The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

Tales of the Tendo Family

What's It About? 

Masato, a son of the Tendo family, is meant to marry Hojo Ran, the daughter of a baron. There's just one problem: she's a fake. The real Ran fled after hearing that few had made it out of the Tendo family alive. In her place is a young woman who says she will die if it means saving someone else's life.

Tales of the Tendo Family has art and story by Ken Saitō. Matt Schley translated this volume. Published by‎ One Peace Books (April 9, 2024).

Content Warning: Suicide ideation

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

There's something to be said for good old-fashioned problematic shoujo. You know, the kind where the romantic interest gives every appearance of being an irredeemable jerk who terrorizes the heroine because he likes her, doing things like refusing to allow her to go home, tying her up whenever he or his servant can't have eyes on her, and burning her house down and desecrating her grandfather's memorial plaque – the kind of things that say, "I'm in love." And, of course, there's also the plucky heroine, a girl utterly devoted to doing good things so that she can die while saving someone and thus be reunited with her beloved grandfather in the afterlife because there is no higher calling than dying to protect someone else. It's the sort of combination that warms the cockles of your heart, right?

All sarcasm aside, Tales of the Tendo Family feels like a relic of the 1990s shoujo scene despite being published in 2015. Its main strength is in not making any of the aforementioned plot points feel like total dealbreakers. However, I would advise against reading this if suicide ideation is a trigger for you, because heroine Ran mentions her desire to die at least once per chapter. Ran and Masato meet when Ran saves Masato's actual fiancée from her suicide attempt – the real Ran (our Ran was abandoned in the woods as a toddler and doesn't even know her real name) decided that death was preferable to marrying into the messy Tendo family. The two young women switch places because that means that our Ran has an easy exit from this life: she'll have saved someone else's life, and now she can happily go to certain death at the Tendo family's hands. Unfortunately for her, Masato takes a shine to her for some moderately dubious reasons, and the next thing she knows, he's destroying the hut where she lived with her late grandfather so that she has no choice but to stay with him. If it sounds messed up, it is.

But what's fascinating here is that despite waving so many red flags around with wild abandon, there's still something appealing about this volume. Ran herself has astounding martial skills alongside her almost creepy devotion to her grandad, and from the glimpses we get of Masato's aunt Misao and his uncle Naoto, he may be the least messed up member of the family. There's a strong (yet unhealthy) case to be made for him simply not knowing any better than to terrorize Ran because, goodness knows, his relatives aren't setting any good examples. The art is also very appealing in a classic LaLa style, with nice period details (this is Meiji-set) and a deft hand with Masato's menacing facial expressions. Despite not liking it that much, I have a terrible feeling that I'll read more, if only to see if my suspicions about Ran's nameless grandfather being a Shinsengumi survivor are true.

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Christopher Farris
Rating:

Tales of the Tendo Family may eventually settle into being a solid long-form shoujo story, but by my estimation, this first volume is hardly its best foot forward. The introduction and setup are clunky as all get out, for one. It hinges on multiple blurted-out backstories frontloading the reasons for the lead character who took on the identity of Hojo Ran to get herself into this situation. There is something to her life and outlook that could contribute to her compelling character—she's a very lovable, sad, and pathetic person. But at the beginning of the book, as it attempts to convince the audience to care about it, things feel very disparate and desperate.

I could roll with Ran as Tales of the Tendo Family got underway. Her selflessness as a story-propelling character trait can come off as equally mechanical as it is endearing, but it is something, and the writing is committed to it. At this point, neither Ran nor we have any real idea of what's going on with all the messy intrigue and drama surrounding the titular Tendo family. She's just been airdropped into this situation to serve as the audience's window into it but with little drive to uncover and understand it all at this point. It probably says something that I was more invested in the fate of Ran's vegetable garden before the end of the volume than anything to do with her relationship with her faux-betrothed Masato.

Part of that might be because Masato, per usual for these kinds of old-school lead shoujo love interests, is the opposite of a charmer. There's no shortage of brusque boys in this genre, and they can be made to work with properly managed spicy drama. Masato, however, doesn't get properly sold as either a misunderstood jerk with a heart of gold or a steamy danger-boyfriend fantasy. He's a mostly practical asshole whose main method of sympathy seems to come from his complete inability to stop getting stabbed. His most mild kindnesses have been all but wiped as he maliciously commits some pretty awful crimes at Ran's expense by the end of this first volume. It leaves the whole thing ending with a pretty bad taste. And I know plenty of people come to this kind of manga for the unsavory, but couple that with storytelling that is both meandering and clunky, and this ends up hardly being an enrapturing time.