Is Nue's Exorcist Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Gakuro Yajima is a timid high schooler with the inconvenient ability to see spirits, which is how he ends up discovering Nue — a spirit of serious power, sealed away in a locked room at his school and feared by the professional exorcists who are supposed to be in charge of containing her. After a violent spirit nearly kills him, Gakuro makes a contract with Nue, borrowing her power to fight back against hostile spirits in exchange for helping her deal with exorcists who'd rather lock her away than work with her.

What it does well

The relationship between Gakuro and Nue is doing most of the heavy lifting here, and it works. Rather than being a straightforward power-up gimmick, Nue is written as someone the institutional exorcist world has already decided to be afraid of, and Gakuro stands out specifically because he's willing to actually talk to her instead of just trying to manage her. That gives the series a real emotional core underneath the spirit-battling: the question of whether Nue's reputation is deserved, and whether anyone besides Gakuro is willing to find out.

Kota Kawae's art brings genuine unease to the spirit-world imagery, which keeps the combat visually distinct from a lot of shounen power-fantasy and gives the horror elements real teeth. And because Gakuro's own safety is tied to how well he and Nue function as a pair, fights carry stakes beyond simple power comparisons — the partnership itself is always part of what's being tested.

Where it falls short

Keeping the focus so tightly on Gakuro and Nue in the early volumes means the supporting exorcist cast — Kazusa Suo, Shiroha Fujino, and others — takes a while to become more than function players, and a subplot involving Gakuro's stepsister Shitotsu is introduced without a lot of initial context. The series also leans on some familiar shounen escalation beats — new enemy rank, new technique — that readers of the genre will have seen before, even if the central relationship keeps them from feeling rote.

Verdict

Nue's Exorcist earns its place in a crowded shounen-supernatural field mostly on the strength of its central partnership — Gakuro and Nue's contract is more than a power gimmick, and the question of institutional distrust versus earned trust gives the series real thematic weight underneath its spirit battles. If you want solid genre action with a relationship worth following, it's a good pick, especially once the supporting cast catches up to the leads.