It was serialized in Shogakukan's seinen manga magazine Big Comic Superior from 1994 to 2008, with its chapters collected in 48 tankōbon volumes.

A sequel series with the same title (rendered in all caps Latin-script) was serialized in the same magazine from 2008 to 2014, with its chapters collected in 14 tankōbon volumes.

The story follows the title character, a young woman, brought up as part of a team of assassins charged with killing the warlords that threaten the uneasy peace in Feudal Japan in the aftermath of its long Sengoku civil war period.

Azumi received the Excellence Prize at the 1997 Japan Media Arts Festival and won the 43rd Shogakukan Manga Award in the general category in 1998.

Many of Azumi's early missions are the assassinations of prominent supporters and generals of the Toyotomi clan, against whom Tokugawa Ieyasu expected to again go to war.

Early in the manga, as part of their training, Azumi and her comrades are ordered to go to Shimotani, a hidden community of ninja who became farmers, to learn the basics of ninjutsu.

The ten erabareta senshi (chosen warriors), who are all young children (Azumi has her first period well after her first missions, so she appears to be somewhere between 10–12 years of age at the onset of the manga) are told by Jiji that they have completed their training.

Their second mission is to massacre all fifty-three residents of the peaceful ninja village, including their teacher, women and children, as they know of the group's existence.

An action game for PlayStation 2, based on manga's original story, was developed by Gargoyle Mechanics and released in Japan only by Entertainment Software Publishing in 2005.

[12] Azumi received an Excellence Prize at the 1997 Japan Media Arts Festival,[13] and won the 43rd Shogakukan Manga Award in the general category in 1998.