With the English-language release of Mysterious Journey to the North Sea (originally written in 1988), the Vampire Hunter D series begins to get that much more ambitious. And, I have to admit, I had mixed feelings: the VHD series workedbecause it was light, fast, unpretentious fun, and didn’t get bogged down in the ponderousness that afflicts most written fantasy these days. On the other hand, I could also see how after a high point like Pilgrimage of the Sacred and Profane, the series might end up eating its own tail and repeating itself in the worst possible ways. The most likely scenario was an endless treadmill of: “D meets bad guy; D stands stock-still; bad guy attacks; D kills bad guy without mussing a hair; lather-rinse-repeat.”

Thankfully, Hideyuki Kikuchi did want to try to play that much farther over his head, as he admits in his postscript to the English-language edition of the book. With Sea, he started to expand both the length and scope of each individual story beyond the single-volume treatments he’d been giving them so far. And since he was already no stranger to multi-book epics, the time was probably more than ripe to try it out here.