This is one of those splash pages I picked not because it best summarized the series - although, maybe? A man combusts because his desire for power overrides everything else - but because the moment I saw it, I knew the title. Also, I think it's funny Saturday Splash Page had no manga posts for the first 8 months of this year, and now 3 in 4 weeks.
Rurouni Kenshin, which came out in serialized form from 1994-1999, is set 10 years into Japan's Meiji Era, with the restoration of the Emperor's power, but also Japan's attempts to modernize and stand as equals with the Western nations. It follows a wandering swordsman (rurouni being a word for "wanderer") named Kenshin, who meets Kaoru, a young woman trying to keep her father's dojo running in the face of unscrupulous elements. Kaoru's father developed a style of swordfighting, Kamiya Kasshin-Ryu, that was meant to protect. It focuses not on killing the enemy, but on preserving the lives of the wielder and those around them. Kenshin thinks it a naive dream, that the art of the sword is to kill, but prefers the dream to the reality.
As it turns out, Kenshin would know about the reality, as he was "Hitokiri Battosai", a famous assassin for the revolutionary forces. Kenshin practices a lightning-swift style of swordsmanship, Hiten-Mitsurugi-Ryu, but in the present, carries a reverse-bladed sword, meaning the edge his strikes with is dull. He killed many, once, but has vowed not to do so again. The question is, can he protect others and still maintain that vow?
Especially because, while the new era was supposed to be one of peace, not everyone is happy with how things turned out. There are those who lost, those who were used by the winners and cast aside, those who learned the ideals espoused in pretty speeches were too easily forgotten when rubber met road. Not to mention all the opportunists, profiteers and general scumbags that always inhabit society. Though Kenshin has - by his choice - no position in the government, he's still a symbol of the revolution and bent on protecting those who can't protect themselves, so he's inevitably drawn into the conflicts.
Kenshin is a bit unusual to me, because he seems quite unlike the typical shonen manga protagonist. Dragon Ball's Son Goku became an archetype. Undersized (initially), loud, uncultured, teenager who loves to fight and loves to eat. Naruto and Luffy both lean that direction. Kenshin was a teenager when he fought in the war, but most of this series is set while he's in his late-20s. He's quiet, polite, refers to himself as 'this one', which is apparently a mark of humility, and would rather not fight if a situation can be resolved peacefully. He is undersized, as basically every opponent he faces towers over him. Kaoru, who is close to a decade his junior, is probably taller than him, too, but most of those shonen characteristics are carried by either the best friend character, my boy Sanosuke, or Kaoru's student, Yahiko.
It's a different approach, but it works. Kenshin, despite his placid or pleasant exterior, is haunted by the things he did in the war. He wanted to make a better world for people, but his attempt to make that world left a mountain of corpses in his wake. Didn't those people deserve to be in that better world? What of their loved ones who are left behind? For Kenshin, the moments when he "gets serious" are not cool so much as a type of PTSD, where he slips back into the killer's mindset he adopted during the war. It frightens and worries his friends, as well as himself, and he struggles to reconcile with his past and what it's done to his psyche throughout the entire series.
Yahiko is probably meant to be the reader identification character, as the actual young boy that grows by leaps and bounds. I mostly find him annoying, especially in how quickly he advances in roughly six months that most of the series occurs within. Two characters who hired Sanosuke late in volume 1, cross paths with him again in volume 26, and when he can barely remember them, they point out that was only six months ago. In that span, Yahiko goes from knowing fuck all about swordfighting to winning battles against seasoned warriors on his own, something Watsuki doesn't offer to either Kaoru (who has been training in swords her entire life, and is essentially at the skill of a national champion), or Misao (who has been learning to be a shinobi for at least 5 years when she's introduced.)
Unlike some manga artists, Watsuki does seem able to draw a clean and intelligible action scene. I remember reading volumes of this concurrent with Hellsing or Trigun and being astounded at how much easier it was to follow what was actually going on in RuroKen compared to those two. That said, Watsuki was also apparently a big fan of American comics, and sometimes his characters designs are heavily, heavily drawn from DC or Marvel. The "Jinchu" arc in particular, has antagonists who are heavily reminiscent of the Joker, Apocalypse, and Venom. Personality-wise, not so much - although the Joker-lookalike is really just a sadist, there for his own amusement - but it can be a little distracting when Kenshin fights a guy who sure looks a heck of a lot like Omega Red, complete with weighted chains he throws in such a way they seem to emerge from his wrists.
This was Watsuki's most successful manga by far, running 28 volumes, plus the Rurouni Kenshin: Restoration 2-volume, whatever it was (a condensed, updated version?), the lengthy anime series, some animated movies, some live-action movies in the last 10 years, all that jazz. And then he got busted for possession of child porn in 2017-2018 which, as mentioned in the post on his next serialized series after Rurouni Kenshin, Gun Blaze West, got him fined the equivalent of $1,500, although a check of Wikipedia says it's actually equivalent to $1,900. Which does not feel like enough of a difference to be significant, but in the interests of accuracy, there you go.
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