Cardcaptor Sakura
Natively: Level 20
This won POLL 14: Book Club starts Sep 7th 2024
Summary
Sakura Kinomoto, while exploring her family’s library, accidentally unleashes the Clow cards, a series of cards that spawn familiars that can grant magical powers to the wielder. With the help of the beast of the seal, Cerberus (who really doesn’t like being called a ぬいぐるみ, despite his current diminished form), Sakura sets out on a quest to recapture all the Clow cards.
Availability
Physical: Honto | Rakuten | CD Japan | Amazon US | Amazon JP | Kinokuniya JP
Digital: eBook Japan | BookWalker | Amazon Kindle JP
Personal Opinion
This is one of the genre defining magical girl series, to the point that this (and Sailor Moon) were the series all the other shows tried to imitate up until the launch of Madoka Magica. Unlike the more modern wave of magical girl shows like Madoka and its successors, it’s a more upbeat adventure / coming of age story. Later on the series also has some romance elements, but that’s beyond the scope of the volume 1.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- The series is actually much more day to day heavy than you’d expect, given the premise (or even having seen the anime). I guess the anime has all the motion to draw out the action scenes, but the manga seems to resolve them rather quickly.
- A classic series you’ve probably heard of.
Cons
- A stylistic quirk of the series is that it uses a decent amount of English. The card names are all in English, parts of Sakura’s incantions are English. In the manga this is represented by using the kanji and then putting the English in katakana in the furigana, which may make it harder to look up the Japanese reading. (e.g. you’ll see 風)
- The action scenes use a lot of handwritten kanji/kana for effect, this might be hard to read for a beginner
