Vam­pire Knight (Vol.1) by Hino sounded inter­est­ing. As a reader who has self-proclaimed that she was sick of vam­pires, I’ve been read­ing my share of them lately. Heh. How­ever, there are those few excep­tions that still grab my inter­est. I chanced a copy of this book as it was the last one on the shelf. It’s a fan favorite in Japan so says the cover. I’m all for manga that are hits and here is a descrip­tion of the plot for your perusal:

Vam­pire Knight pri­mar­ily takes place in Kurosu/Cross Acad­emy, a pres­ti­gious pri­vate school with an unusual class struc­ture. The stu­dent body is divided into two classes: the Day Class, which is made up of ordi­nary stu­dents, and the Night Class, an élite group of ‘beau­ti­ful peo­ple’. Unbe­knownst to the major­ity of stu­dents, and even most of the staff, the Night Class is made up entirely of vam­pires. The hero­ine, Yuki, is one of the few humans who know the school’s secret. She serves as a Guardian, ded­i­cated to main­tain­ing the peace­ful coex­is­tence of the Day and Night Classes with her child­hood friend Zero, who lost his par­ents to vam­pires at an early age.

It seems that a school was nec­es­sary for peace so that vam­pires can bet­ter under­stand humans and vice versa. There’s a cen­tury old, bloody con­flict, between humans and vam­pires that didn’t want to stop any­time soon. So we have The Cross Acad­emy. It’s a pri­vate school. The Night classes and the Day classes are sep­a­rated. Yuki and Zero are the guardians of the school and are on the dis­ci­pli­nary com­mit­tee. They make sure that none of the day classes are aware of the night class because they are full of noth­ing but vam­pires. Humankind’s worst enemy.

Vampire Knight, Volume 1In this entry, we learn right at the begin­ning that Yuki has had her share of rogue vam­pires as her life was saved from one ten years ago. Kuname was the hero who saved her and she’s had a girl crush on him ever since. Mean­while, Zero seems to have noth­ing but apa­thy for vam­pires as he was the only sur­vivor of a vam­pire attack. The author does make a dis­tin­guish­ing fea­ture between pure­blood vam­pires and those that are not. It seems that pure­blood vam­pires are the only ones that can turn humans into mon­sters like them. This entry goes into the academy’s daily rou­tines and even­tu­ally the thread starts to pick up and things start to get a bit more sinister.

I really enjoyed Vam­pire Knight. It is a very busy manga full of action sequences and sound effects. It was often rather con­fus­ing as to who was speak­ing to who. Almost had me believ­ing that I wasn’t get­ting this right to left read­ing thing down flat.  This one would not be a good place to start unless your up for it. The art­work is nice. I really like Kuname. He is the hearthrob vam­pire who is for­bid­den to humans.  However, the com­plex­ity of Zero has my full atten­tion, too, as he is a truly tor­tured soul. All the vam­pires are just gor­geous. This is a series that I’ll keep my eye on. My grade, B+.