Touge Oni Review: The Japan That Existed Before Japan

The Problem with Reading Ancient Japan Through Modern Eyes

Most manga set in historical Japan ask you to imagine the past through the lens of the present. The characters think like contemporary people; they just happen to wear robes and carry swords. The gods, when they appear, behave like gods in Western fantasy — powerful, aloof, occasionally benevolent, ultimately comprehensible.

Touge Oni: Primal Gods in Ancient Times — 峠鬼 (Touge Oni) by Kenji Tsurubuchi — does something more difficult and more honest. It asks you to imagine a Japan where the gods are not metaphors. They are real, particular, local, and deeply strange. Not every god is kind. Not every ritual makes sense. Not every encounter with the divine ends in enlightenment or destruction — sometimes it ends in confusion, partial understanding, and the unsettling awareness that you are walking through a world whose rules were not written for human convenience.

This is not a manga about ancient Japan seen from the outside. It is a manga about ancient Japan from the inside, drawn by someone who understands what the people of the 7th-century Yamato period actually believed — and more importantly, how that belief felt in the body, in the landscape, in the act of walking down a road that might end at a shrine or might end at something that cannot be named.

A Girl, A Monk, and the Country Between the Gods

The central figure of Touge Oni is Miyo, an orphan girl whose village has designated her as the next ritual sacrifice for the local guardian deity, Kippuuson-no-Mikoto-no-Kami. This is not a story about a girl who escapes her fate through rebellion. It is more complicated. Miyo meets En no Ozuno — the historical ascetic who would later be revered as En no Gyōja, the founder of Shugendō — along with his two oni attendants, Zenki and Goki. Together they travel to Miyo’s designated shrine to fulfill the ritual. But what they find there is not what anyone expected.

The manga’s great structural insight is this: the problem is not the sacrifice. The problem is that nobody — not the villagers, not Miyo, not even En no Ozuno — fully understands what the god actually wants. The ritual exists because the community needs it to exist, because it creates a boundary between the human world and the divine world, because it gives people a grammar for living alongside forces vastly larger than themselves. Whether the god is satisfied by the ritual, or whether the god has a different understanding of the exchange entirely — that is left open. Deliberately.

Tsurubuchi is asking: what does it mean to live in genuine relationship with the divine, rather than within a system designed to manage it safely from a distance?

This is a question that ancient Japanese people were actually asking. And it is a question that most manga, even excellent manga set in historical Japan, do not have the patience to sit with.

What the West Calls “Shinto” Was Not a Religion

Let me explain something that most international readers of Touge Oni will not know, and without which the manga is less than half legible.

The spiritual life of 7th-century Japan — the period in which this manga is set — did not have a name. What we now call “Shinto” (神道, literally “the way of the gods”) was not codified as a distinct religion until the Meiji period (1868–1912), when the imperial government needed to separate it from Buddhism for political reasons. Before that, for more than a thousand years, Japanese spiritual practice was not a named system. It was simply the way things were. You respected the kami because the kami were real and present and had to be dealt with. The word “religion” implies a doctrine, an institution, a set of propositions you choose to believe. What the Yamato-period Japanese had was something different: an inhabiting of a landscape understood to be densely populated by powers.

“Kami” (神) — the English translation “god” is consistently misleading. A kami is not an omnipotent deity watching over humanity from above. A kami is a power that inhabits a specific place or object or natural phenomenon. The mountain has a kami. The river has a kami. The unusual-shaped stone on the edge of the rice field has a kami. Each kami is distinct, local, and has its own character, its own demands, its own relationship with the people who live nearby. There is no single kami of all mountains; there is the kami of this mountain, the one your grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents first encountered when they settled in this valley.

This hyperlocality is something Japanese people grow up understanding intuitively. We do not think of the divine as universal. We think of it as specific. The kami of the shrine at the end of my street is not the same kami as the one at the shrine three neighborhoods over, even if both are technically housed in what Western visitors would call “Shinto shrines.” They have different histories, different ritual requirements, different relationships with different families. To someone raised in a monotheistic tradition, this can seem like polytheism — and in some analytical sense it is. But to someone who grew up inside it, it feels less like a theology and more like geography. The divine is terrain to be navigated.

Touge Oni renders this accurately. Every village the travelers pass through has its own deity, with its own form and its own rules. En no Ozuno does not carry a universal key to all divine encounters. He carries knowledge, spiritual discipline, and the ability to perceive what is happening — and he is frequently wrong, surprised, or humbled. The gods in this manga are not plot devices. They are the landscape.

En no Gyōja: The Man Who Made a Deal with Oni

The figure at the center of Touge Oni is historical. En no Ozuno (役小角), born in Katsuragi, Nara in 634 CE and traditionally said to have died in 701, is one of the most extraordinary people in Japanese religious history. He is revered as the founder of Shugendō (修験道) — the “path of cultivating experience” — a practice that fused mountain asceticism, Buddhist esoteric ritual, Taoist techniques, and pre-existing local kami worship into something entirely new. His practitioners, called yamabushi (山伏, literally “those who prostrate themselves on mountains”), are still active today, walking mountain pilgrimage routes in white robes and carrying wooden staffs.

What is remarkable about En no Ozuno is that he operated in the period when Buddhism was still new to Japan — introduced from the continent roughly a century before his birth — and the relationship between Buddhist institutions and existing local spiritual practice was being negotiated in real time. En did not choose one side. He synthesized. He took the esoteric disciplines of Buddhist practice and applied them to the existing framework of kami worship, mountain reverence, and the cultivation of supernatural power that Japanese holy men had practiced long before the sutras arrived.

The imperial court was suspicious of this. In 699 CE, En no Ozuno was accused of sorcery and exiled to Izu Ōshima. He was pardoned three years later, but the conflict reveals something important: official Buddhism and official Shinto were both uncomfortable with a holy man who insisted on walking between them, drawing from both, answering to neither institution. He remained, his whole life, something not quite classifiable by the categories available.

His two oni attendants, Zenki and Goki, are central to the legends surrounding him — and central to Touge Oni. The legend holds that Zenki and Goki were originally malevolent demons in the Ikoma Mountains who stole and devoured the children of nearby villages. En no Ozuno captured them not by destroying them but by hiding one of their own children in an iron cauldron, forcing them to understand what the families they had terrorized had experienced. The demons, comprehending their own cruelty through the mirror of their own suffering, repented and pledged their service to him.

Zenki (前鬼, “oni in the front”) is male, depicted in red, and traditionally carries an axe. Goki (後鬼, “oni in the back”) is female, depicted in blue, and traditionally carries a water pitcher. Together they serve as En’s helpers and protectors. In the legends, after En no Ozuno’s death, the couple settled in Yoshino, had five children, and became the ancestors of families still living there today — families called the “Gokigen” lineage, whose name preserves the echo of the demon who chose a different life.

Touge Oni makes Goki the protagonist. This is unusual and deliberate. The healer, the female oni who carries water rather than an axe — Tsurubuchi gives her the central perspective. The choice carries thematic weight. This is a manga about care rather than combat, about the subtle work of maintaining relationships between worlds rather than the dramatic work of destroying what threatens them.

The Sketch Lines That Hold the World Together

Tsurubuchi’s visual approach in Touge Oni operates on a principle that initially seems like inconsistency but is actually sophisticated visual philosophy.

Human figures are drawn with comparative lightness — loose lines, suggestion rather than precision, the impression of a person rather than a fully rendered body. The moment a kami enters the frame, the density of the artwork changes. These entities are drawn with enormous detail, unusual geometry, forms that suggest not just a body but a principle made visible. The god of a swamp looks nothing like the god of a crossroads. Each is unmistakable in its particularity.

This visual hierarchy is doing something that academic discussions of manga rarely note: it is recreating the phenomenology of encountering the sacred in an animist worldview. In that worldview, everything ordinary is recognizable and manageable — the villagers, the road, the tools, the food. The kami are the exception to the ordinary. They are where your perception snags, where the familiar categories stop holding, where your eyes need to work harder. Tsurubuchi’s art replicates this cognitive experience in visual form.

There is also a roughness to the linework on the human characters — something sketch-like, not in the sense of unfinished, but in the sense of provisional. The humans in this story are not fixed. They are traveling, changing, uncertain about who they will become. Only the gods are drawn with something that feels like permanence. The humans exist in motion; the gods exist in place.

This is exactly right. In the world of the 7th-century Yamato period, the kami were ancient. They had been in their mountains and rivers and crossroads for longer than memory reached. The humans passing through were brief. The visual contrast in Tsurubuchi’s art encodes this temporal relationship without stating it.

”Kegare” and the Body That Carries What It Has Touched

To understand why the ritual of sacrifice functions so differently in Touge Oni than it does in most fantasy manga, you need to understand kegare (穢れ).

Kegare is often translated as “impurity” or “pollution,” but these English words carry moral weight that the Japanese concept does not necessarily imply. Kegare is closer to a description of a state: having been in contact with something that disrupts the normal conditions of life. Death causes kegare — not because death is morally wrong, but because it is a crossing of a threshold that life occupies. Blood causes kegare. Childbirth causes kegare. Certain encounters with the divine cause kegare.

The ritual response to kegare is misogi (禊) — purification, typically involving water. Japanese people still practice this at shrines, washing hands before approaching the main hall. But in the 7th century, before these practices were formalized into the current shrine system, misogi was far more elaborate, personal, and regionally varied. Different communities had different ideas about what produced kegare, what removed it, and what happened to a person who had accumulated too much of it.

Miyo, as a designated sacrifice, lives in a permanent state of ritual separation from her village. She is already partially set apart — her identity has been dedicated to the god even before the ritual is performed. The way the villagers treat her in the early chapters of Touge Oni reflects this: she is not hated, but she is not fully present in the social world of normal relationships. She exists in the threshold between the human community and whatever comes next.

When Tsurubuchi depicts this separation, he is drawing on an understanding of how ancient Japanese communities actually managed the proximity of the divine. You did not just walk up to the god whenever you wanted to. You prepared. You became the right kind of body to stand in that presence. The sacrifice was not primarily about death — it was about becoming the appropriate vessel for crossing a threshold that ordinary people could not cross.

This nuance is almost entirely absent from other manga that feature ritual sacrifice. Touge Oni holds it at the center.

Who Should Read This

You will love Touge Oni if you:

• Are genuinely curious about Japanese spiritual history rather than just its aesthetic surface
• Prefer manga that creates atmosphere through accumulation rather than action through escalation
• Enjoy beautiful, unconventional art that uses visual technique to convey meaning beyond what the dialogue says
• Were drawn to the spiritual dimension of manga like Mushishi or Natsume’s Book of Friends and wanted something with darker, stranger edges
• Have any interest in how Buddhism and earlier animist traditions collided in early Japan

You might struggle with Touge Oni if you:

• Need fast pacing and clear forward momentum — this manga moves at the pace of a mountain road, not a highway
• Find the lack of a strong conventional antagonist frustrating
• Prefer spiritual concepts explained clearly and fully rather than shown and left to accumulate meaning over time
• Are looking for something with romantic or comedic elements to break the mood

Verdict

Touge Oni: Primal Gods in Ancient Times is a quiet landmark. Quiet is the right word — this is not a manga that announces its ambitions. It does not open with an elaborate prologue explaining the world’s mythology. It drops you into the land of Yamato the way the actual landscape of ancient Japan must have felt: dense, particular, slightly beyond full comprehension, beautiful in a way that is partly beautiful and partly unsettling.

What Kenji Tsurubuchi has managed is rare. He has written manga about pre-Buddhist Japanese spirituality that does not reduce it to aesthetic decoration, does not treat it as superstition to be explained away, and does not force it into Western fantasy templates. The gods in Touge Oni are genuinely god-like — not human in scale, not reducible to allegory, not comprehensible by the end of each chapter. They demand what the actual kami of the actual landscape demanded from the actual people who lived alongside them: attention, respect, and the humility to admit that not everything can be negotiated with.

The choice to center Goki — the female oni who heals and carries water, not the male oni who fights — tells you everything about what kind of manga this is. It is interested in the work of sustaining life, maintaining relationship, and understanding what it means to have been a monster who chose a different path. In a genre full of stories about power, Touge Oni is a story about care.

Rating: 9/10

The single point deducted is for accessibility: the manga’s deliberate opacity about its world rules and the slow accumulation of its narrative logic can frustrate readers looking for an entry point. A small amount of contextual framing early in volume one would have lowered the barrier without diminishing the mystery. But this is a minor complaint about a manga that earns its difficulty.

When you walk past a small roadside shrine in Japan — the kind you find at the edge of fields, in the corners of intersections, on mountain passes — what do you imagine is inside it? After reading Touge Oni, my answer changed. I suspect it will change yours too.