So, the only thing I remember from this story was the super intense faces. There's one page in particular that I ended up saving because it's just ridiculous. Besides that, I don't recall getting that into the story. The characters were bland, and that's all that can be said about them.

I liked it a lot, but i think that is exclusively because of two reasons. One, I like yaoi, so the male love didn't spook me, on the contrary, it atracted me to the story. Second, I hate tragedy, but thanks to the narration, which distanced me from the characters a bit, i was able to enjoy it without getting too emotionaly involved with the feeling of the characters, and so i didn't end in a pool of tears by the end of the manga.

Well, all in all, it was a good read, definitely not for everyone, but good all the same. As the comment above states, the narration is kind of heavy, but it worked for me, and the homosexuality theme may scare some away, though it's really light image wise. Apart from that, the art is beautiful, the same as in all the artist's works and the plot is also interesting.

The narration is heavy and cumbersome, so much so that it bogs a potentially dynamic story down to an emotionally disconnected crawl.

The art is fantastic; the story base itself and several scenes presented more intuitively capture the essence of the samurai "do", but the image-word interaction pushed me away instead of drawing me closer to the characters.