'One Piece' Introduces A Mysterious Female Samurai

One Piece has recently introduced fans to Wano, a world of samurai, and now its debuted one of its more enticing denizens: O-Kiku the samurai.

In the latest chapter of the series, Luffy and Zoro learned more about Wano. But the biggest reveal came at the end of the chapter where the the kind woman who had been attending to them was actually a samurai.

As O-Tama was being cured of her poison, Zoro's wounds were being dressed by a rather large woman (though Luffy assures Zoro Big Mom was bigger). She introducers herself as O-Kiku, using "doth" and throwing Luffy and Zoro for a loop with her older, polite manner of speech.

She was working with Tsuru at her tea house when all the commotion with Luffy, Zoro, and O-Tama happened. When they're attacked by the Gifters, O-Tama is suddenly kidnapped and O-Kiku quickly jumps into action by grabbing a katana and jumping on O-Tama's giant dog in order to give chase.

Zoro was surprised to see her grab a katana, but Tsuru says apparently O-Kiku can use it (though she's never seen her do so herself). O-Kiku does not know why the Gifters pre-planned O-Tama's kidnapping, but she knows all about their organization.

When asked why she knows all of this, O-Kiku responds, "I doth be a samurai" as she, Luffy, and Zoro barge into Bakura Town, a city of "officials and pirates." She may not be the first female swordswoman or samurai in the series, but she's grabbed fans' attention nonetheless. Now it's a matter of what she can do as the rest of the Wano arc rolls on.

One Piece is currently in the middle of the "Whole Cake Island" arc and can be found streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation. Eiichiro Oda's One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan.

The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. Eiichiro Oda revealed some news about One Piece's future in a recent interview as well.

Stating that he was about 80 percent done with the manga at this point with the Wano arc, fans are worried that the series may be coming to an end sooner than they thought. But it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the ending will most likely still be years away given how much of the world there is to explore.