I’ve just put the finishing touches on this week’s Flipped, with cooking manga in the spotlight, and I was hoping to be able to wedge Yu Yagami’s Hikkatsu! Strike a Blow to Vivify (Go! Comi) into the mix. Alas, in spite of the protagonist’s dedication to violent appliance repair, he doesn’t give so much as a hostile look to a microwave, much less roundhouse-kick a convection oven into compliance.
Yes, the protagonist, Shota, uses karate to repair broken appliances, or at least he hopes to. For the most part, his efforts just guarantee that the appliances will never work again. It’s amusingly ridiculous, if not ridiculously amusing.
Shota’s quest is based in a misunderstanding. During a scolding, his sensei insisted Shota use karate only to help, and the logic of a six-year-old took it from there. After a decade of training atop Mt. Fuji, he re-enters the world with an equally bizarre paramour at his side. (Momoko is a spirited young woman who was raised by pigeons, and she’s completely undeterred by the fact that Shota seems only marginally aware of her presence.) A trio forms when Shota and Momoko run into a crook named Kanji who makes a living selling a variety of dodgy merchandise.
Fortunately, Yagami has a better success rate with the jokes than Shota does with his work-in-progress repair strike. They don’t all work, but some are genuinely hilarious, and the series is good-natured overall. The art is a lot of fun, all gangly figures and loopy action sequences. It’s Go! Comi, so you know the production values and translation are of high quality.
If I was going to unreservedly recommend an absurdly funny action series, it would probably be Hideaki Sorachi’s Gin Tama (Viz). But Hikkatsu! makes a solid, second-place showing.
(Review based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)
