Basilisk: Kouga Ninpouchou, Y十M: Yagyuu Ninpouchou Recommendations
Yagyu was created by the same artist/author as Basilisk. The art, as well as the execution, is very similar. You could actually describe Yagyu as a sequel--its story occurring not too long after Basilisk's end.
Where as Basilisk involved two ninja clans with a lot of hatred for the other being forced into a 10 vs. 10 battle to the death, Yagyu has a war of the sexes theme. At the start, seven of Aizu's strongest warriors - warriors working for the evil lord Akinari - are forcing a rebel Aizu faction to walk many miles to their execution ground; tied up and dragged by dogs.
But, instead of being taken to their place of execution, they're instead taken to the convent where their wives and daughters are hiding, following the failed rebellion. The seven Aizu men break down the gate of the convent - entering a female only sanctuary - and start killing the women in front of the men. In the end, only seven of the women survive, and that's where the Yagyu story begins proper.
The main difference between Basilisk and Yagyu is that the girls have justice on their side. In Basilisk neither side were fully in the right, and that made it easy for the numbers to decrease evenly on both sides. But, in the case of Yagyu, the girls are trained to get revenge on evil men; men lead by a man who kidnaps, rapes, and murders the women in his province for fun many times over the course of the story. The end result is the women surviving and the men not, and that has, to a certain extent, taken away the kind of intensity that the shorter, far less predictable Basilisk had.
What Yagyu does have going for it are the strategies Jyubei comes up with that allow the seven women to get their revenge. Jyubei mostly just trains the women and comes up with strategies for them to kill vastly superior opponents. The variation between the mini-arcs where his plans play out are what make Yagyu so gripping to read. For example, in one part, Jyubei and one of the women act as husband and wife in order to get themselves kidnapped and, by doing so, infiltrate enemy territory.
Seven volumes in, out of what I believe to be eleven volumes total, Yagyu has been well worth the money paid for it. It is inferior to the faster-paced, more tragic Basilisk, and there is a bizarre amount of very nice nudity present in the story, mainly as a result of one of the main villains being an evil rapist guy, but I can't knock it too much. The art is distinctive, the small bits of humour have amused me (such as when Jyubei opened his eye after acting blind during one of his plans, saw two of the girls naked, and they blushed/hid behind another, tomboyish character), and the action has been intense.
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Same author/artist.
Both are about two rival factions duking it out during the Edo period in Japan, the stories share some common traits.
