Holo lives in a world where most of humanity lives underground, hiding and protecting themselves from monsters that roam the surface and are impervious to almost all weapons. Aside from people cast out from these underground cities and a few merchants, the only people who travel on the surface are Ayanashi, fighters who have mastered how to kill the beasts with the only weapons that work: very very short swords that put the wielder in the most danger of all, and Holo became an Ayanashi at a very young age. Until recently he traveled with his younger brother, another Ayanashi, but after his strange and unexplained murder Holo is seeking vengeance, looking for the man who did it and discovering a number of other secrets about the world along the way.
At first, Holo’s world reminded me a little bit of the middle grade, American book The City of Ember which was also set in an underground city but the setting differentiated itself pretty quickly. This world resembles Earth in many ways but it has a distinct creation myth about the ogres that roam the surface and the need for people to live below ground, but there appear to be no stories of people previously living above ground, even if the surface world is littered with ruins.
Ayanashi is quickly paced but not so much that it feels like the story is rushing. It feels more like you’re riding along in a car and able to clearly see the world-building and side characters through the windows. Holo successfully strikes that fine balance between “tough ‘n gruff shounen protagonist” and “isn’t an asshat” with ease and the side characters, no matter how brief their appearances are, are equally engaging. While some of the aspects of the world-building feel strange at first, especially where the ogres are concerned, the story stays consistent which makes it a lot easier to suspend disbeliefs. It’s easy to fall headlong into this story and by the end of the first volume I was hooked and spent an inadvisable amount of time before bed reading more.
In the extra pages of the first volume, creator Yukihiro Kajimoto details how Ayanashi came to be and, to my great surprise, it’s their first series and more or less their first manga, period! They started as a video game designer who made a manga somewhat on a whim for Kodansha’s amateur contest, won an award, submitted another one shot, and then was able to turn the idea from their contest entry into the serialized version of Ayanashi (these extra pages don’t make it entirely clear if the aforementioned one-shot was a different story or if that was also an earlier version of Ayanashi, I do believe it’s different but I wasn’t able to find reference to it online in English either way).
I’m stunned that Kajimoto made the jump from doing design work to creating a manga with creative backgrounds, interesting yet intuitive paneling, and fluid action scenes without any prior comicking experience or even working as a manga assistant because this art does not feel like the work of a beginner! Sadly it doesn’t look like they have done much manga work since since I very much want to see more of what they can do.
One way in which Ayanashi did feel like a first work was how the story started off a little “meh” but quickly grew stronger and stronger and by the time I finished the third volume I was dying for more. Kajimoto was advancing the story at a good pace and had included some additional interesting details about the world-building, hints that would likely explain some of the earlier inconsistencies, and dynamics between the different Ayanashi that I was really excited to see pay-off in later volumes…only to find out that volume four is the final one! I have not read volume four yet but I feel confident in saying that only one more volume won’t be enough time to satisfyingly wrap up all of the plot threads that Kajimoto has introduced with the intent of resolving.
It’s such a shame too, if there was more word-of-mouth chatter about this story I could see it growing a small but devoted fanbase since it’s a solid battle shounen story but without anything resembling tournament arcs and the pacing feels so much better for it.
I do intend to read the final volume, as this is one of my favorites of Kodansha USA’s digital-only releases, but even before I do this has colored some of my feelings on the series and leaves me feeling a little torn about recommending a story that (most likely) didn’t get to reach it’s full conclusion. With the rise in the past two years of more digital manga services (such as Kodansha USA’s aggressive publishing schedule of digital-only titles and services such as MANGA Plus and VIZ’s Shonen Jump) I think this is a feeling that we are all going to be experiencing more often. We’re now getting not only the great and mediocre on-going stories but the great and mediocre stories that never got that chance.