Written/Drawn/Colored by Hayao Miyazaki
English language translation by Alex Dudok de Wit
Edited by Mark Siegel and Kara Valdez
Cover designed by Kirk Benshoff
Interior design by Kirk Benshoff, Sunny Lee, and Angela Boyle
American edition published in 2022 by First Second
Original Japanese language publication in 1983 by Tokuma Shoten
. . .
“Spotting the slave traders’ vehicle, Shuna got in front of it and unleashed a burst of fire at point-blank range. The attack caught them completely off guard. Shuna kept firing with wicked composure, as he would when hunting snow leopards. By the time he had run a ring around the vehicle, he had shot them all down.”
-text from page 62 of Shuna’s Journey
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Shuna’s Journey is a manga-adjacent work from the master animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose most recent feature length film is The Boy and the Heron, and whose other works include Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I refer to Shuna’s Journey as manga-adjacent because even though it will most likely be shelved in the manga section at the bookstore it apparently is considered an emonogatari-an “illustrated story”-as per translator Alex Dudok de Wit’s afterward. Indeed, Shuna’s Journey is much more “compressed” in its storytelling than other manga works which often allow the action scenes to play out cinematically-almost moment to moment-across many pages and panels. Shuna’s Journey evokes the widescreen majesty of John Ford and Sergio Leone, as opposed to the hyperkinetic action of contemporary shonen sagas such as One Piece, Chainsaw Man, and Kaiju No. 8. Having said all this, I still personally found Shuna’s Journey to be very manga-like: it’s fast-paced, full of beautifully detailed environments, and inhabited by incisively stylized humans coexisting with fearsome, outsized monsters and bygone ruins of forgotten empires.
A boy named Shuna leaves his fading village to seek power and adventure in a vast, harsh world full of magic and cruelty. Shuna wanders the ruins of dead empires, battles slave traders, and comes face-to-face with bizarre powers which humankind can never hope to tame. Shuna’s main quest is for some magic seeds-a fairy tale element-but he is forced to do battle with the evil forces of the world using a variety of guerilla warfare tactics. All this is rendered in evocative watercolor art in a sort of storybook style which lends a peculiar grace to this hard-boiled fantasy adventure. Long time Miyazaki fans will perhaps see in Shuna’s Journey a kind of roadmap for many of the themes, character designs, production designs, conflicts, and strange creatures that would go on to achieve global pop culture iconography status. Shuna’s Journey is so dense with the primal material of Miyazaki’s subsequent work that it almost seems like the artist conjured a prophecy of his future glory via the power of a maniacal work ethic.
Shuna’s Journey also works as a story all unto itself. It is not merely of interest to Miyazaki obsessives and collectors. If you have never even heard of Hayao Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli Shuna’s Journey offers an experience complete unto itself. The main ideas here have to do with survival and power. Shuna leaves his fading agrarian village to seek a better life for himself. Shuna is also tantalized by the prospect of finding the source of magic seeds which promise a future of abundance beyond subsistence farming, beyond hunting and gathering. To this end, Shuna manufactures his own bullets to feed the rifle handed down from the previous generation. Shuna’s a very model of rugged self-sufficiency, and yet he seeks ever more power. This restless seeking comes at a terrible price. Shuna’s adventures are grand: he kills slave traders with the bullets he himself crafted; he liberates slaves; he stands his ground against ghoulish night raiders; and, much like the player characters of The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, he’s persistent and intuitive enough to see the way forward through bizarre, formidably occulted terrain. The cost is that Shuna suffers trauma from violent battle, sleepless exhaustion, exposure to the elements, and deprivation of nutrition. Shuna’s capable, yet also mortal.
Late in the narrative, there’s a change in perspective which suggests Shuna’s single minded pursuit of the magic seeds must be tempered by ethical connection to other people. His personality and agency are evacuated by his experience of a terrible otherworldly power which requires him to enter another’s care. This level of hardship and the complexity it entails brings a sense of gravity into the fantasy. Unlike with Marvel Cinematic Universe products-where endlessly malleable computerized action figures get iterated across endless potential product outputs- in Shuna’s Journey great power comes with both great responsibility and consequences. The power Shuna attains might be wielded responsibly, but it will always do some violence to its wielder. Shuna’s hope lies in his allying himself with the oppressed who endure injustice while also fighting to expand their domain of autonomy.
Shuna’s Journey is an engaging fantasy about power, self-reliance, and finding a place in the world against oppressive regimes of both nature and humankind. Its seemingly happy ending is shadowed by a certainty of future conflicts against the powers of the world. One is left with the sense that Shuna and his allies will endure no matter the hardships.
