Yona of the Dawn opens with the celebration of Princess Yona’s sixteenth birthday. It isn’t your typical sweet sixteen birthday party: Yona watches her pining love for her cousin Su-Won take a tragic turn as she witnesses him slay King Il, her father, in order to usurp the throne of Kohka.
Su-Won has always coveted the royal seat since the death of his own father, Yona’s uncle Yu-Hon, which he blames on King Il. And while he seems to reciprocate Yona’s love, and gives his cousin a hairpin with a floral design because he “thought it would look lovely”on her, he is about to heed his advisers and slay her to eliminate the only witness to the regicide, when General Son Hak slays several of Su-Won’s guards with a single slash of his naginata. (The naginata is a very business-like weapon from the feudal days of Japan, resembling a halberd, only its edge is broader and its pointed end less of an afterthought.) General Hak and Princess Yona escape death, however, less through force of arms and more because the usurper sees him as a castle appliance (“The man before you is an integral part of Hiryuu Palace”) and soon the pair are surrounded by spear-armed guards. What ultimately saves them is a poorly-aimed arrow fired by the servant, Min-Su, which distracts the new King Su-Won’s soldiers just long enough for them to flee.
From here until the end of the book, the plot progresses very slowly, as the author uses vignettes to show Hak and Yona bonding through pity’s power, as well as flashbacks to show that once Yona, Hak, and Su-Won were all childhood friends that even shared a sick bed together one winter. These segments combine to demonstrate that Yona can’t so easily cast off her feelings for Su-Won. Indeed, she still loves him at the end of this volume.
Described as a shojo manga fantasy, so far this is a low-magic or no-magic fantasy, describing a setting even more magic-poor than that in the first volume of Game of Thrones. Despite that, Mizuho Kusanagi has managed to capture the atmosphere of high fantasy, much of which historically has rested on the power of fated or doomed love, with which Princess Yona is cursed with an abundance. She would be so lucky to have a simple, lovelorn fate, like Prince Lir and Amalthea the Unicorn, but instead she appears to be tortured with a love triangle for one man with a dual nature, not unlike that Cymmoril feels for the soft-spoken but cruelly ambitious Elric of Melnibone.
In my research for this review, I have discovered that fans of the anime are often disappointed with this volume, and I feel that I should address this as one who has not watched the anime. It is true that Yona is not yet a strong female character, and while I can see that might offend some sensibilities, protagonists in fantasy fiction usually start from a position of weakness or vulnerability, and only later grow into their heroism or authority after being plunged into an overwhelming threat or rescued from a melancholy tragedy. Mizuho Kusanagi is setting the stage for an epic fantasy tale in this first volume, and establishing that her heroine is in the tragic position of one who has lost everything only so that she can triumph over this adversity and become the hero of her legend.
As such, fans of fantasy genre novels are likely to enjoy this manga, and it is not so deeply beholden to the tropes of shojo manga as to be inaccessible to these readers. Kusanagi takes her time to develop not just Yona, but also Hak and Su-Won, so that by the end of the volume you feel the enormity of Su-Won’s betrayal, which ends up not only seeming a betrayal of Yona’s trust, but a betrayal of his fundamentally kind nature.
Yona of the Dawn Volume 1 was published in August by Viz Media, and it is on shelves now.
