Our first release of 2025 is The Legend of Kamui: Volume One and will be in stores January 14th. This is an all-time major manga series, so major that its creator Shirato Sanpei makes a prominent cameo in Shigeru Mizuki‘s Showa 1953-1989: A History of Japan alongside other manga greats Osamu Tezuka and Yoshiharu Tsuge.
I’m certainly no historian when it comes to manga, but I had been hearing about The Legend of Kamui for years and knew it to be one of the great classic comics that hadn’t been translated into English yet. I’d asked after it a couple of times and got nowhere. But one day, out of the blue, I received an email saying the rights were available and the esteemed Japanese History professor Richard Rubinger had already translated a large portion of the series with the help of his wife Noriko Rubinger.
The Legend of Kamui ran in the oft-spoken-about GARO magazine. In fact, the magazine was created to run this epic series by Shirato Sanpei. I’d been a fan of everything we published from GARO but it had all been typically more ‘modern world.’ I wasn’t sure if a story about feudal Japan would have the same hold on me. I shouldn’t have worried.
The Legend of Kamui is tense, funny, realistic, and humane. It’s riveting! It’s also a thoughtful historical look at the period, its classism and its brutality. I’ve honestly never read anything like it—whole chapters might be devoted to the lives of the animals that live in the mountains. It’s an old school page turning serial that is hard to put down. I almost can’t believe we’re lucky enough to be able to read this amazing comic in English now. This is the first of what will be a 10-volume series. Each book will be roughly 600 pages. A true epic that you won’t want to stop reading.
