Baki The Grappler Volume 9-12 Manga Review

As Volume nine opens, Baki is training again to face his father. Baki walks into a Northern Japan wilderness to find a team of battle-hardened, bloodthirsty commandos that defeated thousands of elite JDSF soldiers by themselves. In Baki The Grappler, everything is true, and nothing is real, and Buddha-level enlightenment comes from crossing over from almost dying to be slightly dead, then finding a way to fight anyway.

There is an actual moment where Baki attains Galaxy Brain as he is schooled in pain and terror by one of the personalities of Billy Milligan, the first person to be acquitted by reason of dissociative identity disorder, who here is simultaneously fighting with, for, and against the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, and who is apparently a near god after almost being executed in Uganda.

Every moment of this two-volume training sequence is brilliantly unhinged. As he leaves the mountains, Baki, bloody and beaten, but smiling, thinks, “Mr. Gaia, Mr. Nomura, The Twins, and the knife-user…I'll never forget you as long as I live!” My man, you don't even know the names of three of those guys. You spent months with them.

Having undertaken extreme training, Baki once again faces the monster that is his father, Yujiro Hanma. Despite having been trained by elite military forces, Baki doesn't last long. And, in retribution for her teenage son not being strong enough to beat his adult father in the prime of his life, Baki's mother is caught up in the fight. Needless tragedy flavored with a heavy helping of murderous psychosis brings Baki up short. His mother never loved him as much as she loved Yujiro, but Yujiro clearly loves no one. Unable to kill his father—which is, apparently, the only acceptable outcome—Baki's father rejects him, again, as being unworthy of being his son.

After a series of Oedipal scenes with his mother that are extremely uncomfortable to read, Baki's mom is fridged to give him some motivation to really, definitely want to kill his father. Then the arc ends. Baki returns home, functionally parentless.

Of course, his next action is to jump back into training. From Japan's elite sword masters to Brazil's best MMA fighters, Baki gleefully has his body and soul pummeled in the quest to become strong enough to take on his father. It is at this point that the Underground Arena at Tokyo Dome returns for Baki's second chance to go all out in a battle to be the strongest fighter.

Having been injured (i.e., he died and had to be brought back to life), Director Orochi offers his son up to this next round. We learn that his son, Katsumi, has “perfected” karate and is able to do the bottle chop at only twenty years old! Neither of these things is actually relevant to him being a good fighter, but we can see from his good looks sans scars or sneer that he will be a formidable foe.

When reigning champion Baki Hanma enters the competition, he is excited and confident, but this time, there is a poise in his carriage, the confidence of a man without arrogance. This time, he also brings Kozue, the girl he is closest to, as a guest. When she asks why he brought her to watch him fight, he talks about the dream of being the strongest, but Kozue is unconvinced that his answer makes any sense, really. On the one hand, he's letting Kozue see his truest self; on the other hand, that arena has got to smell really bad.

And then the fight begins. Once again, we are back in Baki's dream, as he happily enters the ring to cause pain and misery to his grotesque opponent, a wrestler twice his size. We get a glimpse of Kozue's reaction to Baki's fight (horror and confusion, obviously, since Baki really didn't warn her how bloody it would be), but we have no idea what she will think about his victory. It doesn't matter all that much; she's just taking up the space Baki's mother occupied as “a woman in Baki's life.” I fear for her. Women in Baki's orbit do not fare that well.

The art continues to be both outstandingly detailed and ugly as hell. Every stance, joint lock, and punch defies anatomy and, often, physics. Even positions of strength are drawn in fantastically distorted ways. In Itagaki's desire to show motion and strength, he overcompensates stylistically, crafting stances that would be hideously unsafe and moves that defy gravity. It's fantastic. Volume twelve seems especially as if he overthought every panel to express this kind of extreme physiology. There is a scene where Orochi's son has his hand pulled back to slice the glass bottle balanced on his father's head. Instead of a clean, firm line between his arm, wrist, and fingers, we see a protruding pisiform, fingers curled and separated. In a normal human, this strike would simply knock the bottle off the person's head and possibly break a finger or two. Not here. Here, the strike is as precise as a sommelier's saber. Of course it is, Katsumi Orochi has “finished karate” according to his father.

We are now halfway through the story, and Baki is taking us into a competition for the third time. Like previous bouts, we're sure he'll win, so it's simply a matter of sitting back, grabbing some grilled yakitori, or whatever is the preferred snack at underground, illicit, no-holds-barred fighting events in Japan, and watching the wacky opponents rise and fall before Baki.