Narrator Disclaimer: Baki The Grappler is not intended to illustrate martial arts in any meaningfully realistic way. Check with your doctor before continuing physical activity with broken bones and ruptured limbs.

Baki The Grappler is a primer in unrealistic bloodsports. It's both amazing and awful at the same time. One cannot stop reading even when it becomes obvious that this grotesque, unreal skill that has defeated the previous fighter will now be deployed on Baki. And when it has been, Baki will continue to fight somehow, arms and legs ripped apart, blood everywhere. It's great if you like bloodsports. If you don't, seriously avoid this manga because there is a lot of blood and mangling of bodies. To a hilarious degree. When these supposedly young and healthy bodies are broken in ways that humans simply do not heal from, for them to just get up and keep going is exactly that level of horrible that we're going to laugh at.

In Volume 7, Baki finally finds the courage (is it courage, really?) to throw himself off a dangerous cliff and fight the Great Yasha Ape. As I read this “battle,” I was constantly reminded of a Gizmodo article about how Americans vastly overestimated their ability to fight wild animals and why they are wrong. A giant ape of that size would simply rip Baki to pieces, the end. Not here, of course! Baki and the Ape come to an understanding. Baki does the Ape a solid, a turn of fate that will end in unexpected tragedy later.

Then the story shifts into an arc which is not at all complicated, but does beg the question “what the actual fuck?” A Yakuza family's second head—their 15-year-old son, who stands a whole person over Baki's 13-year-old head— and Baki are on a collision course in a brutal battle that will spill so much blood that even in this manga, where everyone appears to be weirdly bloodthirsty, someone will barf.

Baki and Hanazawa are absurd, both separately and together. If Baki is, say, 5'4”, 0 body fat, absurdly cut, Hanazawa stands almost twice his height, twice his breadth. Both are covered with scars. Hanazawa sports a Yakuza tattoo that has its own backstory (This is a pun. The tattoo is on Hanazawa's back.) Hanazawa's gross fuck up your opponent technique renders body parts into chopped meat, but are we for one second worried? Of course not. It doesn't matter who wins, because this monstrous 15-year-old, who snaps glass bottles open by ripping the necks off (we do not recommend this method), is not Baki's true opponent.

We are reminded constantly that Baki's goal and inevitable final boss is his father, Yujiro, the strongest fighter and an obviously psychotic human being. Yujiro sets Baki up over and over in this volume, and it is very clear that he's just like that. He walks into a room, kills the mood and probably the host, fucks up everyone's lives and leaves on to the next round of casual destruction, smiling like he's done something good. Yujiro is a godawful person. It's no wonder that Baki is obsessed with fighting, with punishing his and other people's bodies to the point of breaking.

This behavior is cemented when we get a surprising backstory arc about Baki's mother. When we first met her, you may remember, she was sitting spread-legged in front of an enormous mirror; she was as instantly bizarre as Baki's father, but in Volume 8, we learn how Yujiro stole Emi Akezawa, wife of a rich and influential man, who is so important that he knows Nick Jagger and Sylvester Starlone! Yujiro and Emi lock eyes; the relationship is instantly weird in every way. Emi is physically grabbed by Yujiro from her home, and I guess, lives happily ever after? Yujiro questions whether Emi was a suitable birth mother for his weak son, but ultimately decides that Baki's weakness is not her fault. Let me remind you once again, as the manga itself does regularly, that Baki is 13 years old. Yujiro's goal appears to be to raise a son who can kill him, which is just plain bad parenting.

Absolutely nothing about this series isn't wonderful and ridiculous. The art is so obsessed with musculature that it's sometimes hard to parse what body part we're looking at. The characters are far beyond pastiche into ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ territory. When you pick up a volume of Baki, you sign on the dotted line to not care if things make sense. That said, this continues to be an outstanding localization. David Evelyn is having a blast translating it, you can tell. Every page is crisp and clear; the letter by Rafael Zaiats is excellent. The team at Kodama is enjoying the heck out of localizing this book, and it is the very least we can do to enjoy it as much as they are. I know that I am enjoying it immensely. Crazy fighting, horrible people, tons of blood, guts, and tears. Grab me a bag of potato chips, and this is a perfect afternoon on the sofa to read about people working way harder at something than I ever will.