Sakura Hime 2

Arina Tanemura – Viz – 2011 – 8+ volumes

Hmm… Tanemura promised last time that Aoba would be more likable. I don’t see how this is possible, seeing as how he shot her all the way through with an arrow and led a hunting party to kill her, shouting that he hated her all the while. But, you know. Arina Tanemura can sometimes surprise you like that.

Not yet, though. There are clearly still feelings of love between Aoba and Sakura, and Aoba keeps trying to do heroic things and gets jealous when Fujimurasaki begins hitting on Sakura. But all the same. He literally killed her. Completely and utterly betrayed her. It may take more than the power of shoujo manga to recover from that.

Annoyingly, the plot does a complete 180 here. After being hunted, Fujimurasaki shows up in Sakura’s hour of need and reveals that she can, indeed, stay in the kingdom if she agrees to fight yokai. I’m not sure why that wasn’t a condition to begin with. The plot then follows Fujimurasaki, Aoba, Sakura, and company as they venture into the mountains so that Sakura can prove herself by killing a particularly dangerous yokai. Along the way, Fujimurasaki begins making moves, Aoba is still clearly in love, and a new, demon-ish contender shows up at the end in the race for Sakura’s heart.

After being disappointed by some of the plot twists here, I still like this series quite a bit. There’s a ridiculous declaration at the beginning of the volume where Sakura decides to buck fate and do what she wants. It’s horribly cliche, but in the middle of a story by one of the girliest authors I can think of, it’s appropriate and extremely enjoyable. I also like the way Tanemura is developing the intrigue between the princes and the various royal personnel. There are issues later with one of the advisers, Sakura’s attendant still doesn’t trust her and a plotline follows that out to its conclusion, and Hayate the kunoichi is still hanging around being both helpful and goofy. I still don’t like Aoba, and I think Fujimurasaki is a creep for taking advantage of Sakura during her weak moments, but I like that both brothers are in the story. I like both of their roles, and I like the way they work as characters both together and with Sakura.

Plus, I’m just weak to super-girly series like this. A magical girl series with a strong heroine that slays demons in ancient Japan? Still a really fun concept as of volume two. The required romance is there, and all the action has a super-emotional spin on it that makes everything extra girly. The art helps, too, especially since Tanemura is one of the most ornate shoujo artists I can think of. Everything she draws is among the girliest manga I can think of, but she’s really trying hard to girl it up here.

I know calling something “girly” isn’t much of a critique, but I consider it a very positive trait in shoujo manga, especially one as good as this. I mean, I still like it even when I don’t like parts of the plot or characters. That’s strong stuff.

After the conclusion to the chase scene, the rest of this volume feels mostly like exposition. Tanemura mentions that we are still in the middle of the “Aoba arc,” and that it will likely finish by volume three. I’m looking forward to it, if only because she seems so sure that she can turn the reader around after what Aoba did.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

Sakura Hime 1

Arina Tanemura – Viz – 2011 – 8+ volumes

Wow, I liked this an awful lot more than I thought I would! After reading Mistress Fortune, which I was not very fond of, I started to worry that I had lost my taste for Tanemura’s particular brand of whimsical fantasy-ish series. This has some of her sense of humor in it, but is set in ancient Japan and deals with the myth of Princess Kaguya.

Princess Sakura is engaged to be married to Prince Oura. She’s very much against being married off at the age of 14 to a prince she’s never met. An emissary for the prince named Aoba shows up. To nobody’s surprise, he’s really prince Oura, and Sakura says many terrible things to him both about Prince Oura, her feelings about the wedding, and to Aoba in particular since he seems fond of tormenting her.

So it has that going for it, and save for the setting, the characters and situations read a lot like Tanemura’s other work. But here’s where it gets interesting. Sakura is the direct descendant of Princess Kaguya, a princess from the Moon. When her household is attached by a rather savage yokai-like demon, it turns out that only she can wield Princess Kaguya’s sword, the only thing that can really kill the demons. She’s got a Sailor Moon-like transformation for this and everything, and she slowly learns to wield the sword and keep people safe from demons.

Except… with the ability to transform and kill the demons, which probably came from the moon anyway… and her bloodline is from the moon… so doesn’t that make her just as much a demon as them? The story takes a pretty terrible turn about 2/3rds of the way through the book. I was a little shocked at just how ugly things turned for Sakura.

She does have an adorable little mononoke maid named Asagiri (yet another notch on Tanemura’s belt for adorable mascot-like characters), and by the end of the volume, Sakura has also met the very likable kunoichi named Kohaku. For those two alone, I’d keep reading, but at this point I’m very interested in the mythology behind Sakura’s bloodline and how her being branded a demon will work, especially since that means life as she knows it is gone. I don’t think it will get too terribly interesting, or explore those themes too far in depth, but I know it will touch on them before all is said and done.

But yes, this is an awesome start! Tanemura is good at writing first volumes, and I was just as sucked into Full Moon and Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne when I started them, too. I can’t wait to read more, and I’m very lucky I’ve got the second volume handy.