What is Blade of the Moon Princess?

Blade of the Moon Princess, Gekka Bijin in Japanese, began as a one-shot in Weekly Shonen Jump issue 51 of 2000, one of Endo's earliest published works. A decade later he rebuilt it as a full serialization in Jump Square, where it ran from June 2010 to February 2012, for 21 chapters collected in five volumes.

The story reworks The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, Japan's oldest prose narrative: its Kaguya is a princess of a moon empire, forced to flee to Earth after a coup. Endo's telling keeps the folk tale's skeleton and hangs sword fighting, court intrigue and his increasingly ornate costume design on it. The costumes became part of the production record: the elaborate designs of the Gekka Bijin period were difficult to sustain, and the simpler-costume lesson Lin describes from this series fed directly into how the Forger family's now-famous outfits were drawn a decade later.

Like Tista, Gekka Bijin ended without a stated cause from its author, and like Tista it has been rescued for English readers: Viz Media began publishing Blade of the Moon Princess in English in September 2023, so the whole of Endo's serialized career now exists in English editions. Read against Spy x Family, it is the clearest evidence of what the editor's famous ban on darkness actually removed: the melancholy, kept at bay by comedy ever since.