Characters, Ranked — Part 1 (#20–11)
This is our jigokuraku strongest characters ranked 20-11 breakdown, counting down the death row convicts, Tensen, and Tameshi Itto-ryu executioners who quietly set up everything Part 2 pays off.
Light spoilers ahead. I have kept plot details to what actually explains a character’s placement.
I want to start by saying this one is special to me.
Jigokuraku is short. Thirteen volumes, a real beginning, a real middle, a real ending. After years of following series that run for decades and still have not landed, reading something this compact was a genuine relief. I finished it in a handful of sittings and then immediately wanted to start again.
The premise is what pulled me in. It is an Edo-period story, which normally signals a certain kind of samurai drama, and then it sends a condemned shinobi and a squad of executioners to an island to retrieve an elixir of immortality. That combination should not work. It works beautifully. The monsters show up almost immediately, the island keeps revealing things that are worse than the last thing, and the tone never settles into anything comfortable.
What really got me was the cast. Every death row convict has a backbone to them. Gabimaru has a reason he keeps standing up, and so does everyone else, even the ones who only get a chapter or two. That is rare. Most battle manga treat the supporting cast as a queue of people waiting to lose a fight. Jigokuraku makes you care about them, and then it takes them away without warning. There were several points where I genuinely thought the story might not protect its own protagonist. The executioners start dropping early, and once you realize the author is willing to do that, you stop being able to predict anything.
Yuji Kaku’s art deserves a mention too. The creature designs are inventive and unpleasant in the best way, the action is legible, and the female characters are drawn with real care rather than as decoration.
So yes, I recommend this one without reservation. If you have been waiting for a battle manga that respects your time, this is it.
Now, the ranking. This is Part 1, counting down from #20 to #11. Part 2 covers the top ten.
#20. Yamada Asaemon Eizen
The highest-ranked executioner in the entire Tameshi Itto-ryu line, and the clearest illustration of what rank actually means in this series.
Eizen’s beheading technique is described as the finest among the Asaemon, and his position at the top of the order is not a fluke. But the Asaemon hierarchy is not a pure strength ranking. It weighs suitability as a future head of the school, the execution record, judgment, and the trust of the line. It is closer to a corporate title than a power level.
The island does not care about titles. Eizen arrives at Shinsenkyo carrying the highest rank in his organization and runs into something the ranking system never accounted for, and his showing is over almost before it begins.
He is on this list because the technique is real. He is at the bottom of it because Jigokuraku wanted to tell you, in its opening act, that everything you think you know about who is strong here is wrong.
#19. Mei
One of the most interesting power sets in the series, attached to a character who has almost no interest in using it.
Mei’s Tao aptitude is off the scale. She throws Gabimaru, a man who survived his own execution, like he weighs nothing. When the situation turns genuinely dangerous she moves faster than anyone expects and hits hard enough to end a threat outright. On raw capability she belongs much higher than nineteenth.
The problem is that she is not a fighter. She does not train, she does not strategize, and she spends most of the story frightened. Her power surfaces in bursts, usually when someone she cares about is in danger, and then it goes away again.
I rank by what gets demonstrated. On potential alone Mei is a top-ten entry, and I suspect some readers will put her there. As the story actually plays out, this is where she lands.
#18. Aza Toma
The thinker, and proof that in Jigokuraku you can close a physical gap with pure analysis.
Toma is not built like his brother. He does not have Chobei’s durability or his raw output, and he knows it. What he has instead is an ability to read a fight while it is happening, identify what an opponent is actually doing, and adjust faster than the opponent can adapt in return.
The detail that sells him is how quickly he picks up the sword. He goes from outsider to holding an executioner’s substitute license in roughly a month, which in a school that trains people from childhood is absurd. He simply works out what the technique is for and reproduces it.
He punches well above his weight class throughout the island arc, and he does it by being the smartest person in most of his fights.
#17. Yuzuriha
The most fun character in the series to read, and considerably more dangerous than she lets on.
Yuzuriha plays the helpless act constantly, and it works constantly, which is itself a skill. Underneath it she is a fully trained kunoichi with a nasty toolkit: wires, poison, misdirection, and the patience to let a fight develop until the opening she wants appears. She spends the early island arc gathering information on the local wildlife while everyone else is busy panicking, then sells that information for a better position.
What raises her above the other convicts on this half of the list is that she grows. She arrives competent and leaves genuinely formidable, having worked out how her own Tao attribute interacts with an enemy nobody should be able to hurt. When it counts she is not the distraction. She is the one who lands the hit.
#16. Rokurota
The single most shocking physical display in the first act of Jigokuraku.
Rokurota is enormous, and that is the least interesting thing about him. What makes him dangerous is that he circulates an immense volume of Tao without having any idea that he is doing it. No training, no technique, no understanding of the system the rest of the cast spends the series studying. He is simply built wrong, in a way that lets him generate output most trained fighters cannot match.
That is also his ceiling. Power you do not understand cannot be aimed, and against opponents who fight with technique and coordination, raw output stops being enough. He is sixteenth because what he does on arrival is genuinely terrifying, and because the story then demonstrates fairly quickly why terrifying is not the same as strong.
#15. Gui Fa
The Tensen with the most to say and the least appetite for a straight fight.
Being Tensen carries a floor. Gui Fa has the regeneration, the Tao mastery and the centuries of refinement that come with the position, and any of those alone would put her beyond every human on this half of the list. She also has something the others do not, which is the willingness to stand against Rien, and that takes a kind of strength the ranking system does not measure.
But she is a scholar before she is a combatant. Her contribution to the story is knowledge, about the island, about what the Tensen actually are, and about what the elixir costs. Fifteenth reflects a character who could be far higher and consistently chooses not to be.
#14. Yamada Asaemon Sagiri
The character I went back and forth on more than anyone else on this list.
Sagiri is ranked twelfth in the Tameshi Itto-ryu, which places her nowhere near the top of her own school. What she has that nobody else does is understanding. She reaches the truth of Tao faster than any other human in the story, working out not just how to use it but what it actually is, and once she does, she is able to damage an opponent that the rest of the cast physically cannot touch.
That is not a small thing. In a system built entirely on elemental counters, the person who genuinely understands the system is more dangerous than the person with the bigger number.
Japanese reader polls put her much higher, sometimes in the top ten, and I understand the argument completely. On demonstrated combat output across the whole series I have her fourteenth. On importance to how this story resolves, she is top five, and Part 2 will get into why.
#13. Zhu Jin
The Tensen who turns a losing position into the most dangerous fight on the island.
Zhu Jin is a problem from the moment he appears. The Tao control is refined, the regeneration is absolute by human standards, and he is comfortable fighting multiple trained opponents at once. Then, backed into a corner, he fuses with one of Shinsenkyo’s beasts and escalates into something that threatens every single person in the vicinity at the same time, allies included.
Bringing him down requires an extremely specific solution executed simultaneously, by people who should not have been able to coordinate at all. That is the mark of a genuine top-tier threat: the answer to Zhu Jin is not a stronger fighter, it is a plan.
Thirteenth, and comfortably the most frightening opponent in the middle stretch of the manga.
#12. Tao Fa
Tensen, and one half of the most efficient pairing in Rien’s group.
Tao Fa on her own would be a serious problem for any human on this list. The regeneration, the physical scale, the Tao output: all of it is beyond what a trained swordsman or shinobi can match one-on-one. Her real value, though, is that she fights alongside Ju Fa as a genuine unit rather than two strong individuals standing near each other, and that coordination is what makes the pair so hard to dislodge.
It takes four capable humans, working together and accepting serious damage, to resolve that fight. Twelfth is where I land: clearly above every human on this half of the list, clearly below the Tensen who can hold a battlefield alone.
#11. Mu Dan
The Tensen who explains what the Tensen are, and does it by being horrifying.
Mu Dan is the moment Jigokuraku stops being a survival story and becomes something much darker. The tentacles, the flower transformation, the casual delivery of the truth about what happens to people on this island: it all arrives at once, and the cast has no answer for any of it. Anyone caught is not killed so much as converted, which is a worse outcome and the series knows it.
Combat-wise Mu Dan sits at the lower end of the Tensen, which is why she is eleventh rather than top ten. But the fight has consequences that ripple through the rest of the story, and the sheer wrongness of that first encounter is why she outranks every human in Part 1.## Final Verdict: Jigokuraku Strongest Characters Ranked 20-11That's our jigokuraku strongest characters ranked 20-11 — Eizen's title, Mei's untapped power, and Mu Dan's horrifying debut all setting the stage. Part 2 covers #10 through #1, where the Tensen leadership and Gabimaru himself finally take the stage. [Go to Part 2 →]
Part 2 covers #10 through #1, which is where the Tensen leadership, the top of the Tameshi Itto-ryu and Gabimaru himself all land. It is also where the interesting argument lives, because the character most readers would call the strongest in Jigokuraku and the character the story treats as the strongest are not the same person.
Want the full set? [Grab the Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku complete collection on Amazon] and catch everything these twenty characters build toward.