The Legend of Kamui: Volume Three

The Legend of Kamui

by Sanpei Shirato, Richard Rubinger (Translator), Tom Devlin (Editor)

The greatest sword-and-samurai epic of all time continues!

The body count continues to rise in this engrossing, swashbuckling third volume of The Legend of Kamui, set in feudal Japan.

Our hero Kamui is fresh off his training and begins to infiltrate the delicate hierarchy oppressing the countryside in order to begin tearing it down, piece by piece. Shōsuke faces off with a new assassin because of what he may―or may not have―witnessed. Ryūnoshin’s vendetta befuddles the chief headman as well as his lord. Meanwhile, Kamui’s fellow outcast Saesa takes on a more prominent role.

Revolution is in the air, and the sound of clashing swords rages on in Shirato Sanpei’s landmark manga epic―the first of its kind. The Legend of Kamui was originally serialized between 1964 and 1971 in the legendary alt-manga magazine GARO. Its literary and historical merit was recognized long before a complete translation was even available. Now available in full for the very first time, Shirato Sanpei’s The Legend of Kamui is translated from the Japanese by Richard Rubinger with Noriko Rubinger.

Genres: Manga

624 pages, Paperback

Published March 10, 2026

About the author

Sanpei Shirato (白土三平) was born Noboru Okamoto in 1932, a son of well-known leftist painter and activist, Tōki Okamoto, who was active in organizing a proletarian art movement during the 1920s and 1930s. In wartime Japan, to avoid persecution from the authorities, the Okamoto family frequently moved around the country to different places including Kobe, Osaka, and some rural areas where young Shirato experienced poverty and came in contact with ethnic minorities and other discriminated groups (i.e., burakumin) as a child.

Shirato debuted in 1957 with his manga, Kogarashi kenshi. Although his earlier manga were aimed at children, some of them already exhibited social concerns, including social marginalization of ethnic minorities, the struggles of people in the lower class, the socially oppressive power structure–all of which became prevalent motifs in his works. Stylistically, his earlier manga in the late 1950s inherited the postwar mainstream manga style—which consists of Tezuka-inspired, simplistic cartoony depiction of characters with large eyes. His style gradually changed throughout the 1960s, as observed in the shift of visual style in Kamui-den.