Viz Media licenses The Seven Knights of the Marronnier Kingdom
Nao Iwamoto's fantasy romance is finally being published in English, in the same week that its anime adaptation begins on NHK.
The Seven Knights of the Marronnier Kingdom is at last being published in English. Viz Media announced the licence and released the first two chapters digitally on the same day, bringing Nao Iwamoto's fantasy romance to English-language readers a decade after it began.
The manga has run in Shogakukan's Flowers magazine since 2016, and the eleventh collected volume shipped in June. It topped the female-readers ranking in the 2018 edition of Takarajimasha's Kono Manga ga Sugoi! guidebook - a result that made the title's long absence from English shelves conspicuous.
What the story is
The series follows seven brothers who serve as knights of the Marronnier Kingdom, a realm set at the centre of eight kingdoms. Each brother is dispatched to a different neighbour as an ambassador, and each is searching for the partner fate has chosen for him. It is a romance first and a fantasy second, with the political geography of the eight kingdoms providing the structure for seven parallel courtships.
An anime is already on air
The timing is deliberate rather than coincidental. An anime adaptation of The Seven Knights of the Marronnier Kingdom began on NHK Educational on 3 October, airing at 6:25 p.m. Japan time. Releasing the source manga in English during the broadcast puts the original material in readers' hands while the adaptation is doing the same job for viewers, which is how licensors now tend to sequence these announcements.
Our opinion
Licensing a property in the week its anime begins is sensible scheduling, but Viz is not simply chasing a broadcast. The 2018 Kono Manga ga Sugoi! placing is the more interesting fact, because it means critics and readers in Japan picked this series out years before it had an animation to advertise it. The structural risk is obvious: seven brothers, eight kingdoms and seven fated partners is a formula that can flatten into repetition, and the first two chapters will settle quickly whether the variation is real. For a magazine that specialises in romance for adult women, this is a bet on substance over novelty, and those bets tend to age better than tie-ins.
Further chapters will follow the digital schedule. Viz has not yet detailed how a print edition will be released.