The Elusive Samurai Wraps Up at Chapter 238, Just as Season 2 Gets Going

The Elusive Samurai is over. According to Anime News Network, Yūsei Matsui's historical shonen series — known in Japan as Nige Jouzu no Wakagimi — concluded its Weekly Shonen Jump serialization with Chapter 238, published in Issue #12 of 2026. That closes out a run that began in January 2021 and lasted roughly five years, ending just months before Season 2 of the anime adaptation premiered on Fuji TV's Noitamina programming block in July 2026.

It's a strange bit of timing for fans to sit with: the source material stopped moving forward in February, and the show built to eventually catch up to it started airing new episodes five months later, with a very long way still to go. Here's what's actually confirmed about how the manga ended, what critics made of the finale, and where the anime stands relative to a story that's now fully in the books.

A five-year run built around a fugitive prince

The Elusive Samurai is set during a real turning point in Japanese history — the collapse of the Kamakura shogunate — and follows Hōjō Tokiyuki, a young prince whose family and status are stripped away by betrayal. Rather than building the series around a straightforward revenge-through-combat structure, Matsui built it around Tokiyuki's core skill: running. He flees with a handful of loyal retainers, and the series gets much of its identity — and a fair amount of its comedy — from framing evasion and survival as legitimate heroic tools, not cowardice.

The retainer Yorishige plays a central role early on, reportedly claiming to foresee that Tokiyuki is destined to become "ruler of Japan." That prophecy becomes the engine for the rest of the story: a fugitive prince with no army and no standing, slowly working his way back toward reclaiming what was taken from him, with Yorishige's foresight hanging over every step of that climb. It's a premise that let Matsui blend action, political maneuvering, and genuinely funny character writing in a way that set the series apart from Weekly Shonen Jump's more combat-forward flagship titles.

Who wrote it, and why that matters

Yūsei Matsui isn't a first-time Jump creator. He's best known as the author of Assassination Classroom, a series that ran from 2012 to 2016 and became one of the more beloved non-Big-Three hits the magazine has produced in the last decade and a half — a show about a classroom of students tasked with assassinating their alien teacher that managed to be both genuinely funny and, by its ending, surprisingly emotional. The Elusive Samurai was Matsui's follow-up act, and it's a notably different kind of story: historical rather than contemporary, grounded in real events rather than an entirely invented premise, and built around evasion rather than combat as its central hook.

That pedigree matters for how the industry received the series while it was still running. In 2024, The Elusive Samurai won the 69th Shogakukan Manga Award, a significant industry honor that put it in the same conversation as some of the more critically respected manga of its era — not just a commercially successful Jump title, but one that peers and critics recognized as doing something distinct with the format.

How the ending actually landed

Sourcing on the specific plot content of Chapter 238 is thin, and this piece isn't going to guess at how Tokiyuki's story actually resolves beyond what's been reported on the finale's reception. What is clear is that critics generally came away satisfied. GameRant's coverage of the ending calls it "quite decent," specifically noting that the finale "did not feel rushed" — a distinction worth taking seriously given how often long-running shonen series stumble at the finish line.

That's not a small thing to say about a Jump series wrapping up after five years. Rushed endings are practically a genre unto themselves at this point — a story spends years building toward a climax, then gets forced to collapse its remaining plot threads into a handful of chapters because of editorial pressure, declining sales, or a creator simply running out of runway. GameRant's framing explicitly positions The Elusive Samurai's ending as avoiding that trap, which lines up with a series that had, by most accounts, been building toward its endgame with some intentionality rather than getting cut off abruptly.

The volumes are still catching up

Even with the chapters finished, the print rollout has continued well past the manga's actual conclusion. Volume 24 shipped March 4, 2026, followed by Volume 25 on May 1, and Volume 26 on August 4. The final collected volume, Volume 27, is set for release on October 2, 2026 — roughly eight months after Chapter 238 itself ran in Weekly Shonen Jump.

That gap between a manga's final chapter and its final printed volume is standard practice for Jump series, since collected volumes bundle several chapters at a time and lag behind the weekly magazine by design. But it does mean readers who prefer to wait for print collections rather than following the magazine week-to-week are only now getting their hands on the actual ending, months after the story technically stopped updating. For a series that ran five years and closed out at 27 volumes total, that's a full physical shelf's worth of story now complete and available in one continuous run.

English-language readers have their own version of that lag to track. Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump publishes the series in Japan, with Viz Media handling the official English print release and Viz Media/MANGA Plus covering digital chapters. As with most simultaneously published Jump titles, the digital release via MANGA Plus tends to track closest to the original Japanese schedule, while the print volumes from Viz typically arrive further behind — meaning English print readers should expect the full run of 27 volumes to keep rolling out for a while yet, even with the story itself already finished in Japan.

Season 2 is already airing — and it's nowhere close to the ending

Here's where the timing gets genuinely interesting. Season 1 of The Elusive Samurai's anime adaptation aired in 2024, streaming internationally on Crunchyroll with an English dub, and by most measures it was both a commercial and critical success — a strong outing for a historical shonen series that didn't have the built-in name recognition of a Big Three-adjacent franchise going in. Season 2 followed up on that momentum, premiering in July 2026 on Fuji TV's Noitamina block, a programming slot historically associated with more prestige-leaning anime output rather than straightforward mass-market shonen adaptations.

The catch is straightforward: Season 2 started airing five months after the manga it's adapting had already ended, and it's still only covering a fraction of the finished 238-chapter, 27-volume story. According to GameRant's reporting, the anime will need at least two more full seasons beyond the current one just to catch up to where the manga concludes. That's not an unusual position for a long-running manga-to-anime adaptation to be in — plenty of ongoing anime trail their source material by years — but it's a notable situation for The Elusive Samurai specifically, since the finish line isn't a moving target anymore. The manga is done. The full story, ending included, already exists in print. The anime is simply the format that hasn't caught up yet, and by GameRant's estimate, won't for a while.

What this means for anime-only viewers

For anyone watching The Elusive Samurai exclusively through its anime adaptation, the current situation is almost the inverse of what usually happens with big Jump franchises. Instead of the manga slowly revealing more story while the anime chases behind it in real time, the entire story is already locked in, reviewed, and — per GameRant — generally well-received as a finished product. Season 2's ongoing Noitamina run is effectively adapting a known, complete quantity rather than a still-unfolding one.

That's arguably good news for viewers worried about adaptation quality or pacing decisions derailing the story, since there's no risk of the anime outrunning unfinished source material the way some long-running franchises have had to deal with in the past. It also means anyone impatient to see how Tokiyuki's arc actually resolves has a clear, finished path to it: catch up through Viz's print volumes or MANGA Plus's digital chapters, all the way through the newly released Volume 27, rather than waiting out however many additional broadcast seasons it takes Noitamina to get there.

The bottom line

Five years, 238 chapters, and 27 collected volumes after it began, The Elusive Samurai has wrapped up with an ending that, per GameRant's reporting, largely avoided the rushed, unsatisfying finishes that have plagued other long-running shonen series. Yūsei Matsui closes out his post-Assassination Classroom project with an award-winning historical series that critics say stuck the landing — even as the anime adaptation, freshly returned for Season 2 on Noitamina, is only just getting started on a story that, on the page at least, has already been fully told.

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