James Nicoll Reviews

2023’s Magus of the Library, Volume Seven is the seventh tankōbon in Mitsu Izumi’s secondary-universe fantasy manga series (Toshokan no Daimajutsushi in the original Japanese). Magus has been serialized in Good! Afternoon since November 2017. The English translation of Volume Seven appeared in 2024.

Theo is a poor, mixed-race young man on his way to becoming a kafna, as librarians are known. He will be one of a legion of kafnas in the employ of the Great Library. Created in the aftermath of a continent-wide genocidal conflict, the Great Library preserves knowledge.

What does that mean in practice?

Take Cazcacuatza’s thriving Koami faith. To the pious cultists, their scriptures record literal truth. To reasonable people — Library staff, for example — the scriptures are a collection of delusional, potentially harmful falsehoods. How should the Great Library balance the public good versus the right of people to proselytize the deranged tenets of obviously delusional cults that will surely doom us all? It’s a tough question!

The current problem facing the Library doesn’t seem nearly as problematic as misplaced religious faith. The Mulligad is only a serialized adventure novel. Surely, fiction cannot present the same intractable challenges religion does?

Wildly popular, The Mulligad records the zany adventures of a young man who slaughters his way through any authority figures foolish or unlucky enough to cross his path. Authority figures are understandably cool on the idea of celebrating the murder of people like them. Many young people find the series delightful.

The Great Library has criteria by which works can be suppressed. The Mulligad​’s author has been careful to avoid providing censors with an excuse to apply those to The Mulligad. For example, inciting racial hatred is banned… but only hatred against real groups. Not one of the groups upon which the author heaps scorn is a real ethnicity… but all of them correspond one-to-one with existing ethnicities.

Perhaps the greatest issue facing the Great Library’s conclave is the fact that The Mulligad was already approved for publication. Having given permission and access to distribution networks, can the Great Library reverse its decision? If it can, what are the repercussions of that precedent?

While the conclave is wrestling with The Mulligad, masked conspirators meet. For years they have been searching for the notorious Black Tome, the text that sparked off a continent-wide, genocidal war. Now they have finally tracked it down. All they need do now is steal it from would-be kafna Theo. How hard could that be?

~oOo~

For readers joining late: Theo may be (through no fault of his own) educationally disadvantaged, but his employment history gave him prodigious stores of strength and stamina. Years of exposure to a magical tree left him so resistant to mana that he thinks nothing of accompanying a girl who is to most people a magical Chernobyl. So probably nicking his book won’t be that easy.

This volume introduces the Hwo’e, a senior functionary of the Kokopah people. Fans of the Legion of Superhero’s Gim Allon may be amused to learn that the Hwo’e, who appears to be a short woman when mixing with the other races of this world, is in fact a giant who towers over her diminutive, be-winged, pixy-like kin.

I was interested to learn that suppressed works aren’t destroyed. At least not completely. The Library preserves at least one copy of every work, banned or not. It’s just that the banned works are kept in a limited access facility¹.

While Magus appears to be just a coming-of-age story about a boy of limited means, it’s always been very clear there are some dark forces at work behind the scenes. What forces lay behind the genocidal war that shaped recent history? We learn that it’s not malevolent gods lurking just off-stage. Rather, it’s regular folk who would like to shake off the Great Library and make bigotry and genocide great again. Where do writers get their crazy ideas?

This volume is to a great degree about the administrative issues inherent in applying idealistic regulations to the real world. In this volume the problem is caused by a malicious author who is well aware of the regulations and skilled enough to write around them. He does so in a way that makes it obvious what he is doing, without providing grounds for the Great Library to act. One might think that this plot would be the stuff of pure tedium, the sort of procedural wrangling that inspires board members to hurl themselves from lofty windows. Izumi makes the matter as enthralling as disarming a time bomb… without any clear resolution. Was the bomb disarmed? Or has the timer just been reset? Perhaps we’ll find out in future volumes.

While Volume Seven was less of an escape from current affairs than I hoped for, it definitely held my interest. Too bad that I’ve caught up to the most recent volume and will have to wait for future volumes. Unfair!

Magus of the Library, Volume Seven is available here (Kodansha), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: The heist adventure writes itself.