Vampires, swans, and politics, oh, my! The Record of A Fallen Vampire is the tale of Akabara “Red Rose” Strauss, stoic vampire king of the fallen Kingdom of Night, in his search for his beloved queen Adelheid to free her from the seals placed on her a thousand years ago. Some say he simply threw his kingdom away to find her, but his real reason for abandoning the vampire and dhampire (half-vampires) races is lost to those less than a thousand years old and left to rumors among the broken, hidden community of dhampires. Not only does Strauss have to conceal himself from the human world, but Bridget, once his general and a dhampire herself, has pursued him in hatred for the last millennium because of what happened to their kingdom. She’s lead the dhampires into blending with humans and kept their race alive in the king’s apathetic absence. She has hunted him with well-trained dhampires such as Ethel, Fuhaku, and Renka and he’s made a few narrow escapes. Aside from that, the human world has its own vampire hunter in the form of an entity known as the Black Swan. The Black Swan has existed for at least 50 years and reincarnates itself into another host body each time its body dies.
This brings us to the present. Strauss had a narrow brush with Renka, one of Bridget’s elite dhampire fighters who was trying to avenge his dead lover, the 49th Black Swan, Yuki Komatsubara. But at some point, the newest Black Swan, Kayuki appeared, badly injuring the both of them in the process. Shockingly enough, after Renka’s gone, Kayuki invites Strauss and Laeti (his childlike dhampire companion) to her mansion to recoup. The plot thickens when she explains that they should put aside their mortal feuding against a common goal of restoring his queen and fending off the dhampires. What is it the new Black Swan hopes to achieve? And who is her masked grandfather she mentions? And what is the ultimate goal of the dhampires in hunting Strauss? You’ll have to read and find out. There’s a lot more politics involved than a simple lost love story.
They call it elegance.
I call it generic. That’s what first comes to mind for this book’s art style. The author Kyo Shirodaira and artist Yuri Kimura both seem to be very recent manga entities as far as mainstream popularity standards go. I have to say, though, there’s nothing in the artist’s style that remotely makes it stand out in my mind among the countless sea of other series out there. I will give them credit, though, that each page is usually fairly detailed and not littered with a lot of white portrait dialogue panels. This does make the story a little clearer in terms of the fast pace the writer has set. However, there’s pitifully little content in between chapters or in the back of the book, as is usually fairly common in popular manga. The most you get is an afterward by both creators and an illustration of Renka and Yuki.
And this, the final outcome…
Overall, I’d say The Record of a Fallen Vampire is good as a general read. It’s story has an interesting concept, but the way it’s written out (at least for this volume) everything is moving too fast to understand why certain characters are behaving or feeling the way they do. This leaves me with the impression that the author is either trying way too hard to be ambiguous, or just really isn’t that good at writing a steadily flowing story. Even in the afterward Kyo states that, “…no writer is ever in control of the flow of his own story, and the characters often bring in surprises.” While I don’t entirely dispute that claim, one as cynical as myself could take that to mean he just hadn’t thought very far ahead at this time and is trying to convey too much foundation to the story at once, which becomes confusing. However, Kimura’s artwork does help better convey the overall emotion of most of the characters (Strauss rarely shows any), so there’s that. I’m sad to say that The Record of a Fallen Vampire just didn’t grab me as strongly as I’d hoped it would. Maybe the next volume will be clearer.
