Magilumiere Co. Ltd. (Manga) (2024)

Magilumiere Co. Ltd. / Magi-Lumière Corporation (株式会社マジルミエ, Kabushikigaisha Majirumie^?) is a Magical Girl manga with art by Yu Aoki and story by Sekka Iwata. The manga started publishing in Shounen Jump+ on October of 2021. It can be read in English on Mangaplus.

On June 9, 2023, it was announced that VIZ Media would launch the series sometime in Spring 2024 under the name Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.^[1]

Publication[]

Written by Sekka Iwata and illustrated by Yu Aoki, the series began serialization on Shueisha's Shōnen Jump+ manga website on October 20, 2021.^[2] As of August 2023, the series' individual chapters have been collected into ten tankōbon volumes.

On July 4, 2023, at the end of Chapter 77, it was announced that Magilumiere would have an Act 2 released on August 1, 2023.^[3]

Shueisha's Manga Plus service is publishing the series in English digitally.^[4]

Synopsis[]

In a world where outbreaks of dangerous creatures known as "Kaii" have become commonplace, society has had to adjust. Kaii incidents are now dealt with by companies that deploy Magical Girls— working women equipped with hi-tech brooms to fly around town and spells coming from state-of-the-art software that can be cast by wands. As the number of Kaii incidents have surged, so have the number of magical girl corporations, and the position of "magical girl" is now a highly sought after career.

Kana Sakuragi is a recent college graduate with excellent memory that has been having a hard time job-hunting. When she's caught in the middle of a Kaii incident during an interview, she meets Hitomi Koshigaya, a hot-blooded Magical Girl sent there to neutralize the Kaii. Seeing Kana's immense skill in dealing with the software involved in being a Magical Girl, Kana is immediately recruited to join her in a Magical Girl start-up, Magilumiere. Despite the eccentricity of the company, like the nervous engineer and the cross-dressing Magical Girl fanboy company president, Kana finds herself both intrigued and out of options, prompting her to join the company as a newbie Magical Girl.

Reception[]

Masaki Endo from Tsutaya News felt the series was unique among works of the magical girl genre; Endo also praised the balance between fantasy and reality.^[5] Makoto Kitani from Da Vinci praised the comedic elements of the story and the artwork; Kitani also felt the story was unique among magical girl works.^[6] Steven Blackburn from Screen Rant praised the series, particularly enjoying the comedic moments. He also noted that the series worked well as a satire of Sailor Moon.The series was nominated for the 2022 Next Manga Award in the web manga category,^[7] and ranked third out of 50 nominees.^[8]

Characters[]

See List of Characters

Volumes[]

See for further information related to Volumes.

Story Arcs[]

See Story Arcs for further information related to Arcs.

Anime[]

• The anime was announced on November 28, 2023 along with chapter 93.

Tropes[]

• Almighty Janitor: Shigemoto is the president of a pretty small start-up, but he is heavily connected with upper level and extremely powerful and rich people and a magic engineer of legendary skill and finesse.
• Ascended Fanboy: The guys at Magilumiere are clearly fans of the magical girl genre even before the commercialization and widespread employment of them. Shigemoto wears a magical girl dress to work every day as a sign of his resolve while Nikoyama is constantly fanboying over cool Transformation Sequences and summoning circles.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: The five members of Magilumiere are off-putting to anyone they meet together, but their skill and passion for the field is out of this world and easily gather the attention of people from much more established companies.
  • Koshigaya is a delinquent-looking woman that moves on instinct alone and is often eating, but her skill on the field and fighting is unmatched, allowing her to pull off insane moves.
  • Kazuo Nikoyama is shy to the point of being almost unable to talk to anyone he just meets, but his skill on creating spells on the fly makes him an amazing engineer.
  • The company president, Shigemoto, is a man that is constantly dressed in dresses even flashier than the Magical Girls of companies. Despite this he is reliable as both a boss and a mentor, and is well connected in the industry, being able to talk with high-ranking members of the country's internal security. He's also a legendarily talented magic engineer, outstripping even Nikoyama in terms of speed and efficiency.
  • Midorikawa is Shigemoto's right-hand and a typical salaryman who loves the magical girl genre. He's also a Clock King with Hyper-Awareness capable of evaluating a situation with a glance and act as a one-man HR department with metriculous planning and scheduling.
• Catchphrase: Koshigaya tends to hype herself and Sakuragi up with the phrase, "This'll be a clean sweep!" when they have the tools to take down the latest Kaii at hand.
• Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: In addition to exterminating Kaii, the magical girls of the setting are each tied to their respective companies. When they aren't fighting monsters, they can be found making public promotional appearances and sponsoring their company's products. For instance, Miyakado sells makeup for magical girls that won't smudge or smear even when flying at 40 km/h.
• Dual Wielding: Makino's "Fallen Petal Flash" allows her to transform the rose-ribbons on her waist into twin swords.
• Everything's Better with Sparkles: Actually invoked: because Transformation Sequences are created and customized by engineers, any sparkles in a transformation sequence are there by the engineer's choice.
  • Nikoyama: [in Tears of Joy at seeing Sakuragi's first transformation] It was worth putting in the elaborate effects...
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Kaii are masses of dark mass and sometimes other things including concrete, ice, and wood with many eyes sprouting all over their bodies.
• Face of a Thug: Koshigaya's piercings and dyed hair (her dark roots suggest that her natural hair color is black) are typically associated with Delinquents in Japanese culture. Makino's mental image of Koshigaya has her posing with a nail-studded bat, suggesting that she comes off in a threatening way at first glance. Despite appearances, she's still a friendly, laidback woman and a hard-working Magical Girl.
• Girlish Pigtails: Sakuragi wears her hair in twintails, signifying that she's only just entered the adult world. Makino actually lampshades this:
  • Makino: Still so innocent, huh? Shoulda known with those pigtails.
  • Sakuragi: What are you trying to say?
• Geometric Magic: The Magitek of the world of Magilumiere is deployed in "summoning circles", pre-written computer code that manipulates magical energy in preset patterns to attack and destroy Kaii. These naturally take the form of large arrays of Instant Runes each designed for a specific purpose.
• Hero Insurance: Insurance against Kaii is a commonplace for the industry and is meant to cover the damages caused to buildings.

Honest Corporate Executive: Shigemoto is the Benevolent Boss, founder, and leader of Magilumiere Co. Ltd. While his startup is small, he makes sure that it's filled with talented and passionate people who are as skilled as they are altruistic. He constantly gives his employees opportunities to grow personally and professionally, pays them competitive wages, and takes personal responsibility for all their actions.

• I Have No Daughter!: Koshigaya's father has cut ties with her and no longer wants to have any connection with her after she entered the magical girl industry.
• Lensman Arms Race: Kaii are slowly growing stronger over the course of the story because of the increasing proliferation of magical energy. This requires magical girls to use more magical energy to defeat them, which in turn causes the Kaii to mutate and grow even stronger to compensate. Shigemoto explicitly designed the Alice System to exterminate Kaii with the minimum amount of energy required while opposing the deregulation of magical energy out of fear that the Kaii will become too powerful for magical girls to contain.
• Magical Girl: Magilumiere presents a unique take on the Magical Girl— the series takes place in a world where outbreaks of dangerous creatures known as Kaii have become a common phenomenon, and companies employ working women as "magical girls" to wield Magitek to take them out. There's plenty of the usual Magical Girl tropes and flashy fights, with the catch that position of "magical girl" is treated mostly like an average career, meaning that it has its own set of workplace politics and conflicts on top of all that.
• Magical Girl Warrior: Kaii incidents are referred to as "exterminations" but are essentially Magical Girl fights.
• Magic Wand: Magical Girls in the world of Magilumiere wield magic through wands. Most magical girls use pre-programmed "spells," but Magilumiere takes a unique approach by having Magical Girls communicate with engineers to create magical spells on the fly that best deal with their specific situation.
• Magitek: The force that magical girls wield to defeat Kaii is called "magic" and certainly looks like what we would call "magic," but it's actually treated like a science In-Universe, developed by engineers the way any ordinary technology would be. Akasaka explains in Chapter 38 how that technology involves harnessing a nutrient called "magitosin," which in layman's terms is magical power. Most magical girls deploy magic via "spells" that are pre-programmed into their wands, but Magilumiere takes a unique approach by having their magical girls work with engineers in real-time in order to produce spells that are best suited to deal with whatever situation they're currently facing.
• Mysterious Past: While he initially seems like a simple kooky Benevolent Boss, it becomes increasingly clear that Shigemoto is more than your average startup boss. He has connections to the most powerful people in the magical girl industry, acts as an important consultant in meetings regarding the regulation of magical energy, and developed a unique system for countering Kaii with never-before-seen technology and minimal energy requirements. He's also a legendarily skilled magic engineer capable of rewriting and applying magic he's only seen once before while running circles around his own main magic engineer, Nikoyama.
• Plot Tailored to the Party: Invoked. The Magilumiere specialty involves being capable of assessing a situation and deploy the exact kind of magic to solve a problem with minimal to no side-effects. For example, they're capable of destroying a breakout of Kaii in an old neighborhood without damaging the buildings the way that another company would with the use of a large scale spell circle.
• Photographic Memory: Main character Kana Sakuragi has an amazing level of recall, demonstrated at the start of the series by repeating the last 3 orders she heard while waiting in line at the coffee shop after the shop's computers went down. When Kana joins Magilumiere Co. Ltd. and becomes a Magical Girl, the inventor who makes her and her partner's brooms creates one with a vast number of features and gives her an enormous manual to read explaining them. Kana does, and almost immediately makes effective use of some of them on her next mission.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Koshigaya's father is one of the heads of the magic deregulation political faction pushing for the removal of limits on magic engineering. While he's a stick in the mud and disowned his own daughter for defying his wishes, he's furious when he realizes that Tsutsumi rigged a test against Magilumiere Co. Ltd.'s demonstration of the Alice System by empowering an already nigh-unkillable Group C Kaii. He then declares that he has a responsibility to be an impartial arbitrator and that his daughter has nothing to do with his work or his judgments. He then sees Tsutsumi removed from his position for his highly dangerous and corrupt actions.
• Science Hero: Akasaka, the magical girl for the RIMT, is a scientist at her work, and her outfit reflects that having lab goggles and coat as part of her magical girl outfit.
• Transformation Sequence: Magical Girls change clothes through these. Interestingly, each company has their own method, which often translates to the company's own aesthetic and mission. Magilumiere girls have a simple transformation sequence, Lily recites a few poetic verses to a key to transform, RIMT's Akasaka summons a form she signs to transform, and so on.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Kouji Shigemoto is Magilumiere's president, whose habit of cross-dressing as a magical girl at work is off-putting to newcomers, but he is capable of dispensing wise advice and is working towards improving the industry's method to deal with Kaii as they mutate. Makino notes that, even though she was taken aback by his appearance at first, she thinks he pulls off the look well.

External Links[]

• Official website at Shōnen Jump+ (in Japanese)
• Magilumiere Co. Ltd. Official Twitter Account
• Magilumiere Co. Ltd. (manga) at Anime News Network's encyclopedia
• Illustrator's Official Twitter Account

Reference[]