Manga Review - Nekogahara by Hiroyuki Takei (Shaman King)

Published between September 2015 and April 2018 on the magazine Shonen Magazine Edge, Nekogahara - Stray Cat Samurai is the first work of Hiroyuki Takei (author of Shaman King) since his divorce with Shueisha and his arrive in Kodansha and it tells the story of an old samurai cat looking for a place to finally rest in peace.

The title of the manga is a reference to the Battle of Sekigahara ("neko" means "cat" in Japanese), a battle known for being the end of the Sengoku Era's civil war. Nekogahara takes place immediately after this conflict, in a Japan that is slowly getting used to the newfound peace after a long and bloody war.

What's peculiar of Nekogahara's world is that the antropomorphic cats are not substitutes of humans, but they live with them in their own society within the humans' one. The relationship between humans and cats is a clever mix of the relationship between pets and their owners and the relationship between civilians and the shogun. In this context, being a "stray cat samurai", just like the protagonist, is a clever metaphor for being a "ronin", a samurai who has lost his master.

Much like in Shaman King, beneath Nekogahara's surface lies a dissonance between the main characters and the people around them. In Shaman King, the inability to accept shamans' worldview and peculiar sensibility led to their persecution and exclusion from society, while in Nekogahara is the main character himself that decides to get away from society because of his belief. According to Norachiyo, when a cat submits to a human in return for a life of safety and tranquility, that cat is giving up its freedom and therefore it's denying his own cat nature. Preaching about the way of the stray cat samurai, Norachiyo travels in a world of cats that have lost their soul in exchange of wellness.

Since its first pages, Nekogahara plays with history on more than one level and the historical setting does not influence only the shape of the plot but also how the pages looks. In his previous works we have seen Takei break away from Nobuhiro Watsuki's style (under whom he worked during Kenshin's serialization in the 90s) to approach an edgier style inspired by Street Art or artist like Mike Mignola. In Nekogahara his style evolves again by adding the use of watercolors and bigger paintbrushes that give his art a more spontaneous and rough look. The main influence is a type of painting called Sumi-E which was really famous in East Asia at the time Nekogahara takes place. The philosophy behind Sumi-E consists in capturing the spirit of the subject in the most essential way and using only black ink and wash painting. In Nekogahara the language of manga and the aesthetic of Sumi-E mix together to form an amazing hybrid: in portraying the placid japanese countryside the author replaces the classic mangaka instruments with water brushes and a more essential style. In the action scenes the strokes are instead rough, the onomatopoeias and the kinetic lines are vigorous and frenetic and the page is dirty, scratched and full of energy.

Takei builds Nekogahara on a particular balance between exteriority and interiority and, just like in Shaman King, the fight is first of all ideological and only secondarily physical. Eager to live according to their ideals and faithful to their own nature of cats, the main characters of Nekogahara fail to reconcile themselves with the rest of the world that instead of living has simply decided to survive. Their hatred is directed to the Elite, guilty of deceiving and controlling the masses, and to the Masses themselves, guilty of letting the Elite deceive and control them, and thus acquires a certain subversive and anarchist position, even if involuntary. Consistent with their nature as cats, these characters are selfish, brazen and full of vices; outsiders not interested in changing the world, but forced to.

During its 5 volumes run, Nekogahara talks about power, manipulation, religion, war and violence, but at its core there are just cats and their struggle to survive in a world where the only choice seems to between "submiting" or "being submitted". In their path to find a balance between surviving and respecting their true nature, the main characters find another way of living, outside the gerarchy and composed by freedom and meaningful horizontal relationships.
What made Shaman King stand out was how it was used by Takei to convey his thoughts and feelings and to investigate his very own soul looking for answers that were meaningful to him. In this aspect, Nekogahara is much more close to Shaman King than other works like Jumbor or Ultimo. Knowing his recent biography, it's not hard to see in Norachiyo, a ronin looking for a place to freely live is life according to its own nature, an alter-ego of Hiroyuki Takei. In fact, Nekogahara came out after Hiroyuki Takei's divorce with Shueisha, his previous publisher, and the arrive in Kodansha, where he has also started two new Shaman King series. The story of a cat that finds freedom in being a stray feels like a metaphor of an artist at the beginning of a new phase of his career under a greater creative freedom. Thinking about it this way, Hiroyuki Takei's fans can't not be happy to know that Nekogahara is his first work to arrive to a natural conclusion on the same magazine where it started. A conclusion that might feel as the only flaw of the manga, considering how many events takes place in a short amount of pages, but which is still able to close every plot thread and to square the circle in a satisfying way.

Rough, violent, sometimes even vulgar, but also poetic, intimate and lyrical, Hiroyuki Takei's return to shonen manga after a 4 years hiatus is a peculiar and interesting work whose personality stands out among the other shonen manga and is testimony of an author who's always evolving.

Nekogahara is composed of 5 volumes published in US by Kodansha Comics in a really amazing paperback edition: materials are good, the format is bigger than your average tankobon, it has color pages and also the translator's notes to better understand every cultural reference. Absolutely recommended.

A quick comparison with a more mainstream manga

Every volume has one two or three color pages

The quality of the paper for the color pages is higher
than the one used in the rest of the volume, amazing work!

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