What Is the Itto-ryu?

A sword school with one rule: the technique that wins is the correct one.

The Itto-ryu is the engine of Blade of the Immortal. Founded and led by Anotsu Kagehisa, it is less a school than a heresy: where the dojo world teaches fixed forms, lineage and etiquette, the Itto-ryu teaches that any technique that ensures victory is legitimate, whatever weapon it uses and wherever it was learned. Anotsu, trained by his grandfather Saburo, a swordsman disgraced by the very establishment the grandson now besieges, built the school into a campaign: dojo after dojo challenged, defeated, absorbed or destroyed, including the Asano dojo where the story begins.

The campaign has a destination. Anotsu does not want to burn the sword world down; he wants a place inside it, official recognition for his school from the shogunate itself. That ambition is what brings the Itto-ryu into collision with Habaki Kagimura and his Mugai-ryu, the shogunate's own heretics: a squad recruited from death row, granted pardons to do with official blessing what the Itto-ryu does without it.

Blade of the Immortal volume 6 Japanese cover, Afternoon KC — **VOLUME 6**Volume 6 of the Japanese tankobon, Afternoon KC. Samura painted all thirty covers himself, and they were never redesigned.

THE NAMES ON THE ROSTER

The school's core fighters

Anotsu Kagehisa

The founder. His signature weapon is the Kabutsuchi, a Nepalese-style axe, with a matching sword he uses less often. His restraint is as documented as his ambition: he repeatedly lets Rin travel in his company though she announces her intent to kill him.

Magatsu Taito

A peasant who took up the sword after samurai killed his sister, and one of the schools finest. His Grand Turk hides three blades in one guardless hilt. He leaves the Itto-ryu when it treats with the shogunate, and returns on his own terms.

Otono-Tachibana Makie

The school's equal best sword, a master swordswoman born to a samurai house and disowned for beating her brother. Her double-bladed staff Haru-no-Okina travels hidden inside a shamisen, the instrument of the geisha trade Anotsu bought her out of.

Kuroi Sabato

A master trained by Anotsu Saburo himself, and the school's darkness made plain: his preserved trophies are the series' most infamous image of what victory-at-any-cost does to a man.

Abayama Sosuke

The second in command, an older administrator-swordsman who fights one-armed with a concealed dagger-machete and weighted chains: the heresy applied to a missing limb.

The recruits

Later core members include Yoshino Doa, an Ainu-raised swordswoman with a spearhead dagger, and her partner Yasonokami Isaku, who fights as living armour. The school keeps absorbing outsiders the dojo world rejected.

THE OPPOSITE NUMBER

The Mugai-ryu

Habaki Kagimura

Commander of the shoguns Banshu guard and secret head of the Mugai-ryu: the establishment fighting the heresy with a heresy of its own.

The death-row squad

The Mugai-ryu are convicts offered pardons for service, among them the poisoner Hyakurin, the shipwright Giichi, and Shira, whose cruelty is the one thing in the series both schools agree is beyond the pale.

The mirror

Samura sets the two schools as facing mirrors: unofficial killers seeking legitimacy, and legitimate killers doing unofficial work. The Itto-ryu page of the story is never only about sword technique.

What Is the Itto-ryu?

THE NAMES ON THE ROSTER

THE OPPOSITE NUMBER

THE FIRST WORD