• The Samurai Detectives: Volume 1 by Shotaro Ikenami (2025)

    A huge disappointment. This didn’t click with me at all. Which is a bummer, man. Because: Samurai! Detectives! I love those two things. And combined?! Take my money. But. The prose is utilitarian. And its episodic nature—the stories were originally serialized, which is probably its ideal format—means there’s no panoptic cohesion. Everything about it just…