Welcome to my Manga Hanabi post?! Manga Review: Gate 7 by Clamp!

Though my blog is called Anime Hanabi, and it is indeed all about the wonderful world of anime, I realized recently that there is also a great big world of manga and manhwa that I interact with everyday. I also realized that very few of my happy discoveries in hunting down, collecting, and reading manga/manhwa ever manage to get onto my blog! Considering how much manga I read everyday, it’s kind of strange that I don’t write more about it. In fact, many times I have found a manga series I love and I was bursting with inspiration to tell everybody about it, but because it was a manga I seem to think that I wasn’t allowed to put it on my blog. As if the blog consistency police would show up and point out that my blog is called Anime Hanabi, not Manga Hanabi. I don’t know why I kept thinking that way. So to solve this oversight, I will be trying to add more manga reviews into my blog! So this blog post is officially not an Anime Hanabi blog post, but now a Manga Hanabi post!

Gate 7

This more recent Clamp manga is about Chikahito, a high school boy that just loves the ancient Japanese city of Kyoto. He not only knows all about the colorful history of the former capital, and all the famous locations and buildings of lore, but also the life stories of seemingly every famous or even notorious person that once lived there. The story begins with Chikahito getting to go on (in his opinion) the best school trip ever, to tour the attractions of Kyoto! During the class trip the students were allowed to explore a little on their own, so Chikahito journeys away from the rest of the group and wanders some of the back alleys and lesser known stairways through the old city. While Chikahito was trying to find some interesting locations for pictures and selfies, what he ended up stumbling upon was a battle between magic users!

This being a Clamp story, it shouldn’t be too surprising that Chikahito quickly crosses paths with the magic girl Hana. She had already set up a magical barrier to keep regular people out of her magical battle ground, but somehow Chikahito seemed to be able to stroll right through it as if there was nothing there to stop him. And boy did he ever get an eye full of giant magical monsters, Hana throwing fireballs like it was nothing, and two wizards attendants to Hana that were quite surprised to see Chikahito there!

Once the battle was over (with Hana winning easily) the two attendants invited Chikahito back to the traditional Kyoto house that they share with Hana (aka, they kidnapped him). Needless to say, poor Chikahito was kind of freaking out at this point, so thankfully the two wizards explained that what the high school boy had wandered into was a battle in a secret war between wizards in Kyoto that had been raging for centuries. The ancient generals that Chikahito thought he knew and loved, were actually immortal wizards that were alive and well and still fighting! After the two wizards interrogated Chikahito a bit more, they decided that he seem to be just an unlucky idiot, so they placed a spell on him so he would forget everything he saw that day, Hana gave Chikahito a smooch, and they sent him on his way. Little did the magical trio know, Chikahito didn’t actually forget anything.

Months later Chikahito is given the opportunity to transfer schools, so he moves to Kyoto to live on his own. And surprise! within moments of returning to the ancient city he crosses paths with Hana and her wizard helpers once again!