The Spring 2025 Manga Guide

Martial Master Asumi

What's It About? 

Nito is living a quiet high school life while taking care of his disabled grandpa, but thanks to an encounter with a schoolmate striving to be a professional female MMA fighter, his life is about to flip. Sometimes, you just have to fight! This serious MMA story is an all-out battle!

Martial Master Asumi has a story and art by Kawada, with English translation by Nova Skipper. This volume is lettered by Phil Christie. Published by Viz Media's Shonen Jump (April 22, 2025). Rated T.

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris
Rating:

I enjoy sports manga as much as anybody else. I'm not knowledgeable about the combat sports that Martial Master Asumi is based in, but fortunately, this is one of those series that's happy to lay out the finer technical details in ways that are engaging and flow with the story. Even if it didn't do that well, this manga still scored a TKO on me early with its female lead, Nao Okiba. She's got fangs, wears glasses and spats, and she's a weird freak about all things fighting and mixed martial arts. The titular Nito Asumi falls in love with her pretty much at first sight, which helps to cement him as a good protagonist because he's got friggin' taste.

Anyway, apparently Martial Master Asumi was canceled in its original run after just 32 chapters because this world cannot abide us having nice things.

Even apart from the advantage of having a character seemingly created in a lab to be my newest Best Girl, I think Asumi is going to be worth following to see wherever it ends up over its short run. It comes out swinging at the start, as Kawada has a really strong handle on the timing of setting up details for twists to pay off effectively later. The pacing of the reveal of Nito's martial arts skills and his specific style and ability in using them feels natural in a way that many secret surprise prodigies in sports manga don't always make work. Nito himself has a really strong voice and personality that comes through in the way his narration often trails off, or his reflexive habit of trying to de-escalate situations. There's a feel to this manga.

Of course, the other feeling about it is the one of hands upside someone's head. Martial Master Asumi is unflinching in its portrayal of the pain in the sport that Nito is at first so insistent on avoiding. So many of the hits in this manga look like they have weight, embracing the inherent brutality of MMA fighting. Not only does it look good, it communicates the points of the story: whether it's making clear that people like Nao and Nito have to be some degree of freaks to be into this as "fun" or showcasing the raw, personal anger that comes through in Nito's fight with his brother at the end of this volume, there's dimensionality to it. It makes it feel more real when the story is backed by subjects like a family hit hard by a member's death, and also needing to take care of an elderly relative suffering from dementia. With all that, it's a mean feat that Martial Master Asumi still feels like a "fun" manga, but maybe that just marks me as its particular kind of freak. This manga knew what it was doing with that Nao girl, after all.

MrAJCosplay
Rating:

This is probably one of the most satisfying single-volume experiences I have had in this entire manga guide. Granted, when you have a shounen series focusing on things like real-world martial arts, you're selling blood to a vampire, considering that one of my favorite manga of all time is Hajime no Ippo. However, while there can be some similarities here if you just replace boxing with MMA fighting, I would argue the setup here is far more emotionally involved compared to that series. We have a young boy who is above average at fighting, but psychologically has a very distant relationship with martial arts. Other people come up with reasons and excuses for him to get into fighting, but the reasons why he doesn't want to do so stem from some very relatable family drama.

By the time the volume ends, we have our overall setup and main goal established. But I was surprised by just how sad the end of this volume left me. I felt for almost everybody involved, including the main antagonist. While his actions are deplorable, you at least see how he ended up on the twisted path that he did. The panel layouts for the action are also incredibly dynamic, allowing you to feel the flow between all of the characters' movements. There's nothing too exaggerated here, but the artwork keeps a lot of the fight scenes engaging, and you can tell that the creator had an appreciation for the world of MMA fighting. If you're into the shounen martial arts stories, this ticks all the boxes, and I will certainly be checking out more of this series in the future.