James Nicoll Reviews

2020’s Steel of the Celestial Shadows, Volume One is the first tankōbon of Daruma Matsuura’s historical fantasy manga series. The 2024 English translation is by Caleb D. Cook.

A samurai should be skilled at their designated role or they should at least die magnificently trying to do their duty. Ryudo Konosuke can do neither. He has been reduced to begging for work and selling off the last few family heirlooms, while slowly succumbing to malnutrition and starvation.

Ryudo is a pitiful, contemptable figure. No woman would want to marry him. Yet, beautiful, rich Tsuki proposes marriage. Salvation! And the only cost: the last of Ryudo’s self-respect.

Ryudo’s fellow samurai interpret Ryudo’s steadfast avoidance of sharp implements as cowardice. However, the problem is not that he will not allow swords, knives, and razors near him. The problem is that he cannot. He cannot touch metal and metal cannot touch Ryudo. Ryudo has suffered from this curse his whole life.

A samurai who cannot hold a sword or be harmed by one is barely a samurai. Surely nobody could ever love such a person. Therefore, Tsuki must have some dark agenda for marrying Ryudo. The only sensible solution is to divorce Tsuki before her evil plan comes to fruition.

Tsuki bargains for a single condition for divorce. Ryudo must first defeat her at go. This should be child’s play for an avid go-player like Ryudo. To his considerable irritation, Tsuki is a superior player. They play game after game, all of which the samurai loses.

Reconciling oneself to a wealthy, beautiful inexplicably affectionate wife is a nearly insurmountable challenge. Ryudo only fully realizes that he has done so when a mysterious stranger wielding an ability (similar to and yet very different from Ryudo’s) arrives to take Tsuki away.

~oOo~

The art in this volume is quite effective.

To clarify, if Ryudo tries to pick up metal, it is warped and repelled. If it happens to be approaching him at high speed — a sword during an attempted decapitation, say — it will be rejected violently enough to bury metal fragments in the attacker. The effect is not limited to weapons. You would not want Ryudo leaning on a structural support held together with nails or concrete filled with rebar (admittedly, not an issue in shogunate Japan¹).

Another way to look at Ryudo’s situation is that he’s effectively invulnerable to most of the weapons he is likely to encounter. Sword blades cannot touch him. Arrows will bounce off. A wandering samurai armed with an oar carved into a bokken would present a serious challenge, as would fists and feet, but most samurai love their swords.

Curiously, what is to Ryudo a curse can be a blessing to others with similar abilities. It’s almost as though Ryudo’s cultural perspective has limited his perception, and that there are applications for his ability that Ryudo might have discovered, had he only tried.

This being the first volume, the tankōbon’s focus is on establishing the setting, tragic backstory, and raising a lot of questions. Answers will have to wait for later volumes. I am interested enough to track those volumes down… and a bit unhappy to learn the manga appears to have been discontinued.

Steel Of the Celestial Shadows, Volume One is available here (Viz), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: The world outside Japan is irrelevant to volume one, which makes cramming in a gratuitous USA delenda est challenging.