Samurai Champloo by Masaru Gotsubo

Finally I got a picture (below) of the proper manga characters from this manga.  They have made this into an anime but I’ve only read the manga of Samurai Champloo.

Image via Wikipedia

Samurai Champloo is the name of a samurai who uses the sword and mixed styles of martial arts when they fight. They may be unpredictable but very strong, the guy in the middle of the picture with big, fuzzy hair is called Mugen and he is a Samurai Champloo.

He literally lives to fight others and doesn’t care about anything or anyone else, apart from food.  In the manga he’s the first samurai you meet and he decides to become the girl’s, Fuu, body guard for hire as long as she paid him with food because he hadn’t eaten in days.

The second samurai we meet is, Jin, the man with the long black hair, blowing on a pipe in the picture, he is also a samurai but he has no motivation to fight others.  He is a highly skilled swordsman and very disciplined in his fighting style, unlike Mugen who isn’t and can be unpredictable when he fights.

They are both evenly matched in a fight and they become friends/enemies by wanting to kill one another with their swords.  Mugen decides to honour his job with Fuu and become her bodyguard as she wants to travel to find a samurai who smells like sunflowers because he killed her brother. Jin tags along because he has nothing else better to do and he really wants to fight Mugen again and kill him.

The manga does not censor what happens to the people who get cut by swords, in fact if you like to see people getting cut in some interesting ways, this very graphic and bloody manga is great for you.  For most of the stories these three spend their looking for the next meal and getting into lots of fights while looking for the samurai who smells like sunflowers.

I don’t know what the anime is like but I would like to see an episode, if I do watch it I’ll post my thoughts on here.

Happy reading!