MANGA REVIEW | "Mission: Yozakura Family" - Volume Nineteen
With Momo finally defeated, the Yozakura Family can finally relax, correct? Eh, not so fast! If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading shonen manga, it’s that there’s always a bigger threat waiting around the corner. As the nineteenth volume of Mission: Yozakura Family reveals, the next big baddie may be the final boss of this adventure: Asa. And boy, does this character have a history!
Just how far back does Asa’s story go? Well…remember how old Tsubomi was? That’s her freaking dad! And when Tsubomi shows up at the Yozakura household, the family’s both shocked and on edge. But she’s not there to threaten them; she’s arrived to warn them of the incoming danger. That’s when Asa reveals everything to the family, including the plans to harvest them when they’ve reached a “ripened age”.
So there you have it. Mutsumi, Kyoichiro, Shion, and the rest of the Yozakuras see what their futures hold, and it’s not pretty. In fact, for a volume of a shonen manga that just concluded a big arc, it’s kind of depressing to see that the siblings don’t get much of a breather before finding out who’s targeting them next. Heck, the Momo arc doesn’t even finish up before Asa arrives and takes him and Rei’s heart away!
There are some breather moments here in this volume of Mission: Yozakura Family. The long ride home has the siblings playing some games, doing some fishing, and even having character-building reflections on what just happened. Taiyo is in need of a mentor for his next level of spy work, with each sibling showing why (and why not) they’d make for solid picks. Mutsumi and Taiyo even get to celebrate their one-year wedding anniversary, with the siblings trying their best to one-up the other with their wedding gifts.
However, as bleak as their future seems, a beacon of hope is found within thousands of old family videos. After each brother and sister experiences embarrassment from the old videos, an AI program reads through all the discs and finds a hidden message. In that message, Momo offers both his sincere apologies for putting his children through Hell. (He also was able to predict exactly what would come out of his kids’ mouths, which is a pretty funny thing to read unfold.) But before the video ends, Momo delivers something that the kids will need to take on Asa.
Volume Nineteen of Mission: Yozakura Family may not be the aftermath one was hoping for following a big arc, but it does set the stage for what’s to come. It’s clear that the family is not yet ready to take on Asa, so we may have to go through many volumes of training and preparation before the siblings can take him head-on. Still, how it sets the stage is pretty entertaining, and one hopes that maybe there will be a break or two for some good old-fashioned spy shenanigans in-between the main arc. Until then, the Yozakuras have some planning to do!
FINAL GRADE:
Promotional consideration provided by Chantelle Sturt of VIZ Media.
