If the embed won’t play, the Kagurabachi anime teaser is also here on YouTube.
For a manga that started out as an internet joke, Kagurabachi has become remarkably hard to laugh off. Chapter 138, titled “Heavy Charge”, went up on VIZ’s Shonen Jump service and MANGA Plus on Sunday 8 November, free on release day in the usual way, and by Monday it was trending on X, with readers singling out Takeru Hokazono’s panelling for particular praise.
Light spoilers follow, so look away if you’re saving it. The series is still deep in its wartime arc, set years before Chihiro’s story begins, in the conflict that produced the Enchanted Blades. The chapter cuts between the Mikaboshi forces pressing towards Tokyo, Kunishige at the forge and a quieter scene at Chiaki’s bedside, before ending on a lone swordsman climbing the steps to the Yagira Villa past fallen guards. It’s the kind of chapter Hokazono does well: long stretches of stillness, then one sharp cut, with the page layout doing the work a lesser artist would hand to a narration box.
The joke, for latecomers: around its 2023 debut in Weekly Shonen Jump, Kagurabachi was swept up in an ironic meme campaign, with a large slice of the internet hyping, at great volume, a comic most of them hadn’t read, about a swordsmith’s son with a revenge problem and a fondness for goldfish. Then people actually read it, and it was rather good. The manga has since passed four million copies in circulation, and the irony has quietly evaporated, as irony tends to when the thing being mocked turns out to be better than the people mocking it.
The anime is due in April 2027 from Cypic, the studio formerly known as CygamesPictures, directed by Tetsuya Takeuchi, with character designs by Keigo Sasaki and Taihi Kimura voicing Chihiro Rokuhira. Crunchyroll has worldwide streaming rights outside Japan, mainland China and the Koreas, so British viewers should be covered. The teaser above opens in the forge, which is the right instinct for a story as interested in how a blade is made as in how it’s swung. A world tour has been screening the first 20 minutes of episode one at conventions this year, ahead of a full first-episode premiere in Japan next spring.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we like a revenge saga that understands the value of a silent panel. Five months to go until the anime, and Chihiro still has a fair few people to have a very serious word with.
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