The Legend of Kamui: Volume One Manga Release Details

Date: 2024 December 07 17:57

Posted by Joe

Publishers Drawn & Quarterly have sent us the release details for The Legend of Kamui: Volume One. Due out in January 2025, the classic and highly influential manga will be available in English. Originally serialized between 1964 and 1971 in the alt-manga magazine GARO, The Legend of Kamui is translated by social historian and decorated academic Richard Rubinger with Noriko Rubinger. Additional translation by Alexa Frank.

Drawn & Quarterly always publish interesting manga and have a nice selection of classic gekiga titles.

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Press release as follows:

Drawn & Quarterly

The Legend of Kamui: Volume One
Shirato Sanpei
Translated by Richard Rubinger with Noriko Rubinger

IN STORES JANUARY 2025

The iconic series that launched the alt-manga bible GARO becomes available in English for the very first time



At long last, manga titan Shirato Sanpei's groundbreaking epic makes its way into English. Celebrated as a watershed of both the Japanese counterculture and dramatic, longform storytelling in manga, The Legend of Kamui serves up clashing swords and class struggle to create a timeless political allegory set in feudal Japan. This ten-volume series is a must-have for fans of samurai and ninja manga and anime, and of other giants of postwar manga like Tezuka Osamu, Mizuki Shigeru, Tsuge Yoshiharu, and Lone Wolf and Cub's Kojima Goseki.



It's the seventeenth century in Japan. Child outcast Kamui lives on the fringes of a miserably stratified society. Fueled by pure grit, rage, and a dash of cunning, his only way out is to take up the mantle of ninja. Follow scrappy peasants, cold-blooded ninja, and warriors both disgraced and exalted as they navigate the unforgiving hardships of a violent yet hopeful age. With its vivid and critical attention to social injustice and environmental issues against a backdrop of heart-pounding action and romance, this multilayered gekiga drama not only redefined ninja and samurai fantasy, it also offers astonishing parallels with the modern day.

Originally serialized between 1964 and 1971 in the legendary alt-manga magazine GARO, The Legend of Kamui is translated by social historian and decorated academic Richard Rubinger with Noriko Rubinger. Additional translation by Alexa Frank.

PRAISE FOR THE LEGEND OF KAMUI

"An adventure story with adult content and themes, [The Legend of Kamui] can be seen as the work that forced manga and anime to 'grow up.'"-Nichi Bei News

"Legend of Kamui follows the young boys of farmers and ninja, and describes structures of a hierarchical society and resistance to discrimination in detail."-The Asahi Shimbun



SHIRATO SANPEI was born in Tokyo in 1932. His father, Okamoto Tōki, was an oil painter whose artistic endeavors exposed the young Sanpei to a variety of perspectives. Okamoto notably instructed Kurosawa Akira in painting and design before the latter became a filmmaker. After a seven-year stint as a kamishibai artist, Shirato would begin working in the kashihon manga market in 1957. Kaze no Fujimaru, an animated series based on an original story by Shirato, began airing in 1964. This was the first animation for which the young Miyazaki Hayao was in charge of original drawings. The Legend of Kamui debuted that same year in the pages of Garo-a manga periodical founded by Shirato and now best known as a launching pad for other revered mangakas like Mizuki Shigeru and Tsuge Yoshiharu. Shirato died in 2021.

AN 2025 • $39.95 USD / $49.95 CAD • B&W • 6.2" X 8.8" • 612 PAGES
COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS / MANGA • ISBN: 978-1-77046-729-3 • PAPERBACK