I absolutely love Reborn, or KHR as I often abbreviate it. I first heard about this series from one of my friends in high school and I was hooked. I rocketed through the available chapters and binged watched the anime the next summer. I continued to follow the series even when I left the country, checking up on new chapters with my BlackBerry even when I was out of the country (it was Canada, so I was still on the same continent but had no roaming data. Wi-Fi is my friend). The series is over now, but I can instantly tell you how many chapters, manga volumes, anime episodes and light novels there are (409, 42, 203 and 5 respectively). I also dressed up as one of its characters for Halloween this year.
I’m a bit obsessed. *cough*
Enough fangirling (for now), I’m here to tell you about the series. It takes place in the town of Namimori somewhere in Japan and focuses on a boy named Sawada Tsunayoshi, or Tsuna to just about everyone in the series. Tsuna is your typical loser middle schooler: his average test score is somewhere around 15 out of 100, he is always picked last in sports, and he’s overall unpopular. His life is a downward spiral of hopelessness and failure.
Then Reborn shows up.
Reborn is a baby. Literally. He also happens to be the most trusted hitman of the Ninth Boss of the Italian Vongola Family and one heck of a tutor. He shows up at Tsuna’s house one day and shoots him in the head with a bullet that makes whoever it kills be reborn with the single-minded desire to do whatever they regretted as they died. Tsuna finds out that Reborn and his “Dying Will Bullets” have been sent to train Tsuna to become the Tenth Vongola Boss. Tsuna is adamantly against it but builds up a family including an over enthusiastic bomber, a somewhat oblivious baseball star, a single-minded boxer, a cow child and fighting obsessed school prefect.
The series starts out a little slow, with the first six volumes and nineteen episodes devoted to character introduction and development, but it eventually turns into an action series with plenty of heartfelt family building moments in between. I highly recommend that everyone read/watch it. Unfortunately, the series is not particularly well loved by Viz (who license it in the US), who have only published 16 of the manga volumes and have not dubbed or released any DVDs for the anime. The anime can be found on subbed Hulu and Crunchyroll though, and volumes are available online at Amazon and Barns & Noble.
If you’ve already seen it, or you want to try something else before actually diving into the series, try this story here. It isn’t particularly long but it doesn’t give too much information away either aside from a couple character names and it makes for a good bit of light reading.
With that I’ll bid you farewell, so that you can go check out my favorite series for yourself. I hope you like it. As always, have a great day! Mattane!
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