Usasgi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho by Stan Sakai

As I've warned before, my posts about series tend to get shorter and more perfunctory as I have less and less to say. I may end up rambling below, but I doubt I'll have anything particularly profound this time.

I'm still reading my way through Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series, a mildly fantasy-tinged adventure series set in a dramatically heightened version of Edo-period Japan, pitched at a level appropriate for middle-grade readers...oh, and all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, because Sakai started this series in the '80s for the Critters anthology. Anthropomorphic characters also suit his art style quite well, though there are all the usual questions of how multi-animal worlds work - are all these races interfertile? If a rabbit and a fox have children, are they hybrids, or are the boys rabbits and the girls foxes, or what? Do the races code specific positions in society, or geographic origins, or something like that?

In this series, they're mostly just animals because Sakai wanted them to be animals. Individual characters are kinds of animals that make sense for them specifically; I haven't made a study to see how families connect. Usagi himself clearly gets the hots for babes who are not themselves rabbits, for one data-point.

The ninth collection of that series is Daisho, collecting some stories from issues 7 and 8 of the 2nd series that weren't in vol. 8 (Shades of Death) and the full issues 9-14; it reaches almost to the end of the Mirage series (Usagi started with Fantagraphics, had a short run with Mirage, and then settled in at Dark Horse for twenty years and 160-ish issues); the current edition came out in 2010 but seems to be an only very slightly updated version of the original book 9 from about 1995.

The stories here mostly flow into a continuous narrative, though those two lead-off stories are both closing off loose plot threads from earlier volumes. Most of the book sees Usagi caught up in helping out a town taken over by slavers, and then chasing their leader after "General Fujii" steals Usagi's swords. After that, we get a flashback to another great lost love of Usagi's life - we're only up to Lost Love #2 at this point, but we're also only twenty-some issues in, with a hundred and sixty to go, so Usagi could have a hot anthropomorphic babe in every town by the end of the series if I'm counting correctly.

This particular Lost Love is the We Could Never Be Together type - she's the daughter of a major lord, he's the bodyguard delivering her to the arranged marriage, and they're on the run from the forces trying to murder her before that can happen. You've read that story before, but Sakai does a solid version of it here.

That's generally my take on Usagi, this volume and this previous ones - Sakai is professional and solid, telling stories well in a clean style, with solid dialogue and engaging plotting. There's nothing groundbreaking or surprising here, and it is all pitched so you could hand it to a ten-year-old. Is that enough? Every reader has to decide that - so far, I'm enjoying the stories, while finding them inherently limited.