Print Review: Kurogane volumes 1-4

Review Kurogane volumes 1-4 Written by Warpshadow Rating good/ very good

Kurogane is a odd and melancholic action story about a cyborg in the feudal era and surprisingly this all makes sense.

Jintetsu was feared as a great assassin but in the end he fell not to another swordsman but to a pack of wild dogs. He thought he was dead and maybe in a sense he was, but he found himself in the workshop of the inventor Genkichi. Jintetsu became his latest experiment in bringing the dead back to life. Now Jintetsu is half man and half machine with a face hidden behind a mask and voice that no longer works. While Haganemaru the talking sword can cover for Jintetsu’s inability to speak no amount of mechanical genius can really repair a life destroyed.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Kurogane is the manga’s ability to place a cyborg in a Jidaigeki (Japanese period setting) and make it feel plausible. The main reason behind this is that for the most part the cybernetics is little more than a caveat that allows for monologues between a silent man and his sword. The overall tone of the story is pretty fatalistic as happy endings are few and far between. The artwork is a bit above average perhaps the best feature of the manga. Overall I found Kurogane to be a fairly good manga and it is something I would recommend to anybody looking for a wandering samurai tale.