the dojo where both leads are students, Kogan and his idiosyncrasies play a major role in the series, but he doesn't often feel much more "real" than someone like Yujiro Hanma (BAKI). If he had been more human I think it would have enhanced the dynamic between him and his students, and their dynamic with one another. Someone like Logan Roy in SUCCESSION is what I'm thinking of.

The art is very strong, again, especially in the later parts. Yamaguchi uses a lot of nudity, literal and figurative, which always demands reflection, I think. It's not just fanservice, and can often be pretty disgusting. The goal is to get at the "core" of the characters, what's going on "inside" them, but after the tenth time it isn't very impactful. The landscapes are a high point. The elaborate castles and cities of the Tokugawa have a lot of shine. Personally, I thought the characters were fine, but not exceptional, both in design and rendering. The action is well realised and makes it clear what's going on when, which is something a lot of combat series struggle with.

I was captivated by its absurdity in the same way a clown car pile up is captivating rather than a good book. Many other reviews can attest to some of the manga's strengths, but many of those strengths felt were overshadowed by the stories' weaknesses.

Much of Shigurui's art is meticulous with a strong sense of flow, a strong amount of detail, and horrific depictions of violence. The violence while understandably brutal quickly became oversaturated, what at points felt like the turning of a page in a horror manga soon was coming across more as hyper violence for hyper violence's sake. While there are moments ... where the art style of characters flourishes, for the most part far too many panels have characters looking more akin to grey aliens than people, their upside pear shaped heads with eyeballs as big as fists creates more of an ugly uncanny effect than an amusing absurdity of something akin to Baki.

The story and pacing did not manage to hold strong, peaking in the middle in an admittedly very memorably intense and well paced fight, only for the latter half of the story to become a slog. What proved the most tiresome was how the story made use of women, reliably it felt like the story could not go more than a few pages without flashing a boob here and there, often mid-fight scene as well as if the reader would lose interest if something sexual wasn't shown often enough. The story is littered with sexual assault in a manner that felt all too frequently revelling in it rather than simply trying to depict the sleaziness and cruelty of the era, if a woman is shown it's pretty much a countdown clock appearing until they appear in a scene with sex, violence, and all too often both.

Shigurui came across to me as a manga that had potential if it had been more reserved, using those moments to heighten a situation or make a point with violence rather than having every page dripping with it. Sadly, I doubt that Shigurui would have managed as large an audience if it was more reserved, its current fans seem able to excuse a lot of problems for an extra blood splatter across the page.