Ayakashi Triangle Review: The Shonen Jump Action Comedy That Ended on a Kiss Nobody Saw Coming

I almost skipped this one. Kentaro Yabuki's name on the cover usually means one thing — he drew the characters for To Love-Ru, the series that basically defined a decade of Jump fan service — and I assumed Ayakashi Triangle would be the same idea with a ninja coat thrown over it. I was half right and completely wrong at the same time. Yes, there's fan service. But I kept reading because the exorcist action was actually good, and then I kept reading because the central relationship refused to resolve the way every other gender-swap comedy I'd read resolved. By the final chapter I was genuinely not sure how it would land. That almost never happens to me with a Jump series.

So this review is me trying to explain why a manga I almost dismissed ended up being one of the more quietly bold things I read out of Shonen Jump in recent years.

Quick Take

• An exorcist ninja gets cursed into a girl's body mid-battle — but it's a full action-comedy with real supernatural worldbuilding, not just the premise on repeat
• Yabuki's art carries it: dense ayakashi designs, fast wind-technique fights, and the cleanest paneling in his career
• Mature rating — heavy fan service and partial nudity in the uncut Seven Seas edition; this is not an all-ages book

Story Overview

Matsuri Kazamaki is a jaynin — an exorcist ninja trained to hunt ayakashi, the malicious spirits that prey on people. He's spent his life protecting his childhood friend Suzu Kanade, who is an "Ayakashi Medium": her overflowing life energy is so potent that it draws ayakashi to her like a beacon. To them, she's the best meal in the world.

The series' engine ignites when Matsuri confronts Shirogane, a 400-year-old ayakashi who styles himself the King of Ayakashi and wants to devour Suzu. To win, Matsuri seals away most of Shirogane's power into a scroll — but in that same moment Shirogane lands a curse of his own. Knowing Matsuri loves Suzu, Shirogane transforms Matsuri into a girl, betting that the change will quietly poison any future the two might have had as a couple. It's spite as a weapon. Matsuri is now a silver-haired girl with no obvious way back, and Shirogane is reduced to a roly-poly cat form, sulking and scheming to recover his strength.

From there the manga runs two tracks at once. One is straight exorcist action: Matsuri keeps working as a jaynin, Suzu develops her own abilities, and they tangle with both hostile and oddly friendly ayakashi while uncovering the history of the exorcist clans. The other track is the slow, awkward, genuinely thoughtful question the curse forces open — does Suzu's feeling for Matsuri depend on the body Matsuri is wearing? The series spends all sixteen volumes letting that question breathe instead of treating it as a problem to be reset, and the answer it eventually commits to is what makes Ayakashi Triangle worth talking about.

Characters

Matsuri Kazamaki — A wind-style exorcist who sealed away his own powers to trap Shirogane, then got cursed into a girl's body for his trouble. What I respect about Matsuri's arc is that the transformation never touches his competence. He keeps refining his craft — developing the "Inner Wind" technique to strike ayakashi from the inside out — and never once becomes a worse fighter. The change rewires his social life and his relationship with Suzu, not his ability to do the job. He starts the series insisting he'll find a way back to his male body; where he ends up on that question is the whole point.

Suzu Kanade — The Ayakashi Medium whose vitality makes her a target. She's easy to mistake for a passive damsel early on, but she steadily grows into a fighter in her own right, learning to throw energy through origami projectiles and to create "Omokage" copies of herself. Her real arc, though, is emotional: she has to figure out whether what she feels for Matsuri survives Matsuri being a girl. She doesn't get there instantly, and the manga earns it by not pretending the question is simple.

Shirogane — The King of Ayakashi, reduced by Matsuri's seal to a pudgy, bib-wearing cat. He's the engine of the plot — the one who cursed Matsuri, the one still angling to devour Suzu — but Yabuki lets his menace and his absurdity coexist, and his dynamic with Matsuri grows far more tangled than simple villain-and-hero.

Soga Ninokuru — An exorcist from a rival ninja clan who becomes Matsuri's friend and combat rival after clashing with her. Soga knows Matsuri was originally male, which makes the running gag of Soga being hopelessly nervous around women land with an extra layer of irony.

What I Love About It

It's that Matsuri stays good at the job. So many gender-swap comedies use the transformation as a humiliation engine — the hero becomes clumsy, embarrassed, diminished, and the laughs come from watching them fail at things they used to do well. Yabuki refuses that. Matsuri is exactly as dangerous an exorcist after the curse as before, and the "Inner Wind" technique he develops is a real escalation of his skill, not a consolation prize. The comedy comes from everything around the work — the social mess, the misunderstandings, Suzu's flustered reactions — and never from the work itself going wrong.

That choice does something structural. Because Matsuri's competence is intact, the action sequences keep genuine stakes, and the supernatural plot never feels like an excuse to get back to the fan service. You can take the fights seriously, which means you can take the worldbuilding seriously, which means when the emotional question about Suzu finally matures, it's resting on a story you've already been treating as real. A lesser version of this manga would have let the premise eat everything. This one keeps a working action series running underneath the gag the whole way through.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The ending. After 144 chapters of the question being held open — does Suzu love Matsuri, or does she love Matsuri's old body — the final chapter answers it with a kiss. Matsuri, still in girl form, and Suzu confess and kiss, and Matsuri says plainly that he's fine dating Suzu like this. Suzu's happy with that; she even gets curious about learning the sex-change jutsu herself, so she could enjoy both of Matsuri's forms without having to pick one.

What makes it stick isn't just the romance. It's that this ran in the Shonen Jump ecosystem — the most mainstream boys' manga brand there is — and it ended with two girls kissing as its leads, played completely straight and completely tender. After all the ecchi the series was known for, Yabuki closed it out on something almost startlingly gentle and sincere. I went in expecting the usual gender-swap cop-out, where the curse gets reversed and everything snaps back to a "normal" boy-girl pairing. It doesn't. The manga decides the feeling was never about the body, and it commits. That refusal to take the easy exit is the thing I'll remember about Ayakashi Triangle long after I've forgotten individual fights.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Yabuki's art is the strongest of his career — dense ayakashi designs and clean, readable action
• Matsuri's competence is never undercut by the transformation, so the action keeps real stakes
• The central relationship question is handled with patience and an ending that genuinely commits
• Complete in 16 volumes; no dangling threads

Cons

• The fan service is heavy and frequent — it earned the uncut edition for a reason
• The premise's comedy does thin out across sixteen volumes
• If the gender-transformation framing or the ecchi content doesn't appeal to you, nothing here will change your mind — this one is genuinely not for everyone

Is Ayakashi Triangle Worth Reading?

If you want an exorcist action-comedy that takes its own fights seriously and ends somewhere braver than its premise suggests, yes. Yabuki's art and Matsuri's undiminished competence carry the action, and the ending earns the patience. Just go in knowing the fan service is constant and the Mature rating is real — that's the line that decides this for most people.

Content Warnings & Age Rating

Age Rating: M (Mature) Content Warnings: Frequent fan service and partial nudity (uncut in the Seven Seas edition); gender transformation as an ongoing premise; action violence; supernatural themes.

This is a Mature-rated book and the fan service is not incidental — it's woven through the whole series. The Seven Seas "Ghost Ship" release is the uncut edition; the original digital VIZ run skipped chapters 74–75 entirely over their content. If explicit ecchi or the gender-transformation framing is a dealbreaker for you, this isn't the series to start with.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How Ayakashi Triangle Differs
Ranma ½	The classic gender-transformation martial-arts comedy, with the change as a recurring gag	Ayakashi Triangle treats the change as permanent and lets it reshape the central romance instead of resetting it
Blue Exorcist	Exorcist action with a protagonist tied to the demonic world he fights	Ayakashi Triangle leans into comedy and a will-they-won't-they core rather than dark family destiny
Twin Star Exorcists	Exorcist partners whose arranged romance drives the plot	Ayakashi Triangle's romance is voluntary, slow, and built around a transformation the leads have to reckon with

Official English Translation Status

Complete. After VIZ Media's digital run dropped the controversial chapters 74–75 and retired the physical volumes, Seven Seas Entertainment licensed the series and published all sixteen volumes uncut under its Ghost Ship imprint, finishing with Volume 16 in late 2024. The Seven Seas print edition is the complete, uncensored English version.

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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