When you open what you know to be the last volume of a manga series, you tend to go in with preconceptions or second guesses about how everything’s going to turn out. With Dororo, I thought I had all the cards face-up on the table after the first two books: the hero, Hyakkimaru, was going to win back all of the missing body parts demons had stolen from him; and Hyakkimaru’s impish sidekick Dororo was going to earn Hyakkimaru’s sword for himself at last.

It doesn’t quite work out that way, for reasons that seem at least as much due to Tezuka’s production schedule as the mechanics of the story he was telling. Dororo’s final volume wraps things up with a little too much haste for my own comfort—but at the same time, it doesn’t feel thematically wrong. Everyone gets what they have had coming for a long time. That and what might come off as middling (or rushed, or clumsy) for Tezuka is still outstanding by anyone else’s yardstick—and really, the whole of Dororo is more than worth the cash and the effort. “Nobody is born whole,” reads the blurb on the back cover, and now that I’m done with the series it makes sense as more than just ad copy.