'Song of the Samurai' Officially Brings Its 36-Volume Manga to English Readers [Exclusive]

Published Sep 29, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT

Ryan O’Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided’s CubbiesCrib. Whether it’s taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what’s going on. Outside of entertainment, he’s a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor’s in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.

In the absence of FX’s much-lauded Shōgun series, HBO Max brought in its own gripping live-action jidaigeki adaptation this year in the form of Song of the Samurai. Instead of the Sengoku period, the series jumps forward in time to late-Edo period Kyoto and takes an action-oriented approach to the story of the Shinsengumi, Japan’s secret police made up of elite swordsmen to protect those tied to the shogunate. Its beating heart is former street fighter Hijikata Toshizo (Yuki Yamada), who forms an unlikely brotherhood with Kondo Isami (Noboyuki Suzuki) and Okita Soji (Kanata Hosoda) that is tested in the fire of betrayal, war, and illness. Now that the Japanese drama has found a foothold in the U.S., its source material is finally about to get the translation it has long deserved.

Titan Manga, the new manga-focused imprint from Titan Comics, is releasing the English debut of the long-running and much-celebrated series Chiruran: Shinsengumi Requiem in a three-in-one package that collects the first three volumes of the saga. Like Song of the Samurai, it follows Toshizo on his rise from a reckless swordsman aiming to carve a legacy for himself in Japan to the legendary Vice Admiral of the Shinsengumi history books would one day recognize him as. However, its popularity has sustained for over a decade, reaching a staggering 36 collected volumes so far, with over three million copies sold. Series creator Shinya Umemura also went on to achieve international acclaim following the success of his global hit Record of Ragnarök and its subsequent anime adaptation.

Now, Collider is thrilled to share an exclusive preview of the English release, with four panels showing off the historic figures of the Shinsengumi as larger-than-life heroes facing towering odds as a group of skilled commoners looking to restore order. Each swing of the sword or swift movement is drawn like a blur, as seen when Toshizo trains with the blade. When battles begin and the samurai face similarly skilled opponents, Umemura uses scale to make each challenge feel more grueling than a fight against another person would appear. One of the swordsmen disarming a man by slicing off his fingers is given a gravity that conveys the kind of uphill battle the fledgling Shinsengumi face in a Japan on the doorstep of revolution.

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.

You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you’d drive through a building for any one of them.

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

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