The Yagyu Ninja Scrolls: Revenge of the Hori Clan

Rating T+ Genre manga Publisher Del Rey

Read the back cover of The Yagyu Ninja Scrolls: Revenge of the Hori Clan and you'll learn most everything you need to know about it. This is historical fiction set in seventeenth-century Japan in the aftermath of a failed rebellion. A group of the rebels are being held prisoner by the victors. Their captors take them to an all-female monastery where their women are in hiding. There they massacre all but seven of the women before they take the men away and brutally execute them. What follows is a fairly generic revenge plot, intertwined with some odd gender issues.

I cannot tell you a single name of any character in this manga without first looking it up. Each person has a surname, a given name, a title, and an affiliation. There's also a lot of characters for the first volume of a manga. Here's an example. The samurai who decides to instruct the women is introduced as "Edo Yagyu Family, Munenori's Son, Yagyu Jyubei Mitsuyoshi."

Basically, though, you have two main groups. You have the seven surviving women and the male samurai who is going to train them so they can get revenge. Opposing them are the Aizu Seven Spears, a group that is exactly what you'd expect if you've ever read a manga or seen an anime: seven cruel, sadistic fighters, each of whom has his own unique fighting style. By the end of the first volume, we've only gotten through initial setup. The women have vowed their revenge, they've recruited their teacher, and that's about it.

There's some odd gender issues in this volume. I can't quite figure out of its pro- or anti-woman, if it's making a feminist or chauvinist argument. It's not really all that clear.

I should also add that the animation style in this manga, while far more detailed than I've come to expect from the genre -- normally manga are very bare-bones, basically an over glorified storyboard -- has produced some of the ugliest characters I have ever seen.

This manga bears the warning "Mature Content." Thus far that means a lot of blood spray and a few frames that feature bare bottoms. There's talk of some characters have strange sexual hungers but thus far those elements haven't made it onto the pages themselves.

Overall, Yagyu is an enjoyable read, but it's nothing special.