Daemons of the Shadow Realm Review

Arakawa's first long original fantasy since Fullmetal Alchemist opens by telling the reader almost nothing. Yuru hunts in Higashi, a mountain village closed to the outside for centuries, until he wakes two creatures called Left and Right and learns he has a twin, Asa, raised somewhere called the Lowlands. Which of those places is the past and which is the present is a question the book sits on for several volumes, and the answer changes what every earlier scene meant.

Craft is what carries the wait. Arakawa is still one of the most legible action artists working: clean staging, weight in every blow, faces that hold a joke and a threat in the same panel. The daemon contract is a proper system with costs and rules rather than a mood, and Higashi is built out of specifics, its food, its tools, its shrine hierarchy, instead of out of atmosphere. The village modelled on Takatori Castle looks lived in on every page.

It is slower than her earlier work and deliberately so, and the withholding costs something: motives stay opaque long enough that the middle volumes read as setup, and Asa is kept off the page more than a co-lead should be. Thirteen volumes in, this is a very good series still refusing to show its hand.