The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

Sengoku Youko

What's It About? 

The world is divided into two factions: humans and monsters called katawara. Despite being a katawara, Tama loves humans and vows to protect them from evil, even if it means fighting her own kind. Her stepbrother Jinka, however, hates humans, despite mostly being one. The siblings are joined by a cowardly swordsman named Shinsuke, who wants to learn how to become strong.

The people they meet, places they see, and creatures they battle will be legendary!

Sengoku Youko has story and art by Satoshi Mizukami, with English translation by Massiel Gutierez, lettered by Vibrraant Publishing Studio. Tokyopop released the first volume digitally in December followed by the physical edition on April 11.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

This book should have been much more appealing than I found it to be. After all, it involves historical fiction and supernatural, folkloric creatures—practically a recipe for stories I enjoy. However, Sengoku Youko is hampered by clunky storytelling and a plot that's just shy of incoherent. It's a definite shame because the book has a lot of potential.

The greatest issue with the book is its tendency to rely too much on overt explication. Characters stop in the middle of the action, or delay the action, to expound on what they're doing and the backstory behind their actions. We could have easily figured out what "katawara" is, the relationship between Tama and Jinka, or even the deal with the warrior monks without large speech bubbles giving us the information in the dullest way possible. The book uses special variations on themes we've seen before, but works like Kemono Jihen manage to get that information into the plot without halting the action.

There is a lot of action in this book, which compensates for its other shortcomings. Jinka's half-katawara form is striking, and most of the scenes have at least a semi-decent sense of motion, branching out into actually good in several cases, mostly towards the end of the volume. The katawara also have interesting designs that aren't too fussy, giving them a sense of strength and power. Despite its other problems, the artist is very good at drawing strong fists, which is a bigger deal than you might think. Additionally, there is a nice level of detail in things like the characters' straw sandals and the monks' robes, so this book has its strengths.

Sadly, it just doesn't come together well. It's a shame because there are some genuinely good ideas here, and the characters also have potential. However, it ends up feeling like the lesser cousin of other similar series. You're probably better off reading one of those instead.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

This might be the story of a wandering warrior and his demonic sibling, but it ain't Demon Slayer. Even if you remove the eyebrow-raising similarities between these two, Sengoku Youko doesn't really have much to make it stand out.

The art is very functional and humdrum, with lots of panels simply placing characters within an empty white void. There's a bit of creativity with Jinka's transformation, but I can't tell if the weird outline for his hair and fox tails is supposed to look like sumi-e brushstrokes or if it's just a quirk of Youko's art style. The basic conflict of humans versus katawara just isn't very engaging: humans fight katawara and are underhanded about it, while katawara are innocent despite their monstrous appearances. Can't we all just get along? The truth is somewhere in the middle, cue the Pepsi commercial. Jinka's misanthropy feels immature and definitely needs a ton of exploration before it feels less like middle-school edge-lord material. Also, the story of Shakugan and their memories of slaughtering their village as a katawari is glossed over way too quickly in exchange for a fairly unremarkable battle against 300 monks, staged by Jinka.

I really hope Sengoku Youko gets better because the idea works, and there's room for more than one Sengoku-era story about humans and demons living together. But until then, I can only recommend Sengoku Youko to people who haven't yet read works like Inu Yasha or Demon Slayer.

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

I want to start off with some positives here by saying that I love this manga's style. There's a type of sketchy roughness to the outlines of the characters that makes them look very dynamic even when they're just sitting down and talking. Then when we get to the action, the way that everything smears together in order to simulate that fast and kinetic motion of massive attacks slamming into each other can be really fun. I start with all of this because outside of some of those stylistic choices, I am really struggling to come up with things to talk about because the series really is just that basic.

I feel like I'm reading a watered-down version of every historical fantasy series I've ever read or watched in my life because there is just very little actually new here. The world is full of evil demons and evil humans yet we have characters who feel both great hatred and great love for those same groups. They're on a quest where they come across some incredibly bland characters who talk a lot about what's going on while disclosing very little information about themselves. You could argue that this volume is more there for the sake of setting things up but it never feels like we get any legitimate emotional or narrative payoff to anything that the book is actually talking about. The world-building is incredibly basic with very little uniqueness to actually latch onto and at its worst, some characters come off as more annoying and stubborn than they do charming or endearing. If you like Fantasy manga that takes a lot of inspiration from Japanese folklore then technically there isn't anything wrong with this and in fact, this manga was probably written for you guys specifically. But anybody else won't be missing much by skipping this series as there are much better stories with those elements already out there.