Summary
- Set in a gritty near-future, MUJINA INTO THE DEEP follows individuals who lack human rights called “Mujina”, as they carry out deadly assassination missions for money.
- Asano’s exceptional art enhances the series’ heavy themes, but its content may not suit all readers.
- The manga explores deep themes like societal decay, liberation, and crumbling relationships through intense visuals and storytelling, but feels lacking in terms of depth.
Inio Asano is a famous name in the world of manga, with his 2007 coming-of-age slice-of-life seinen drama manga, Oyasumi Punpun (Goodnight Punpun) standing out among his various works for the ways it grapples with themes like love, death, family, trauma and social isolation. The author returns in 2025 with MUJINA INTO THE DEEP, a brand-new action manga set in a gritty, semi-futuristic world in which the thriving criminal underground settles scores via the Mujina, young women who are highly specialized ninja who take on any assassination job if the money’s right.
With excellent art, Asano’s art in MUJINA draws in the reader and caresses the eye with brilliantly constructed panels, but its content might be a bit too rough around the edges for some readers.
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Plot and Background
Assassins and Thrilling Urban Combat
MUJINA INTO THE DEEP, created by Solanin, Oyasumi Punpun and the award-winning Dead Dead Demons DeDeDeDe Destruction author Inio Asano. The series has been serialized in Shogakukan’s seinen magazine, Big Comic Superior, since March 2023, with the first volume being released in September that year, with the series having three volumes out as of October 2024. VIZ Media announced their acquisition of rights to publish the manga in English in May 2024, with the first volume of the English-translated MUJINA INTO THE DEEP being released on February 18, 2025.
MUJINA INTO THE DEEP is set in the near future, in a world where human rights aren’t guaranteed, and those who find themselves losing their human rights are dubbed “Mujina” and simply treated like nothing. They can’t expect the law to protect them the way it would “people”. However, being unable to expect the protection of the law also means that they aren’t privy to its rules either, and those who are skilled enough – fast enough, strong enough, perceptive enough and willing enough – can exploit this gap in the law’s reach to do whatever they want, even if that might be becoming an elite assassin. MUJINA INTO THE DEEP sets itself up with some particularly interesting themes driving the story forward. The central concept of Mujina, those who have relinquished their human rights, creates intriguing worldbuilding, making an alternate world out of a setting that is not unlike the current moment.
The minute they give up their rights, they’re no longer part of society. They’re no different from stray dogs and there’s no reason to pity them. They’re not allowed to use the transit system or go to the hospital. They can’t be tried in a court of law either. Nowadays you hear of some of them using that to their advantage, acting like hitmen. They’re a cancer on society and I sure as Hell want nothing to do with them.
– Terumi Morgan, MUJINA INTO THE DEEP Chapter 0.2
Absolutely Exceptional Art and Paneling
MUJINA INTO THE DEEP’s Visuals Make For Easily Understandable Action
While we know that art isn’t everything when it comes to manga, the ones that do it well can sometimes have an easier time of winning over readers than those that aren’t as strong in the visual department. MUJINA INTO THE DEEP is absolutely gorgeous, with both character designs and backgrounds being of extremely high quality, greatly improving the perception of the series’ intense fight scenes. Asano’s draftsmanship is something to behold in this manga, and the dynamism of the high-detail art is easily one of the best things about MUJINA INTO THE DEEP. Each panel is meticulously constructed and the high level of detail in the art style enhances the realism and grittiness of the series’ content, which is often contending with the darkness of human society as the story is set in the near future in a period of extreme moral and societal decay. In being situated in the near future, the story threatens to become something of a speculative fiction, daring to ask, “what would society be like if human rights could be relinquished or revoked?”
There is something particularly valuable in the series’ exploration of this central element, and how it develops into the greater story. A society comfortable with the kind of configuration in which one’s human rights can be lawfully revoked in their entirety is one in the midst of collapse; at the end stage of some kind of fraying of the values that humankind really came to value in the 20th century. MUJINA INTO THE DEEP is quite rough around the edges in how it approaches depicting the aforementioned societal decay, with sex being a thematic device that communicates shame or lack thereof in hedonistic pursuit, especially when it comes to those with darker proclivities. The kind of “darkness of society” on display in the series hits the reader quite soon into the manga, and is likely a make-or-break moment in one’s assessment of it as a title to keep on their watchlist.
The Presentation of Deep Moral and Social Decay
Interesting Themes, Including Human Society, Liberation and Crumbling Relationships
For some, MUJINA INTO THE DEEP could read as too crudely executed to deliver on some of the more complicated themes it has presented in its premise, sometimes reading like it wants to show its reader the lowest, darkest dregs of this society as quickly as possible without really delving too deeply, sometimes giving the impression that it has “this guy is a bad, bad guy doing bad, bad things” in bright neon signage in certain moments.
Maybe the crudeness and rampant depiction of sexual situations in the early days of the series is a symptom of the perspective of the protagonist, the middle-aged director of a game developer, Terumi Morgan, who has a strained relationship with his son in the wake of his divorce. On some level, Terumi reads like an older man struggling to deal with an ever-changing world, and despite his advanced age, there’s something particularly adolescent about him.
Perhaps it’s his tendency to monologue about his chagrin at the current state of the world, his aimlessness when it comes to his life, or maybe even the way he ogles Namerikawa, his only female colleague who is several years his junior, but there’s a yet-to-be identified link between MUJINA INTO THE DEEP’s main character, and the series’ inelegant approach to some of its themes.
The emphasis on liberation from society by relinquishing the social contract, and that leading to people hopping from rooftop to rooftop Air Gear style, while engaging in epic sword fights, is a strange enough direction for MUJINA INTO THE DEEP to be intriguing enough to warrant further reading, but the writing in the early series does leave one with a sense of hollowness, yearning for more to go with the pristine art.
MUJINA INTO THE DEEP is available on VIZ Media’s website.