Usagi Yojimbo, Book 6: Circles by Stan Sakai

This sixth volume is slightly longer than the previous ones, collecting seven issues of the Usagi Yojimbo series (#25 - 31, November 1990 through November 1991), plus a story from the anthology Critters #38. But it's otherwise much like the previous books, down to the mixture of one-off stories (several of the issues collected) and a longer "mythology" multi-parter in which our hero returns to his home village, hoping to settle down and get out of the killing-random-people business. Of course, if he could do that, the series would end, and there are seventeen more volumes of this series, so...you can guess he learns the old Thomas Wolfe lesson.

Usagi Yojimbo: Circles was originally published in the early nineties; the current edition (no indications of what's different; it's probably not much) is from 2014. It has four stories up front - three of them full-length, and one ten-pager, "Yurei" - and the four-part "Circles" to close out the book. It also has an introduction from Jeff Smith, dated 1994, which is a bit of a time capsule itself.

In "Circles," we learn that sex actually does happen in this very tween-friendly world, although it happens, as far as we see, in a chaste embrace while both characters are still fully dressed. Still, baby steps. And I should say that I am too cynical and jaded to be a really good guide to Usagi Yojimbo: I enjoy it and appreciate creator Stan Sakai's story-telling ability while still seeing it both as a very second-hand thing (an American riff on the historical fiction of actual Japanese people about their actual history) and as something deliberately cleaned up and sanded down for that younger audience. (To be blunt, I don't see why an adult would read this rather than going to the seinen classics like Lone Wolf and Cub: it is very much a derivative version of those.)

So Usagi battles a demon (not quite a troll, but the same sort of thing) in "The Bridge," protecting the village he's just wandered into randomly. He gets caught up in a gambler's scheme in "The Duel," unwittingly, and of course kills the gambler's hand-picked fighter, which is sad for that guy's wife and child. (There's also a fair bit of cop-movie-style "I'll just do This One Last Job, honey, and then we'll have enough money to retire from This Dangerous Life forever!" which is as ironic as it always is, in the same ways.) "Yurei" sees Usagi help out a ghost after mostly forgetting what she told him, in the traditional way of causing those who caused her death to die themselves. And "My Lord's Daughter" is a very over-the-top, battle-heavy story, full of monsters, in which Usagi fights through hordes to save the title character from a gigantic, vicious Oni and its minions...and which turns out to be a bedtime story Usagi is telling a bunch of kids, showing Sakai realizes what the whole of Usagi Yojimbo is, and is willing to joke about it.

Then we hit "Circles," which is the story of Usagi going back to the village where he grew up, and hoping to settle there. He first learns that his old teacher, who lives in a remote location not far from the village, is surprisingly still alive - Usagi last saw him falling from a high cliff towards the usual rapids - which is encouraging. But the new village headman, Kenichi, is married to the girl Usagi loved, Mariko, - they had a rivalry about that, among other things - and doesn't like or trust him at all. Meanwhile, the creepy supernatural samurai Jei from the third book is back - from the dead, actually - and is leading a band of bandits to find and kill Usagi on behalf of (he claims) the gods. Jei does have supernatural powers, so, on balance, I'm willing to grant that some gods are on his side

Jei's bandits threaten and harass and raid the village. Kenichi and Usagi, as the two trained samurai, lead the villagers in fighting them off and planning a counter-attack, but Kenichi's young son Jotaro is nabbed by the bandits, raising the stakes. There's a big fight, Usagi kills Jei once again, and Jotaro is saved. But Usagi learns a deep secret, and has to leave the village because of it, never to settle there. (He could, of course, settle somewhere else, and he'll probably think of that eventually - but the point of a wandering-samurai series is for the samurai to wander, so don't expect it any time soon.)

As before, this is well-done samurai action, in a register suitable for middle-grade readers. Sakai is a fine story-telling cartoonist, adept at large groups of random animal-headed people fighting with each other with medieval weaponry, and every bit of Usagi Yojimbo I've seen has been solid adventure-story material, superbly crafted with a fine control of tone to hit both comedic and dramatic moments. I still think the originals Sakai used as models are better and more interesting, but this is both excellent and something you can hand to your tweens without worry.