The History of Sorcerous Stabber Orphen

A moneylender in a back street, written by a man who wanted European fantasy with a Japanese heart.

Yoshinobu Akita came to Orphen off an award-winning Japanese-style fantasy novel, Inside a Sparkle from the Snow, with a deep admiration for European and American literature and a plan: a European-style fantasy whose people a reader could genuinely ache for. With illustrator Yuuya Kusaka, he launched Sorcerous Stabber Orphen: The Wayward Journey in Fujimi Shobo's Dragon Magazine in May 1994, under the Fujimi Fantasia Bunko label.

The label already had a flagship: Hajime Kanzaka's Slayers, running in the same magazine since 1989. Through the 1990s the two series shared the magazine, the label and the readership, the house's twin pillars of sword and sorcery, and in 2001 their authors crossed the streams in print. Orphen's main run closed in September 2003 after twenty volumes, but the series never really stopped: a sequel line began in 2011, and the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2019 brought new novels, stage plays and a new anime. The full shelf, counted line by line, is below.

THE WHOLE CENSUS

Every novel line, counted

The Wayward Journey · 20

The main series, May 1994 to September 2003, Fujimi Fantasia Bunko. The Azalie story from first summons to the Sanctuary finale. This is the line the gallery above shelves.

The Reckless Journey · 13

February 1996 to October 2003. Lighter side stories set before and between the main books, heavy on the comedy the main line keeps breaking for. Akita added one more chapter on his own website in 2009.

Detour · 2

November 1997 to September 1998, Kadokawa Mini Bunko. Short side stories from the first half of the journey, the only Orphen novels issued outside the Fantasia Bunko line in the classic era.

Slayers VS Orphen · 1

The 2005 crossover with Hajime Kanzaka's Slayers, co-written by both authors and illustrated by both artists. It sold out on release and spent years as a phantom book before its 2013 reprint. It has its own page in this archive.

The New Wayward Journey · 10 and counting

From September 2011, from TO Books. Orphen twenty years on: married to Claiomh, running a school, known across the continent as the Demon King. Ten volumes by 2015, with the line continuing after.

The anniversary books

A guest-writer Anthology in November 2019, with a commentary by Lodoss creator Ryo Mizuno, and Comicron's Plan on 25 December 2019, a prequel Akita calls the Gap Edition. Fourteen million copies of the novels were in circulation by December 2019.

The History of Sorcerous Stabber Orphen

THE WHOLE CENSUS

THE FIRST WORD