If the first volume of Firefly Wedding set off warning bells in your head with its harsh story and themes of unwilling marriage and sexual predation, you may want to skip the rest of this series. It is hard to think of another ostensible romance that has as many flashing red lights as this one, particularly as relates to Shinpei, the romantic lead. He's a textbook yandere: loving one minute and murderous the next, willing to do anything to keep Satoko safe, provided that she agrees that she will be his and his alone. The minute he thinks she won't marry him, he's ready to just let her die; if he believes she's in danger and that she will be his bride, he'll cause any amount of bloodshed he can to protect her. If this is not your favored flavor of romance, it can be incredibly uncomfortable.

On the other hand, if you enjoy a possessive male lead just this side of insanity, absolutely run out and grab this series. Oreco Tachibana does a phenomenal job of writing Shinpei – he's believably human for all that he embodies the yandere type. His upbringing in the world of sex work (his mother was a sex worker and his father unknown) has inured him to most forms of violence against women or hangups about sex. His training as an assassin finished the job of giving him a very compartmentalized view of humanity: his life matters, and Satoko's life matters because he loves her, but everyone else is disposable. You are his, or you aren't. Tachibana writes him so that it's hard to decide how much of this attitude is nature versus nurture; Shinpei himself says several times that he's not good at understanding emotions, including his own. Much of how he views the world can be narrowed down to a coping mechanism, but in the Meiji era, things like “neurodivergent” weren't understood, making him simply look like a dangerous psychopath. This puts both Shinpei and Satoko in a similar situation: they have medical issues that the world isn't equipped to deal with yet, and they're both trying to get by as best they can. The difference is that Satoko was raised with care while Shinpei was emphatically not.

That can be said for most of the people Satoko encounters on the brothel island. The women there are all trying to find their way in a world that deems them useful only as sex objects. Aoi, the woman assigned as Satoko's mentor, struggles with low self-esteem and the idea that if she loses her one steady customer, she'll never have another and therefore be trapped in the brothel for her entire life. Yukari similarly sees Satoko as stealing her best chance; before his involvement with her, Shinpei slept with Yukari, although he never saw it as anything more than physical. When Yukari feels threatened, she lashes out at Satoko in the worst way she knows how: she plans to “sew Satoko's legs together.” (Later imagery suggests that she actually meant to sew her outer labia closed.) In order to survive, Satoko has to become as ruthless as the people around her, turning the tables on Yukari while showing compassion to Aoi and Shinpei. Every situation demands a different approach, and Satoko needs to adapt to each one as a unique encounter.

It makes for some difficult reading. While there's a stereotype that manga that run in magazines for female readers are less violent than those that run in magazines for male readers, Firefly Wedding is here to remind you that that's not true. Satoko's life is constantly under threat, Shinpei engages in plenty of on-page violence that Tachibana has no problems detailing, and the story is absolutely ready and willing to upset readers. This is a dark, harsh world, and if you were starting to be aware of that in volume one, these next three books really double down on it. Even when Satoko's bodyguard reenters the scene in volume four, there's no promise that her nightmare is over: even without factoring in how he and Shinpei try to kill each other, the news he brings of who is behind Satoko's abduction guarantees that the violence will continue.

Satoko herself is the reason to keep reading this. While she's understandably upset with the news volume four brings, she's also determined to survive. It may not make sense to us, reading in 2026, that she's so determined to marry a man who can help her father's business and reputation, as a woman in the late 19th century, that's all she's been taught she's worth. She may be falling for Shinpei, but unless his father turns out to be a noble (which I'm not discounting), all he can do is bring her happiness, which is outside of her role as a nobleman's daughter. She has been raised to believe that she as a person doesn't matter nearly as much as what she can provide her family. As she grows over the course of these volumes, we can see that that may no longer be possible. This is a young woman who has learned to stand up for herself and is discovering her inner strength. She has stopped an assassin from killing simply by telling him not to do so, and she has turned the tables on her bullies. She's taken steps towards saving herself. Can she really go back to being meek?

It's a testament to the story that it feels imperative to keep reading to find out. It's a series that I couldn't say I'm enjoying, but I feel compelled to see where Satoko's journey takes her. With richly detailed art and well-considered characters, Firefly Wedding is a traffic accident that you can't look away from.