Hello again Sunday fans! Here we are at week three of five of new Sunday serials! Not much has changed from the first two so no need to ramble about what we're up to here. Let's get right to the good stuff.
The Artist
Hajime Saeki
Saeki has done a few oneshots before this serial. In fact I could swear they've done far more than I can find information on. It's kind of a good problem to have though, really. It means I have way more points of reference to talk about when going into this work. The color page above is from Saeki's webry oneshot Kanojo no Yogen. which according to the site was published in 2022. The story itself is fairly straightforward, being about a boy and his childhood friend who has prophetic dreams. When she dreams of terrible things happening and relays these to her classmates, they blame her for telling the truth which gets her ostracized by the class.
The unlucky lass ends up holing in her room for years after that as time goes by, and her childhood friend despite this swears he'll protect her from the prophecies she sees and those who blame her for their bad luck. She remains in her room afraid to venture out until he sees a young girl about to meet Truck-kun, and risking his life to save her almost ends up getting trucked himself. This is enough for the girl to leap out of her room and save the one friend she has, leading to a happy ending.
It's a cute oneshot, and shows off Saeki's fairly polished and unique artwork. They also have a bit of a theme in their oneshots, which translates over to their serial.
Their next oneshot which was also in 2022 ran in WSS issue #27 and is entitled Koori Toku. This one features the persecution of witches in a western fantasy setting. (Interestingly, we're a few weeks shy of a year since this oneshot ran.) Koori Toku is a girl meets girl story about Lilia a witch who befriends a human girl Emma. Lilia has secluded herself in a forest to get away from those murderous humans but Emma despite herself can't understand why her kin hate the witch and often comes to visit her in forest home.
This goes about as well as one can expect. Eventually Emma is caught under suspicion of being a witch herself, leaving Lilia no choice but to march up to the scaffolding and save her, revealing their relationship to everyone. The oneshot ends with the two girls running away together on a hopeful but otherwise enigmatic note.
This one feels like it should have been a proper series itself, but Saeki didn't deign that so. Still, a few things we can glean from the work are again, Saeki's artwork is clean, yet unique, and their penchant for stories about characters in seclusion being brought out of their shells by close friends is evident as well. They say one should write about what they know, so I can't help but wonder if this is personal experience speaking on Saeki's part? Or maybe they just have a fondness for this kind of story? Granted, loneliness is a relatable experience so it's just as likely that they're drawing from a universal feeling of wanting to connect to others despite that desire sometimes being a source of pain. Long journeys start with a single step, and Sternbild's road captures that wonderfully. Now, let's step into the new serial.
The Serialization
Sternbild's Road.
Starting in Weekly Shonen Sunday's combined 22/23rd issue in 2023 is Saeki's first long term serialization, Sternbild's Road. They've stuck with the western theme (Specifically German, with a subtitle like Der Weg de Sternbilder, which seems to mean something like "The path of the constellations?" You'd think with as much as I like Frieren that my German would be better, hah.) The introductory blurb and artwork doesn't tell us much, other than the main character Noah lives at a monastery and the chance meeting with a traveler named Allen changes his fate. The editorial text describes it as a "Taiga Romance" which has different implications in Japanese than it does in English. "Taiga" literally means "Large River" but has a totally different parlance in context. In Japan there are "Taiga dramas" that run on NHK for an entire year, and are known for how much more expensive they are to make than the typical Japanese TV show. They're prestigious, high profile dramas with viewership to match, though as of late ratings have started to dwindle. Meanwhile, "Romance" in Japanese is more akin to a heroic tale or epic story than it does lovemaking. Eiichiro Oda's One Piece didn't invent the term, but it is perhaps most synonymous to it.
The Premise:
As mentioned earlier, the protagonist Noah lives in a monastery. His introductory monolog says that (he/people) cannot live on a whim like beasts. This is after he arrows a deer for rations and returns to town, where a few other monks say he has a visitor. Well, sort of. Turns out it's a new guy to town, and they just don't feel like being bothered with showing him around. As Noah is an orphan, they figure they can bum their work onto him. Surprisingly, Noah agrees to this without much protest. The other monks comment on how Noah seems emotionally stunted, not even complaining about having to do extra work or well, anything. He seems to be just be living without actually being alive.
The stranger who needs guiding is Allen. Upon meeting Noah he grabs his face and peers into his eyes (wait is it actually that type of romance series after all?) Commenting that Noah looks really similar to someone else he knows. First impressions aside, Noah leads him to where he can get cleaned up and it's there Allen reveals he's been in these parts before, but things have changed to a point that they're unrecognizable. The two then talk a little bit about a revolution that occurred 14 years before the story began where an evil royal linage was taken out by the Emerad church who rules in peace now.
Noah converses with Allen out of a sense of obligation, but the sight of a little girl and her mom heading to the church catches his eye, and Allen doesn't miss that the boy for the first time in the short bit he's known him has a flicker of yearning in his eye. Allen asks if he has a family, and Noah quickly answers no as he heads back to work. Allen joins the other monks and Noah for dinner (in which meat is not served much to Allen's chagrin. Noah's just skinning the deer for items they can use later, not for food.) Allen notices that Noah is consistently on his own --and wonders if he's being bullied. If only it were that simple. Noah was abandoned in the forest as a child and it's only due to the chief's kindness he was allowed a place to stay, distancing him from the others. Noah shrugs it off like it's a fact of life that he's meant to be alone, but Allen notes what he saw earlier with the girl and her mother and knows Noah isn't built for the solitary life.
I like Allen a ton already. He sees right through Noah and states as much as he thinks he's obligated to stay, the truth is he'd like to leave. He then breaks into the chief's office on a whim and finds that he has a secret room full of gold that he's been misappropriating from the town. Noah's aghast but this isn't everything, no. This strange evening is only beginning.
Allen comes out of the secret room to find that the chief is waiting there, but before they can get into any trouble, the man offers to buy Noah off for keeping his mouth shut about the embezzlement. The chief doesn't miss a beat and asks if Allen knows who Noah really is. Allen then recounts the facts --yes there was a revolution 14 years ago, and the church did stamp out the evil royalty and their entire family line except for one child that unbeknownst to anyone was shipped off into the countryside and raised without knowing their true lineage.
That is to say that Noah is the one and only member of the clan who are the true sovereigns of the land. This boy is meant to be king! Though Noah is more concerned about the people of the church that the chief has been stealing from rather than finding out the life he's been living up until now has been nothing but a grand lie. Remember that, as it ties into what kind of person Noah is deep down and what he actually wants. Anyway Noah asks why the chief would betray those who believe in him, and he angrily berates the boy asking what a mere monk thinks he's doing talking to him as if he's some moral authority?
That look? You see it? That's the disposition of a king, which Allen notes as well. He says that Noah looks exactly like his father, which is great and all but you have to know the chief isn't just going to accept blackmail.
The monks gang up on the two to exact the chief's bidding, but that's where Allen comes in. He's able to handle them without breaking a sweat.
There's just so much atmosphere in this single page panel. I love me some dual page spreads but being able to communicate a sense of weight and speed with a single page is a feat on it's own, helped by Saeki's sense of BG art creating a liminal space that in turn translates into a moment of time.
The chief tries to guilt Noah into staying. After all he offered him a place to live and kept him alive all of these years! Allen refutes this that he doesn't owe anyone anything, especially not his happiness. This is enough to convince Noah to move forward, leaving the chief to a desperate and tragic plan. A fire "spontaneously" breaks out, and while Allen wants to run with the boy, Noah instead heads back to save the monks who were unkind to him --something Allen can't quite understand, but helps out with anyway.
The duo manage to save everyone, but with the adrenaline cooling off there's an important question to answer: What now? This was Noah's home this entire time, and now he can't go back. Allen suggests that he look for what his heart truly has desired now that he has nothing holding him back. Noah starts with simple things like wanting to eat meat (#mood) and being praised for doing things like hunting deer. Then his wishes become grander like not being segregated from his friends, seeing the outside world and of course --gaining a family and friends of his own. We go from small scale to grand scale, back to small again which is the Saeki tradition as traced through these oneshots to this serial.
In the most impressive page of the chapter, Allen apologizes for being late and reveals he's he is the son of the King's head Knight. He also reveals his father the king did not abandon him as what was told, no. He is a stalwart man who lost everything to the church. For it isn't the just who are victorious in this world, but the victorious who are just. The church won the revolution and thus told the story as they saw fit. Though now Noah has a chance to set things "right" by taking back his birthright from the church who stole it from him.
This is asking for a lot from a boy who just lost everything he knew, so Allen instead breaks it down and says he should fight for himself for right now. Of course he has a friend in him, and they'll take on the world together. Thus begins an epic tale of reclamation, desires, and of course friendship.
The Verdict
With epics like this it's generally hard to tell what kind of winding roads the story will embark upon with just the first chapter. Sunday has had it's fair share of stories like this even in recent memory --Erika Funamoto's Souei Sousho had the same vibes (but in an Eastern setting) until schedule slippage saw it leave the magazine for Webry. Shinobu Ohtaka's Magi is another series similar in vibe to this first chapter as well. I said in the brief snippet in the thread that it gave me a similar feeling as Makoto Yukimura's Vinland Saga at a glance, and while I feel a little differently about that now, I do think Saeki could eventually have something that lives up to that series' scope. In short, it's been a while since Sunday had a sprawling character focused heroic epic and Sternbild's Road could fit the bill with it's unique but striking artwork, well paced storytelling and of course relatable main character. That being said such series do have the penchant to bite off more than they can chew early on, but we'll have to see whether Saeki can side step the fate of many before them with this work.
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