Blade of the Immortal: An Anotsu/Makie Essay

[labingi]

"Anotsu/Makie: One of Those Love Stories"I'll preface this post with an apology as I'm about to commit the error of writing meta about a series I don't know very intimately yet. Having been firmly schooled over my early misapprehensions about Mirage of Blaze, I'll approach Blade of the Immortal with a healthy degree of disclaiming: everything I'm

Comments

[jainas]

What you said could be wrong or wildly incomplete, but I very doubt so.
I am not familiar with either Mirage of Blaze nor Wuthering Heights, so I cannot comment on the comparisons you establish with other pairings, but I do think you are spot on when you analyse the duality woman/warrior as the main tipping point of their relationship or the fact that to Anotsu, supporting the Itto-Ryu can only come first to supporting Makie.

A very enlightening read. Thank you for writing.

[labingi]

Thanks for commenting! I'm glad you enjoyed the essay. I'm inclined to recommend MoB to people who like BotI. Both have a great diversity of interesting characters and relationships with difficult moral questions and a strong interest in Japanese history. But MoB is yaoi.

[jainas]

Well, yaoi doesn't bother me at all.
But I'll confess half the reason I'm in love with BotI is the gorgious art. How is MoB in that respect?

[labingi]

Ah well, MoB is a not a manga. That is, it has about 3 manga volumes, but basically it's a novel series. So, yes, really good art is a little hard to find. (There's a lot of anime-based and cartoonish fan art around.)

Hotaka Ran, who is doing covers for the prequels, does it best. Here's a link to her site: http://www.katana.cx/~hotakaan/index.html. If you click "Mirage" on the menu and then click around on the 4 little boxes up at the top (right under "New->Old", you'll find her prettiest MoB drawings, in my opinion. (I don't know why they're so hard to navigate to!) "Mr. Nagahide" under the "Mirage" menu is another pretty one.

Here's a link to some cover art: http://books.rakuten.co.jp/event/book/pocket-book/mirage/

[jainas]

Interesting. I take it has been traslated to english ?

[labingi]

Ah, the plot thickens... I run this community: http://community.livejournal.com/mirage_trans/profile, which posts translations for MoB. In answer to your question, quite a bit less than half has been translated (all fan translations, some smoother than others). But quite a bit less than half still amounts to many hundreds of pages in this epic. (My bound printouts take up about 10 inches of shelf space.) And the whole story has been summarized at least in broad strokes.

If you'd like a gentler and more visual introduction to the series, there is the anime (which covers up to about volume 9 out of 40). It is good, though like the anime of BotI, it has nothing on the books.