Yumi Tamura’s Basara ran from September 1990 to June 1998 and finished at 107 chapters across 27 volumes. It is set in a Japan far past the fall of civilisation, divided between four kings. A prophecy said a child of destiny would be born in one village, and the village decided that the child was Tatara, the boy of a pair of twins.
After Tatara is killed, his sister Sarasa cuts her hair and takes his name. As she gathers a resistance and moves south, the young man she meets by chance and grows close to on the road is in fact Shuri, the Red King who is hunting her. Neither knows who the other is for a long stretch of the book, while each side keeps ordering the other’s death.
For a story about leading a rebellion, it spends far more time on persuading and organising people than on battles, because the question it keeps asking is what the country should be rebuilt as. Complete at 27 volumes.
