軍鶏

SHAMO

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
34
RELEASE
January 13, 2015
CHAPTERS
338

DESCRIPTION

At the age of sixteen Ryo Narushima was a genius and looked to have no trouble of getting into Tokyo University and joining the elite of society. However, that summer something cracked inside Ryo's head. With a small knife he brutally murdered both of his parents only leaving his sister alive and cowering in a corner. It is at this grotesque incident that our story begins.

Note: At volume 20, the series changed publishers, which created a restart of the chapter numbers. Starting from chapter 61 in volume 26, the first chapter from when the series returned from a long hiatus, the series has been completely written & drawn by Tanaka Akio. While Hashimoto Izou did write the series in the beginning, he had been doing less and less work starting from volume 4. Tanaka and Hashimoto reached a settlement and Shamo continued.

CAST

Ryou Narushima
Toma Takahara
Naoto Sugawara
Kenji Kurokawa
Sun Wukong
Yamazaki
Kouhei Fujiyoshi
First
Sakiko Wakui
Natsumi Narushima
Shizuka Uesugi
Resshin Daitou
Gosaku Tengenji
Third
Rangah Gesmurit
Moemi Funato
Second
Roushi
Fourth
Makoto Kunou
Dobu-Gumi
Yàn
Daigo Yoshioka
Valery Ilyuchin
Fabio Marcos Sanshiro

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

Terajima
72/100
Dark and gritty story with one of the best approaches to fight sports in manga.
Really gritty story about a top student called Ryo Narushima who is preparing for entering in the best university of Japan, but during that preparation he explodes due to that pressure and kills his parents.

When he enters in the juvenile centre, he is the perfect prey, extremely weak, without knowledge of that world and kind of people nor how to behave, and with a crime that is not seen in a good way by the guys he will share the next years of his life.

Shamo is the best definition of kill or be killed, the survival of the fittest. After entering he already knows that this will be a nightmare. He made a friend there who could buy him some time to decide what to do, but the best option he thinks of is suiciding since his destiny is to be raped constantly.

A Karate trainer called Kenji Kurokawa comes to give the guys some classes, that trainer is on life sentence and is also like an outcast inside Karate due to his oldschool approach towards it, not like a competition of points, katas and movements but as a way to fight, just as what it was created for, a way for regular people to defend against samurai in the past.

Ryo sees this as his only opportunity to survive, to learn karate as his way to really defend himself, not to learn a fancy choreography. Kurokawa sees in Ryo someone who is in line with his view of Karate, who is in a life-or-death situation and decides he is the perfect student he was looking for. This could be defined as a darkest version of Ashita no Joe story in the juvenile with Rikishi, his trainer and how he learned boxing there.

After training night and day under Kurokawa, Ryo began to see some progress since it’s the only thing he cares in life and can make him survive. After being raped, one day he bited the dick of a guy thinking he is already somewhat prepared to face them, and here began his downfall as being a really dangerous guy who will become a demon who behaves like a human gamecock (the meaning of Shamo).

In the street he can’t go through a regular path since his name will always be associated with that hideous crime he committed back then, so he tries to survive on the undercover at anything that arises, mainly as a male prostitute. He finds that his sister who he left alive that day ended being a prostitute like him after losing everything and her mental equilibrium due to what his brother did.

After some time and facing many drug problems and mental issues he starts to work under some people related to night business having a lot of street fights that make him have a fighting style even more brutal than before, only focused on damaging the other, not to look good. But one night he is destroyed by a guy who does Muay Thai and competes in a tournament called Lethal Fight really similar to what was Japan K1 (and whoever is familiar with the story of K1 will knew about the relation it had with yakuzas, money laundry and shady business that ended finishing it even if it was extremely successful, much better than UFC, those were the times with Masato, Buakaw and so).

Ryo decides to “upgrade” his fighting and compete there, to live like Naoto Sugawara, the superstar of the tournament who without them even knowing each other Ryo has decided due to his mental issues that will be his enemy in life (like David Chapman with Lennon) and is going to do anything to live like him, cash, luxury and sexy woman that are not those grannies that pay him for a night. An obsession that will make him learn every style of fighting, taking steroids as crazy that make him even more unstable and driven by outbursts to be able to catch the attention of Sugawara and the tournament.

Even if it looks like I spoiled the whole story this could be the presentation of everything. Here starts the path of Ryo and the confronting of good and bad, the virtuous Sugawara and the crooked Narushima, and how those limits under lace.

Shamo is a work of fiction, that’s clear, but it’s rooted on reality, this is not about some particular events that may look exaggerated in real life but about the “air” the story has.
That air and feeling is closer to how that shady part of the world really is than the vast majority of approaches to it by cinema, literature, manga and anime (Yamikin Ushijima-kun is an even better depiction of that, and the only other manga in that line that I know).

This is not another of those manga about juvenile delincuents that are just soft little kids with whatever hairstyle, smoking, skipping classes and doing some robberies and drugs, but about a crazy motherfucker like Narushima who lives in a mental war and the people he hang with that those “juvenile delincuents” fear. Because those are the ones who can fade the bubble they live in and the character they created will drop, since at the end they really don't know what that life is all about except of liking the feeling of being seen as thugs, but without the balls, entourage and life experiences to sustain that act.

And here comes the worst part of Shamo where everyone agrees. This manga has one of the worst endings or final parts ever made. It seems that both authors had a lot of disagreements and Izo Hashimoto abandoned this project. I don’t know if Hashimoto was the master mind here since it seems he wasn’t too involved in this before. Also, when Shamo resumed instead of following the prior events Tanaka decided to make a really weird story about Ryo going to the mountains to learn kung fu in a monastery that looked like a Jean Claude Van Damme movie that really lost its touch with reality and also on depiction of combat sports, introducing ki, chackras and many nonsense plots that were really far of the real spirit of Shamo.

If this didn’t ended like that, I would rate Shamo with a solid 9, but it ends so bad that it’s really difficult to don’t be affected by it. Even so I recommend it to whoever is interested in an intense, exciting and dark story with some of the best fights ever, and touches of really sad and moving moments of cruel poetry.
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KuroGFX
100/100
Shamo - The Inner Shadow
__
Shamo
__ The primary focus of Shamo is about a sixteen-year-old Ryu Narushima a genius from a well off family his father an elite bank clerk about to join the elite of Japan’s society after being accepted to go to Todai (The University of Tokyo) considered to be the most selective and prestigious university in Japan Before he actually goes on to attend the university he begins to crack mentally from the strain and goes on a rampage killing his parents with a switchblade knife slashing their bodies brutally. He gets sent to a juvenile reformatory and this is where the story begins as we see him shift over the course of the story into a destructive and aggressive and twisted person in order to protect himself from the people out to get him in the world. --- __
American Psycho and the Shadow Self
__ If you’ve ever seen the 2000 cult classic American Psycho which was a satirical depiction of 1980’s yuppie culture and moral and inner personal decay the characters in the film the businessmen who all contained an egocentric narcissism to their personas every yuppie businessman in the film acts exactly the same, talks exactly the same, and are as shallow as everyone else. The main character Patrick Bateman blends into this community of people morphing himself into one of them in appearance, form, and mannerisms but the result of this is that his inner self becomes suffocated in his attempt to as he puts it “fit in” we see this demonstrated in the earlier portion of the film as he literally applies conditioners and different beauty products which he eventually peels off symbolizing the persona or social mask he puts on. The desire to please others around us can lead to other parts of ourselves feeling suppressed with only the acceptable aspects being focused on while the other aspects we believe to be negative. A negative aspect of this is that when we suppress these characteristics they still are present and we also feel the need to express these aspects of ourselves. In the movie, this is seen through Bateman’s killings. “Where there is much light, the shadow is deep”. How the f does this relate to Shamo well Ryu has essentially been shaped and molded by his parents his natural traits are critiqued and chastised even to the point where he wasn’t allowed to write with his dominant hand but rather was forced to write with his right. The negative feedback from his family and the fact that he had to adapt to an environment which slowly chipped away his real personality suffocating it and as Ryu puts it _“I didn’t have a choice. I was MollyCoddled, Chocked, and Mom & Dad were destroying my personality”_ --- a particular theme we see presented in Shamo is the theme of doing whatever it takes to survive and we see this shown in the fighting style he adopts in series as he uses moves that most would call dishonorable which Ryu uses these actions as a way to defend himself or acquire what he wants. he provokes his opponents into rage or blackmails them and takes advantage in his own words he tells himself to be "pitiless that way he won't ever come against you again" one of the aspects of Shamo is being able to see how Ryu's style of fighting and in life affects and destroys other people's lives he touches as it's his destructive need to win that poisons and ruins other people. --- Shamo’s story is of delinquency falling more and more into despicable and vile acts pushes the story forward and while Ryu inevitably does more and more reprehensible and evil acts it manages to keep you hooked we've seen how Ryu got to the place he is and while it doesn't condone his actions it makes desperate to see how far he falls
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