The Fall Classic begins and the competition is fierce. Can high school chefs really be this good?
Creative Staff:
Story: Yuto Tsukuda
Art: Shun Saeki
Contributor: Yuki Morisaki
Translation: Adrienne Beck
Production: NRP Studios (Touch up art and lettering), Izumi Evers (design), Jennifer LeBlanc (editor)
What They Say:
The preliminary round of the Fall Classic begins! All of the contestants do their utmost to showcase their skills to the acclaimed judges, with the favored students presenting the most exquisite of curry dishes! Only the top eight finalists will qualify to enter the main event. Who will make the cut?!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With battle stories of any sort, the task faced by the writer is easily handled when there is a head-to-head competition. The natural ebb and flow of storytelling works quite well with moving the attention of reader back and forth between the two contenders. Notice that even in most large-scale battles, there is a natural tendency (actually, it’s more a practical requirement) to have the focus move down to a more human level, meaning individuals and their experience in combat. Thus, the challenge faced by Yuto Tsukuda here was to get through all of these competitors, at full count sixty of them, and their place in the preliminaries of the Fall Classic.
Now, of course, no one expects all sixty to get any focus…as most of them don’t even have names (at least names that are revealed to us, the reading audience). So, it is easy to establish, as Tsukuda does, the difficulty of this tournament by having the “small fry,” the unnamed ones who made it into the preliminaries just to be, to use Senzaemon Nakiri’s terminology “sacrifices,” serve as cannon fodder at the start of the judging, once the cooking is over (which it swiftly is, following a quick roll call of the named characters). As the name characters make their appearance, one after another, the judges are suddenly turned from harsh critics (who gave no one more than about 33 points out of 100, not just a failing mark but an embarrassingly bad failing mark) into swooning devotees of student cuisine.
On a general, broad level, Tsukuda does about as well as can be expected from trying to deal with this unwieldy mass of characters and all of the unique versions of curry they come up with to wow the judges (and us, the readers). There is some ability to vary events by switching between the two blocks of students competing for the eight (yes, you read that right, only 8 of the 60 will move on to the tournament itself) spots that guarantee progression, though it is fairly limited by the important fact that you can’t have main character Soma’s dish get judged too early (obviously, he must come last of all). So, how do you get through all these competitors and their individual talents without boring the audience who might just want to get to the end?
You can bring in humorous one-dimensional comic relief characters like Nao Sadatsuka, whose nickname, the “Cauldron Witch” probably tells you all you need to know about her cooking had you never read this volume at all. Her curry smells like an open sewer and looks like it could cast a curse on you just by looking at it…but the taste is good. Then you can reveal a backstory that involves a battle going back to middle school over who gets to be by Erina Nakiri’s sidekick. It appears that Nao is a masochist in addition to being a fan of dark cooking and loves the idea of being tongue-lashed by Erina’s God Tongue (verbally, not literally…we hope). Hisako Arato, however, stands guard over Erina, protecting her from Nao, first by having won a cooking battle in middle school that placed a permanent restraining order on Nao (thus, her creepy stalker antics) and now by countering Nao’s cooking with her own specialty: medicinal cuisine. Her cooking has such a healthful effect, it even cures Nao’s dark side (temporarily), turning Nao into…a really attractive cute girl.
Not all of the choices here used to explain or expand upon the cooking prowess of the major named characters works. Some, like the revelation that Zenji Marui, the much put-upon weakling of Polaris Dorm who is often forced to host parties in his room against his will, is actually a highly knowledgeable chef who employs the full range of classic food writing to improve his dishes, work fairly well. Other events, like the frankly effortless, and therefore to some extent meaningless, victory of Alice Nakiri, do little much of anything except establish that Alice will be a major challenge for Soma in the future. I happen to like Alice as a character, but the tactic of having a group of recognized gourmands rendered speechless by her molecular gastronomy makes her victory seem more like magic—or handwaving—than a triumph of scientific food preparation. It’s like a shortcut because it makes the author seem too lazy to explain why molecular gastronomy can actually work in the real world.
While the individual battles vary in their effects (Megumi’s is, naturally, heartwarming, while Ryo Kurokiba’s displays his split-personality), the chapters here serve their basic purpose in getting us from Point A (start of the preliminaries) to Point A.5 on the way to Point B (the big finale). In many ways, this material works much better in print than it does in animated form, since the pace at which one reads it can be varied (skipping the boring, plodding parts and savoring the more tasty morsels), something you cannot do when someone else determines the flow of events.
Kudos to Shun Saeki’s artistry here, though. While he has a fairly simple and accessible style, there is still so much detail provided in terms of textures and forms: look at the series of panels from pp. 37-44 in Chapter 50, which shows Megumi’s carefully orchestrated removal of the monkfish parts for cooking. Though all still panels filled with speed lines to denote action, examine the surfaces, shading and level of draftsmanship. In the limited space available and on the hard-pressed schedule that manga is usually created at, this is quite good artwork in its level of detail and attention to form.
The preliminary round continues as we come to the main course: the big showdown between the main character and the spice expert.
In Summary:
It’s difficult to handle such a large cast, attempting to give each of the named characters their due in the midst of a large tournament battle. The installments in this volume do that about as well as can be expected, moving the spotlight from one character to the next without losing the reader in a maze or ignoring anyone’s fan favorite among the large cast. Not every choice in terms of emphasis or treatment of a particular chef’s specialities works perfectly, but the task of carrying us through most of the preliminary round so that we can devote all of our attention to the battle between Soma and his latest major opponent in the next volume is accomplished well enough.
Content Grade: B+
Art Grade: A-
Package Rating: A-
Text/Translation: A-
Age Rating: Teen+ (16+)
Released By:Viz Media
Release Date: August 11th, 2015
MSRP: $9.99
