Shamo

This manga is about martial arts not as a sport but as a tool to survive and kill. In order to survive a cruel prison environment the MC becomes a truly ruthless fighter who makes enemies of everyone and lives only to fight.

Started reading the manga Shamo. I like it so far, few volumes in, although I expect it will get worse or boring. I don’t mind it so much that the MC is a piece of shit psychopath, I think it makes the fighting more real. I can’t usually get into martial arts manga (or any sports), and I would find something “spiritual” like Vagabond boring, except that one is a masterpiece because of the author.

A guy is running a bar with outrageous prices for drinks revealed when the customer is trying to leave. If he refuses to pay, he’ll beat them up because actually he happens to be an expert street fighter and that’s his whole business model.

MC goes to an island to do solitary practice for a karate tournament, brings a whore with him. Every day it’s training from hell with spartan diet, and then fucking the woman for the whole night. By the end of the trip she’s going crazy and tries to kill him in his sleep, but he is instead delighted that he is able to sense the danger even while asleep. She comes out alive too, he’s not a savage you know.

Hah, they assemble a “team” in vol 6, pretty cool. And the MC is starting to remind me of Kokou no Hito’s and Vagabond’s. Not like they were saints either.

Ugh, pretty gross bed time reading though.

Finished reading. Of course I could see the MC’s fate coming, but damn the “girl friend” he made in the end was so best that it feels very sad. I think the ending would have been better left ambiguous. He spends the whole series fucking women, sometimes hot, sometimes ugly. Sometimes paying for it, sometimes getting paid for it. So the relationships with girls that don’t involve even kisses seem somehow so intimate.

In the end, I guess I liked the series. I felt it had a consistent morale, something like “the bad guy always wins, but in the end all wins are hollow”. So in that world it’s not a smart move to be a hero because you will lose, but the bad guys won’t win either in the end. The only winning move is to not fight. And with all the blood and gore in the manga, I for sure am yearning to read something less violent next.