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I love pretty much everything Arakawa has produced but for some reason read the first 18 pages of this twice before finishing this volume. And I know it's 18 pages exactly because 1) I remember the medicine seller visiting the village starting on page 15 but 2) not (view spoiler)[the helicopters showing up full of Guys With Guns in what I thought was fantasy pre-1800s Japan on page 19 (hide spoiler)].

Anyway, that hooked me pretty good and I stayed up way too late last night finishing this.

Any reviews of future volumes won't be able to avoid the major spoiler above, but I'll try for this one: Yuru (Yul?) and his twin sister Asa are born in a small village, Yuru (his name means "night" in their mother's native language) just before dawn and Asa (Japanese for "morning") just after. 16 years later, Yuru hunts game and helps the other villagers with bringing in the harvest while Asa...uh, spends all her time devoted to something that keeps her locked up in the dark under the castle. The village is struggling a bit with drought; some villagers are leaving to seek work in the wider world, but Yuru swears to Asa that he won't. He'll never leave her, unlike their parents.

...so of course he's forced to flee the village before the end of the first chapter, when it comes under attack by mysterious figures. In the process, he learns that he's a "tsugai user," with "tsugai" being this story's catchall term for the minor gods, spirits, demons, ghosts, goblins, etc from traditional Japanese culture, and that the statues that have guarded the entrance to the village his whole life are in fact, his own personal daemons.

After the success of Fullmetal Alchemist, the English-language manga publishing industry seems to have taken the approach of translating everything Arakawa produces (save her autobiographical series on growing up on a dairy farm in rural Hokkaido), so the first three volumes were published in English while this sat on my dresser for the last 13 months, whoops.