What is Rurouni Kenshin?
In 1878, eleven years into the Meiji era, a slight, soft-spoken wanderer named Himura Kenshin arrives in Tokyo carrying a sakabatō, a katana forged with its edge on the inner curve so that it cannot easily take a life. A decade earlier he was Hitokiri Battōsai, the most feared assassin of the revolution that created modern Japan. The manga is the story of his atonement: he protects the people in front of him, one dojo at a time, while the men he fought beside, and against, keep arriving to collect old debts.
The title is Watsuki’s own coinage. Rurouni fuses rurō, wandering, with rōnin, the masterless samurai: a word for a man the new era has no slot for. It worked. By 2019 the manga had more than 72 million copies in circulation, and it has been a television anime twice, five live-action films, and a stage of Japanese pop culture that never quite closed.
