Things are coming to a head in the battle for the soul of Totsuki. Azami and his lackeys plan to crush the Resistance at the final Advancement Exams site on Rebun Island. Soma, Erina, Megumi, and Takumi stand ready to risk all for their friends. Whose cuisine will reign supreme? Settle in, this looks like it will take a while.
Creative Staff:
Story: Yuto Tsukuda
Art: Shun Saeki
Contributor: Yuki Morisaki
Translation: Adrienne Beck
Production: James Gaubatz, Mara Coman (Touch up art and lettering), Alice Lewis (design), Jennifer LeBlanc (editor)
What They Say:
In order to overturn their classmates’ expulsions from Totsuki, Soma, Takumi and Megumi challenge Central to a team shokugeki! The big showdown is to take place at the final stage for the advancement exams—Rebun Island. Soma’s team undergoes teamwork training with Gin and Joichiro. But can these Totsuki alums improve the first-years enough as chefs to bring down the best Totsuki has to offer?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While Soma might be the title character, Food Wars has in many ways been as much Erina’s story as Soma’s story. Soma’s story has always been rather straightforward, almost to the point of cliche: he wants to become the best chef there is with the ultimate goal of defeating his father in a cooking battle, something he has been trying—and failing—to do since elementary school. It is nothing more than your classic “Wanna be the strongest” shounen journey, common to the point of being ripe for parody (and I’m sure there are parodies, though I can’t think of one at the moment; there are still far too many sincere executions of the premise). Soma’s progress on his journey has been constant from the very first day we meet him, though it has also been mostly incremental, to the point that it’s only when his progress is pointed out by others (and once, in the Stagiaire, by himself) that we even see how far he has come.
Erina’s arc of development, on the other hand, has been more sudden. It was inevitable, of course. There was no way that she was going to remain a shallow antagonist, always angry and disgusted at the title character, for the entire course of the run. We knew there was more to come. She had all of the usual hallmarks of an ice queen who was going to be thawed out at some point. But it took some time before Yuto Tsukuda decided to set the wheels of her character development into motion. Certainly, there were subtle hints and signs in the early stages (her reaction to Soma’s survival of the Training Camp and his progress through the Autumn Elections). Yet things really started into motion with the appearance of her father Azami and her decision to run away from home into the warm embrace of the Polaris Dorm.
This volume marks what could well be the climax of her character development arc. No, it does not consist of her falling in love with the protagonist—Tsukuda is thoughtful enough not to trot out so tired a device as that. (Are romantic feelings in play at all? They could well be…but nothing is clear at this point). We can joke at times about “Soma’s harem,” all of the female students who were initially wary and even outright hostile towards him (starting with Megumi, continuing through Ikumi, Alice, and Hisako) who have instead turned into his greatest fans (with only Ikumi so far having been shown to harbor strong romantic feelings towards him, even if she’s still doing the tsundere dance for us whenever those feelings come to the surface), but Erina is not a sudden convert either. Erina’s feelings have indeed softened towards Soma, partially because of the influence of others, especially Hisako and perhaps a bit from Megumi, but largely from the revelation that Soma is the son of the chef Erina respects the most, Joichiro. But she remains very much her own force of nature, not another character drawn into the protagonist’s orbit.
She has gained from her new appreciation of Soma, however, Erina has been a prisoner of her own gift, the Divine Tongue, and all of the responsibility that comes with it. The only brief respites have been her encounters with “Yukihira” cooking, an approach so free of the binding constraints of tradition and the usual expectations that they provide a reprieve, however fleeting, from the constant life of tasting disappointment she has experienced before. And this has set the stage for the events of this volume.
For here, we get the real climax of her development: Erina finally breaks free from the straightjacket of expectations tied to duty, duty to her family and especially duty to her father. Despite everything that Azami put her through, Erina is still beholden to her daddy dearest. Breaking free of his malign grasp is the greatest change that she can achieve. It’s not just her being obedient to the point of subservience in his presence. It’s her being still under the spell of there being only one “right” way to cook, the essence of her father’s “philosophy,” if we want to call it that. How can she break out of her prison?
Yes, I’m spending a lot of time on Erina when it’s really Soma and friends who are in a pinch. Only Soma, Takumi, and Megumi remain of the Resistance as everyone else was taken down by the Elite Ten. They’ve now placed the ultimate long-shot wager with Azami: a Team Shokugeki with Joichiro’s freedom on the line in addition to the expulsions of all of their friends. So, they’re going to need work. They’re not alone though. Gin Dojima and Joichiro are on hand to help while Senzaemon is present to provide some emotional support for Erina, who’s still conflicted between her desire to help her new friends and the mental lock her father has on her. What is needed before the final showdown is more training. With Joichiro, of course, things go a bit off script and he and Gin fight over how to train the kids, resulting in their deciding to hold a cooking battle between the two of them right there on the train Moon’s Shadow. Senzaemon steps in to arrange affairs and breaks them into two groups: Team Dojima (Gin, Megumi, Takumi) and Team Yukihira (Joichirou, Soma, and Erina). They are going to make hachis parmentier, a classic French dish that normally requires quite a bit of prep work, though Senzaemon has only given them 50 minutes—and ordered that the teams must work in silence. This is a test of their ability to work as teams without the benefit of the head chefs explaining what they are doing.
It turns out as you might expect: Takumi and Megumi catch onto Gin’s improvisations (neither he nor Joichiro plan to make a boring old normal version of the dish—they are creating new riffs on the recipe such as you might find in a high-level restaurant that has a talented and creative chef); Joichirou, on the other hand, leaves Soma and Erina staring at him quizzically as they have no idea what he’s up to. It takes some time, but Soma finally decides to jump in and matches his father in not following any traditional recipe. This leaves Erina in a strange spot, but we’ve seen this kind of development before—when Soma was in the Stagiaire and realized that he had to go beyond what he had been doing up to this point if he was ever going to move forward. Erina finally takes her first step forward out of the comfort zone of orthodoxy and her father’s “right way” of cooking. She joins in the weird improvisational dance that the Yukihiras do with food.
The real goal of the training, of course, Senzaemon’s plan all along was just this: to get Erina to take her first baby steps out of her cocoon of haute cuisine. (By the way, pay attention to the final page afterward pictures for Chapters 202, 203, and 204. They make the point more directly about Erina’s forward movement). It sets the stage for the next major step—a reckoning with her father. For the central event of this volume takes place in the final meeting between the Resisters and Azami (with several of the Ten present) to decide on the terms of the Team Shokugeki. Here, Azami demands that Erina return to her “rightful” place at his side…and Erina flatly refuses. It’s not a sheepish Erina, no, this is the proud and haughty Erina that we knew from the very start, but now she stakes her pride on her being loyal to her friends, not to blind obedience to her father. She throws away the Tenth Seat and risks her future freedom in order to save the careers (recall, there aren’t really any actual “lives” at stake, just the futures at Totsuki of almost everyone at the Polaris Dorm) of her friends.
From there, we move quickly (very quickly; our two rest stops are a brief remembrance of Gin Dojima and the cycle of helping one another through the generations and a brief interlude where Alice Nakiri is our guide to the defeated Resisters making their trip to Rebun Island, being permitted this privilege because of Alice’s hissy fit) to Rebun Island. There, the Régiment de Cuisine begins. The eight members of the Council of Ten stand against the eight members of the Resistance. Eight members? Of course, you didn’t think that reinforcements wouldn’t be coming to face off against Azami? There is no need to guess who they are, as the cover for this volume spoils any surprise. More impressive is the two-page spread on pp. 140-141, which showcases the team.
The first bout is a 3-on-3 match where Soma is pitted against Nene Kinokuni, the soba specialist. As Soma’s usual luck has it…the theme he picks “at random” is…soba. But we know that that doesn’t mean anything to Soma. He gets more excited the higher the mountain he needs to climb. It’s going to be a big one this time.
We are probably at the start of a rather long road. I don’t see the Team Shokugeki ending quickly. There are many rounds to see, many dishes to taste and many foodgasms to gaze at ahead of us. Will Tsukuda be able to hold our attention throughout the long battle? That is an interesting question. It’s not all just watching people cook though. Tsukuda has taken the time to look deeper into the backgrounds of all the participants, here providing us much more about Nene than we had seen previously to this point. Before, we most had a standard stereotype: the class rep. Glasses. Efficient manner. Curt speech. Concern for the rules. A pretty standard type of the class rep character. Now, we see the fuller picture. If we get the full backgrounds for all of the chefs, there should be plenty of ways to keep us from getting bored by watching and reading about cooking steps.
In Summary:
Having staked everything on a mad gamble—fighting against the Council of Ten for control of Totsuki in a Régiment de Cuisine, a Team Shokugeki—the personal stakes are raised higher for Erina, who now throws in her lot with the Resistance, in complete defiance of her father. It was about time. This volume marks the high point of Erina’s evolution over the past several story arcs. But we have little time to linger over that as the battle for Totsuki is now on.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: A-
Package Rating: B+
Text/Translation: A-
Age Rating: Teen+ (16+)
Released By:Viz Media
Release Date: June 5th, 2018
MSRP: $9.99
