Seven Seas Entertainment has been on another shopping trip, and its latest haul, announced yesterday, is a fine example of the publisher’s knack for finding premises that sound as if they were drawn from a hat. Topping the bill are a runaway mermaid and a retired assassin with a gambling problem. Neither has yet been asked to meet the other, which seems a missed opportunity.
The mermaid comes first. Into the Sea by Yue Ben Du is a Chinese girls’ love novel on the Seven Seas Baihe imprint, billed as a “mermaid x cultivator romance”. Lan Wu, a mermaid demon, flees an arranged marriage. To hide her aura, she swallows a mysterious pill that seals her powers and leaves her weak and close to death, which is the sort of thing that happens when you take medicine without reading the leaflet. She is rescued by Ji Lingyue, an aspiring cultivator, and ends up enrolled as a cultivation disciple alongside her on Haochen Mountain. Anyone who knows xianxia will know that sect life on a mountain involves a great deal of meditation, rivalry and staircases. How a mermaid gets on with the staircases is not explained. Volume one arrives as a large paperback and ebook in November 2027.
The hitwoman is the heroine of Nighthawk, Once Again, Fuyuki Izumida’s action comedy, which has been running in Kodansha’s Morning since last November as Yotaka Futatabi. Eight years after retiring, a legendary female assassin lives in a rundown flat, drinks, smokes and spends her savings on gambling and gacha games. Now she is facing eviction and nearly broke, and has to decide whether to go back to crime. It is John Wick rewritten by someone who has lost a lot of money on loot boxes, and frankly more relatable. Volume one is due in October 2027.
Also in the batch is a title that wins the week’s prize for honest marketing: Dumbass Zombies!!! An Intermediate-Level Survival Guide for a World Where You Can Die Just Going to Borrow Soy Sauce, by Azuki Arai and Osato, in which three worn-out young women try to run their errands in a world full of zombies. It lands in November 2027. The list is completed by Will You Take a Bath with Me?, a boys’ love one-shot from Maki Marukido, the creator of Pornographer, in which Kazuya lets his junior colleague Mika move in in return for housework, and Mika finds out that Kazuya hates baths. That one is out in October 2027.
The haul confirms a couple of trends. Chinese web novels are now a regular part of English-language publishing schedules, and the most dependable genre in manga at the moment seems to be “ordinary, exhausted adult copes with something absurd”. A mermaid who can’t swim in her own powers, an assassin who can’t pay her rent and three women dodging the undead to buy soy sauce: in 2027, it seems, everyone is just trying to get through the week.
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