Books: Yagyū Ninja Scrolls, The: Revenge of the Hori Clan Vol. #2

Always a good feeling, to open the second volume of a series and see that it’s leaps and bounds above the first volume. And I wanted that to be the case with The Yagyu Ninja Scrolls: it’s based on a novel by a criminally-undertranslated Japanese author, Fûtaro Yamada, who’s probably more responsible for the modern pop-culture mythology of the ninja than any other literary party. The first volume, though, was terribly slow to get off the ground, and reveled in a kind of fetishistic ugliness that made it really hard to enjoy. It was all set-up, and not much pay-off.

The second volume, however, leaps from set-up to pay-off in a major way. The seven women of the Hori clan now have Yagyū Jūbei as their mentor in vengeance against the sinister Seven Spears of the Aizu — but there’s only so much he can do. He’s determined to find a way to let the women take revenge with their own hands, to serve as an instructor and trainer, but not as a proxy. This will not be easy, especially since the women are not fighters by nature. (One side effect of the training and the subsequent missions is how the women subsequently differentiate themselves and stand out all the more ascharacters, not simply visual elements.)

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.