Usagi Yojimbo #19-21: "Blade of the Gods," "The Teacup," and “The Shogun’s Gift”

Eclectic mix this time.


"Blade of the Gods" is an odd one. Another spooky instalment, this one more successfully unsettling than the previous supernatural episodes that seemed to be going for that. Usagi is pitted against a maddened undead samurai...or is he? It's one of those ambiguous ghost stories where there may have been a monster, or there may have been some coincidences that made it look like one.

Granted, we already know that Usagi's world has monsters in it, and that their existence is well known and documented, so the ambiguity doesn't hit quite as hard as it would in a less fantastical setting. But still, it basically works.

Usagi shelters from a terrible stormy night in an old farmhouse. There's already someone sheltering in it, as it turns out, and just seeing their face at the door would be enough to turn most people back to find a tree to sleep in.

The rictus grinning wolf who sure looks like a desiccated corpse being animated by fell magic lets Usagi share the hut, albeit in a gruff, taciturn sort of way. When asked, he explains that he killed the owner of this hut a few hours ago, because they were evil. Not a criminal (or at least, if they were, then the wolf doesn't know what crimes they comitted exactly). Rather, the gods who raised the wolf from the dead after he succumbed to fever and endowed him with his new divine powers revealed the resident's wickedness to him, and he slew them as per his unlife's raison d'etat.

If he smites enough evildoers, the revenant explains, the kami will take him bodily into the spirit world and make him one of them. His one man detect-and-smite crusade is part of the process of apotheosis.

Usagi isn't sure what the hell to make of that. For now, as the gaunt, foul-smelling individual who claims to be a zombie paladin sleeps, Usagi builds a fire and finds that it doesn't seem to do anything against the chill in this hut. In fact, despite the fire, it seems colder inside with the wolf than it is outside in the storm. He also saw the firelight catch on the blade of the wolf's naginata earlier, and he could have sworn that it reflected concentrated shadow instead of light.

Usagi doesn't have long to sit around being uncomfortable before the wolf abruptly wakes up again and rambles about how the gods have chosen this moment to reveal Usagi's own wickedness to him.

It's hard to say if the wolf has supernatural strength, or is just too crazy to ignore his body's limits. At any rate, after an initially evenly matched clash of steel, the maybe-undead kicks Usagi out through the wooden door and takes the fight outside. Polearm versus sword in a wide open space will tend to favor the polearm, even without its weilder having supernatural strength and endurance. The fight turns sharply against Usagi.

Just like with the underwater grappling scene in "kappa," the art shift for this scene really does a lot to sell its nightmarish quality.

I'm starting to get the impression that this is the whole reason for the supernatural episodes' existence. Whenever Sakai feels like playing with the visual style, he throws a scenery-warping monster at Usagi.

Usagi narrowly avoids getting struck by lightning, blinding and stunning him. The wolf stands over him, declaring that the kami have just demonstrated their will, in case there was any doubt. Usagi says that if karma demands his death now, then he supposes he'll die, but as long as he isn't being told what evil he's being smitten for he will still do his best to stave off the smiting. The wolf raises his naginata high, and the blade gets struck by lightning.

When Usagi regains consciousness after his second lightning near-miss of the night, morning has come, and the sky is clear. All that remains of his opponent is a burned-up, half-melted naginata stuck in the ground.

Were the chill and the black reflections just Usagi's sleep-deprived senses and the awful weather playing tricks on him? Was the wolf just a skilled warrior who came out the other side of a severe illness with brain damage and delusions? Was he truly a monster, and if so, did the kami punish him for attacking an innocent target, or did they decide that now was the right time for his ascension? It is very, very strange for lightning to strike someone and not even leave so much as a skeleton. But then, perhaps the wolf survived and simply crawled away before Usagi awoke?

We'll never know.


This one was memorable mostly for the visuals. In particular, the leadup TO the battle was just slow-paced and ominous enough to evoke a sense of dread that previous horror-adjacent Usagi tales never quite managed (even if the underwater kappa fight still beats out this story's duel-by-lightning for unpleasant action sequences).

The supernatural ambiguity, well, like I said. I appreciate what it was going for there, but the fact that the characters have all been pretty frank about magic and monsters existing from the beginning of the comic onward takes the bite out of the question. If the wolf really was a monster then that just means it's one more monster, and if he wasn't then that just means it's one less. In any case, personally I do think there was *something* magical going on there, but I don't think the wolf was correct about what that something was. Though that's just my takeaway.


"The Teacup" starts with Usagi realizing that his wanderings have taken him back into the territory of his old buddy, the recently minted daimyo Geishu Noriyuki, and that he should head to his castle to say hi and maybe plough his bodyguard cat again. This turns out to not actually be relevant to this story, though; any city would have worked just as well as Noriyuki's for plot purposes.

As he crests a little hill, Usagi sees a familiar face that isn't any of the ones he expected to run into in the area.

Four times in the first twenty entries. Scumbag Rhino is easily the most frequently recurring side-character in this series.

And, as it so happens, in this story we will see both the full extent, and the clear and distinct limits, of Gen's scumbaggery.

After griping at Usagi for just watching him beat all those mooks instead of helping, and Usagi relishing the chance to be a smug dick to someone who he knows completely deserves it, Gen explains the situation. He's got this priceless artifact teacup to deliver to someone in the Geishu city, but someone else is trying to...I don't entirely understand the politics and motives here, but someone is trying to get that teacup before then and is willing to hire mercs for this purpose.

Gen also assures him that the enemy in question has only probably hired that one little group of thugs, so it should be smooth sailing the rest of the way. Usagi...well, I'd assume that he saw through this but decided to accompany Gen anyway, but after what happens a few pages later I'm not sure, Usagi might actually be just that gullible. Anyway, for now they take a ferry down the nearby river, only for the boatman to turn out to be one of the baddies. And um. He had a bunch of friends waiting with snorkels or something.

Missed opportunity to have the ambushers be fish people or frog people or something. Ah well.

There's a good gag here, set up by a sarcastic comment Usagi made earlier about admiring Gen's expert swordsmanship from afar:

Heh. Anyway, they're back on foot.

Things get harder still when they cross paths with a pair of refugee children on their way to seek out their uncle - the only family they have left - in the Geishu heartland. They're not sure he can afford to feed two more mouths, but he's all they've got.

Usagi, predictably, is eager to protect and provide for them along the way. Gen, predictably, is not.

I'm reading this at least partly as Gen not wanting to have children in harm's way when the teacup-assassins are still gunning for him, but also not wanting to admit out loud to Usagi that he still expects more trouble and isn't planning to pay him for the help. And Usagi just being really, really dumb right now.

I feel like the early episodes had him as more cunning and less gullible. Maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe Sakai just changed his mind about that aspect of Usagi.

When they camp for the night, Gen has a soliloquy. On one hand, those orphan children remind him of himself, which pisses him off because it reminds him of how weak and helpless and pathetic he used to be. On the other hand, those orphan children remind him of himself, which means he can't pretend to not be invested in their welfare no matter how hard he tries.

He starts to slip away while the others are asleep, to complete the journey alone without having to endanger the children or getting to mooch off of Usagi's swordsmanship. But...in the end, he just can't help but let his love of cutting corners pull him back.

Sure enough, they get attacked the next day. And, Gen figures out a way to both clear the rest of his path and protect the children for the rest of the way. It just requires Usagi to be a total moron.

So, would you believe me if I told you that Gen gave him a decoy teacup in front of the enemies, let them harass Usagi for the entire rest of the way while keeping himself and the children untouched, and then got to the destination ahead of him with the real teacup and took all the money for himself?

What? You knew that already? Damn, how did you possibly guess?

Usagi successfully fends off every teacup assailant the world can throw at him short of Juggernaut Star herself before finally making it to the city. He ends up tripping and breaking it himself before the end, and Gen is - surprisingly enough - kind enough to come clean to Usagi at the end instead of gaslighting him into thinking they were both out of a reward thanks to him like I expected him to. For some reason, Usagi once again doesn't go ahead and try to kill him. But I guess it's fortunate he doesn't, because this gives Gen a chance to explain - truthfully, I think - what he's done with the money.

He gave the gold to their uncle, to ensure that he can provide for them until they're old enough to start working themselves.

Usagi is still pissed that he had to do the dangerous half, but he's a lot less pissed than he'd have otherwise been. The final gag has them both trying to stick each other with their dinner bill, resulting in them accidentally dine-and-dashing and getting tracked down by angry townsfolk. It was probably the only way left to build on that running joke, heh.


I guess the takeaway here - aside from Usagi seeming to get easier to trick the longer the series goes on - is that Gennosuke has a lot more complexity to him than it seemed. He's still Scumbag Rhino, but he isn't just a scumbag. He isn't a Robin Hood either, per se, but he can be induced into occasionally playing a Robin Hood role if you pull the right heartstrings.

I'm more interested by the implications about how he became such a greedy, curmudgeony asshat, though, than I am about the revelation of where exactly that asshattery ends. The contempt for weakness and gullibility, especially, seem to point pretty heavily to that childhood of victimization he reminisced on. The fact that he's self-aware about this, and seems to *kind of* want to change and become a better person, is a surprise. I wouldn't have taken Gen for an introspective thinker.

Usagi was really the deuteragonist of this one, tbh.

One other noteworthy thing is that before parting ways and/or getting dragged back to the inn by angry villagers, Gen asks Usagi if he feels like maybe taking up bounty hunting after all. There's a guy with a big price on his head named "Blind Ino" who's supposed to be somewhere around these parts. Usagi's reaction to that name is nonchalant enough that I'm pretty sure this story must come before either of the Blind Swordspig ones. Which means that the other Gen appearances thus far would also be set before that. Which means that the ones I read last time, over the course of which Usagi adopted and then gave up Spot, must also be after all the Gen episodes. Okay, starting to figure out a timeline for at least many of these, unless I misinterpreted Usagi's (lack of) reaction to Ino's name.

Also, this story came with a little bonus. Apparently, this poem was written for "Groo the Wanderer," that other comic that "Usagi Yojimbo" had a visual shoutout to (and apparently vice versa) in an early episode. Sakai adapted it ineligantly to be about Usagi and replicated it here now, for some reason.

I almost feel like the last line gets thrown off by the character's name not rhyming with "grew." :p

"The Shogun's Gift" delivers on the setup from "The Teacup" of Usagi being in Geishu territory. It might as well have come at the beginning of this episode to begin with, honestly. Open on Noriyuki and Tomoe at home in the Geishu manor, squeeing over the glowing red anti-nanoarmor sword they're going to use to buy favor from the Tokugawas.

Sengo Muramasa would have only been dead for less than a century at this point, so his legend hadn't snowballed quite as much to the general public. However, part of the reason his work became so legendary was because House Tokugawa were big patrons of his, and when they eventually took over the country they kind of made his swords into a status symbol. So, handing a Muramasa original over to them specifically would get the Geishus a pretty big helping of brownie points.

Of course, they need to make sure they can actually get it to the shogun when they're due to meet him. So, after finishing their soy session around the katana, they put it back in its sheath and review the new security measures they've put in place. Security measures that haven't prevented a lone ninja from sneaking onto the roof, where he is listening in on them from above the ceiling just a couple of feet over their heads.

Tomoe thinks she hears something, and puts her naginata blade through the ceiling under the spot where she think she heard something. This ninja is a quick-thinker, though, and also very, very dedicated.

No blood on the blade. Must have been nothing. The ninja has a flesh wound, but he's still able-bodied enough to sneak inside a little while later, kill a guard or two, and abscond with the artifact.

A bit later that evening, Usagi crosses paths with Tomoe as she's riding out to alert the border guards about the theft. She takes the opportunity to inform him as well, which naturally ends up paying off for her and her master pretty well by the end of the issue.

Usagi then happens to wander into the campsite of a cat woodcutter who definitely doesn't have anything hidden in his bundle of logs, and who is nursing an accidental axe-wound that looks an awful lot like someone stuck a naginata through his leg. The ninja (who happens to be a cat, it now occurs to me. A member of that same company Hikiji often hires? Makes sense, since last we knew Hikiji was trying to think of another way to weaken the Geishu's land claims, and preventing Noriyuki from becoming the shogun's Employee Of The Month would help with that) can't be too gruff without arousing suspicion, so he endeavours to be as uninteresting as he can and hope Usagi just leaves without asking questions.

And, here we see Usagi get into the zone when it comes to intrigue. In a way that definitely lives up to the folkloric traits often associated with rabbits, but is also kind of hard to reconcile with his showing in "The Teacup," which chronologically is supposed to have happened just a day or two before this. Or...maybe he isn't just playing stupid, at first. After all, this pair of panels:

comes before, rather than after, this pair of panels:

From this point on, Usagi does a great job of playing stupid, contriving reasons to travel along with the "woodcutter" that the latter can't wriggle out of without raising more questions, and generally doing a good job investigating him without breaking his cover of being a nosy moron with no sense of social cues. All clearly intentional on Usagi's part.

But he was also acting like that *before* he had the inner monologue about starting to get suspicious.

Were it not for that, I'd interpret this as him having been inspired by Gen's recent example and making an effort to try and be more cunning and socially aware, but with it...well, I really don't know.

Not that this makes Usagi's performance in the following pages any less entertaining, to be fair. The best part for me is the undercover neko-ninja's expressions as his frustration, rage, and desperation silently grow while Usagi denies him escape after escape after escape. The fact that he has to keep downplaying the severity of his leg wound, which isn't getting any better and that he can't let a doctor look at without it being obvious how he got it, is another factor that keeps him pinned down. His ability to just make himself vanish in typical ninja fashion is limited.

Another thing that helps Usagi is that the Geishu border guards locking down the roads and looking through people's baggage are much better at their job than the guys guarding the castle. Also, they provide the opportunity for this rather baffling gag:

Just a guy taking his giant backpack full of crabs for a swim.

Another background gag comes in the form of this pair of simian cabbage merchants, though I think lampshading it might have not been the best approach the author could have taken:

Usagi invited them to eat and hang out with them while waiting for the border crossing queue to clear up, pretty much just so there'd be more eyes on the ninja and notice if he seems to be figuring out an escape method. And, using this couple in that role is definitely well-suited for them. I just think it would have been funnier if they were written as their normal, dimwitted selves without Usagi recognizing them or them providing an in-universe justification for how they manage to be every pair of hapless peasants who Usagi meets all over Japan. It's kinda like explaining the joke, you know?

The best part of this sequence is when the monkeys pitch in to help Usagi without realizing it, and do a better job than he ever could have. He definitely picked the right couple of cabbage merchants to rope into this.

Also, is that the crab guy with a bowl of octopi over there? I think that's the crab guy. Did he use his crabs as octopus bait? Wait, how can you catch octopi in freshwater? Is it a magic river that turns arthropods into cephalopods? Mysteries!

Well, the kitty (whose leg has been slowing him down more and more since he was able to apply that herb-poultice on the night of the theft before Usagi found him) eventually does manage to slip away, but by then Usagi has been able to make 100% sure that this guy is who and what he suspected he was. He follows him along the nighttime road, katana drawn, and the two finally deal with each other openly.

Yup, he's from the neko-shinyabi gang. Yes, he all but confirms that Hikiji hired him to sabotage the Geishu diplomacy and hopefully deliver their means for conducting it into Hikiji's own hands. Surmised as much. Anyway, as we already know there are two grades of neko-ninja, and this guy isn't one of the mook ones that Usagi carves through during traditional combat encounters (or...wait, right ninjas, it's a numerical thing, I forgot ). So, even with an injured and possibly infected leg, the cat uses his Lone Ninja combat buff to evade Usagi long enough to get a smoke bomb off, and in the darkness of the thick forest he's able to get away from him with his wood bundle and its hidden treasure in hand.

Well, A wood bundle, with A hidden treasure. Usagi took advantage of the time earlier that day when the cabbage merchants had the ninja occupied on their own, and took measures. If they all really were just woodcutters, then there'd be no harm in exchanging their equally-sized bundles of lumber, right?

Back in the city, the monkeys have already managed to get their bundle to the Geishu household where they'd already told Usagi they were planning to sell it. They panic when the missing Muramasa sword is found in the middle of their bundle, but it's obvious to everyone present that thieves wouldn't have just brought the sword right back like that. Especially since Tomoe is onhand and has the background knowledge to make the correct inferences.

She figures Usagi wouldn't have wanted to keep the Muramasa on his person when he went to try and apprehend the thief, for fear of said thief getting a lucky break and managing to get it away from him again in the confrontation. And also that telling the monkeys about what he was doing would have both imperilled them and also caused needless panic if he turned out to be wrong about the cat after all. He knew they were bringing the wood to the Geishus anyway, and he rightly trusted Noriyuki and his underlings to figure out what happened.

It's too bad Tomoe didn't get to see him for longer, though it's possible he'll be coming back this way now that the cat managed to ditch him.

He should. There is no way to read her expression in the second panel other than "I wanna tap that bunny ass some more."


I probably didn't need to go into so much blow-by-blow detail for this story, but there were just so damned many memorable moments and amusing gags that it felt wrong to omit from the review. The slow-burn pace is also an important facet of "The Shogun's Gift," and blowing through it quickly would have given the wrong vibe.

Anyway, this is easily one of the strongest Usagi Yojimbo stories I've read so far. I might even call it my favorite of the lot. Part of it, in addition to the delicately balanced tension of the plot itself, is the sheer detail and diversity of the artwork. We have dark forests lit by firelight, busy city streets full of eclectic (and mostly consistent from panel-to-panel) background extras doing visually interesting and sometimes amusing things, great range and subtlety in the facial expressions for Usagi and the nekoninja as they silently plot against and react to one another, etc. It also is interesting for being a pretty long story, but barely featuring any fight scenes at all. The Usagi Yojimbo fight sequences are generally good, but a lot of the ones that don't feature opponents with unusual gimmicks start to feel samey after a while, and the longer stories thus far have all featured protracted "Usagi versus small army of mook swordsmen" scenes. By virtue of having only two, very short, action sequences, "The Shogun's Gift" devoted most of its length to imagery we don't see in every other episode.

I'm not sure if Usagi is being written as uncharacteristically smart in this episode, or if he was being written as uncharacteristically dumb in some of the previous ones (the one immediately before this, perplexingly, being the most glaring example). Regardless, within the context of this one story, watching him be a mostly-clever protagonist was very enjoyable.

On a myth arc note, this story ends with Usagi looking up at the moon and wondering if he and Daimyo Hikiji will ever have a face-to-face confrontation again. Indicating that things might be boiling to a head (even if it's not a final, conclusive one) soon. Also, the escaping thief named himself before vanishing into the woods at the end, and made it clear that he'd be eager for a chance to make up for this humiliation by Usagi in the future.

I think Shinjen's addition to the rogues' gallery could be a very useful one.

First of all, the main villain's only named minions so far (Lord Hebi and Majordomo Okii) are behind-the-scenes political operator types who Usagi won't often get to interact with. As a field agent, Shinjen is much better equipped to serve as the protagonist-facing representation of the enemy, and essentially act as a proxy for Hikiji to interact with Usagi and thus develop their mutual antagonism (being a stealth specialist with a knack for disappearing also enables Shinjen to survive multiple encounters to keep on playing this story role).

For another, his grudge against Usagi is different from, eg, Ino's or Kenichi's in that it's not being *outfought* by Usagi that he resents, but being *outsmarted* by him. No one expects a ninja vs samurai duel out in the open without the element of surprise to favor the ninja, so there's no dishonor in that even before you factor in the wounded leg. But, being outmanoeuvred in the arena of skullduggery? That stings. And means that Shinjen's revenge is likely to take the form of another intrigue challenge, forcing Usagi to exercise a different skillset than usual if he's to survive.


The next Usagi Yojimbo story is the major "Dragon Bellow Conspiracy" plotline. I'll get to it after FLCL.