The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Laughing Under the Clouds

What's It About? 

The age of the samurai is at an end, and carrying swords has been outlawed. To combat the rising crime rates, an inescapable prison was built in the middle of Lake Biwa. When brothers Tenka, Soramaru and Chutaro Kumo are hired to capture and transport offenders to their final lodgings in this prison, they unexpectedly find themselves faced with a greater destiny than any of them could have imagined.

Laughing Under the Clouds is drawn and scripted by Karakara. The manga inspired a 12-episode television anime in 2014. Funimation streamed the series as it aired with both English subtitles and an English broadcast dub, one of two shows that debuted its broadcast dubbing strategy. The manga has also inspired several stage plays and a live-action film that opened in February 2018. Tokyopop has released the manga's first volume both digitally and in print for $7.99 and $12.99 respectively.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

The anime of Laughing Under the Clouds is one I find myself thinking about from time to time, mostly in the context of, “Wasn't that based on a manga? Will it ever get licensed?” Well, at last there's an answer to that, and here we have the first volume of it. If you're expecting it to just be about the three Kumo brothers in the Meiji era, though, I'll have to disappoint you – only the first chapter actually follows Tenka, Soramaru, and Chutaro's story in this book. The rest of it is made up of what is essentially the history that helped to bring the brothers to where they are in the main storyline, a tale set six hundred years in the past about a time when the monster Orochi awoke to wreak havoc on Omi. That's actually fairly important (or rather, it will be) because it provides hints and context for the main story, more or less providing us the clues we need to be looking for as we read about the brothers. And if there's one piece of the puzzle we absolutely shouldn't ignore, it's that Orochi awakens every three hundred years, covers the Omi sky in clouds, and has to be put back to sleep each time. If they aren't? It's probably not good.

The name “Orochi” may be familiar to you as a name because the monster it belongs to is from one of the more famous Japanese myths – better known as Yamato-no-Orochi, they're an eight-tailed dragon slain by the deposed god Susano-O, saving a young woman, Kushinada-hime, from becoming a sacrifice to the beast. The legendary sword Kusanagi was found in one of Orochi's tails. (And for those of us of a certain age, all of this just reminds us of Blue Seed.) According to the extra story in Laughing Under the Clouds, Susano-O didn't so much kill the dragon as lay it to rest on an island in Lake Biwa – and that island in the main storyline of the manga is one that houses a prison for the Meiji era's worst criminals. The Kumo brothers, descendants of one of the side characters in the tale of the past, act as ferrymen across the lake, although the one chapter of the main story also makes clear that they're expected to help catch any escaped prisoners as well. When we meet them, only eldest brother Tenka is really able to do this, although middle brother Soramaru is champing at the bit, with some very mixed results.

What all of this has to do with the fact that they live at a shrine and the information we get in the distant past isn't yet clear. Normally I'd find it intensely frustrating to have only one chapter before being shoved off into a different tale, but with the amount of information given that looks to inform the main story, this is only moderately frustrating. (And sad. Can't forget sad.) The text and art are both interesting and readable enough that it's easy to get caught up in both plotlines, even if you're initially resistant to the second, so while I might suggest waiting for volume two to be available before picking this up, I think that it will ultimately be a series worth reading.