By Masahiro Totsuka and Aguri Igarashi
Yen Press, 226 pp.
Rating: Older Teen

Bamboo Blade is all about a high school kendo club. It’s a scoop of kendo instruction, a light swirl of plot, and a saccharine-sweet coating of cheap predictability.

Kojiro Ishida is the sponsor of his school’s kendo team. He’s not exactly well-off and his team isn’t much to brag about, either. When another kendo coach wagers a year’s supply of free sushi on a match between two all-girl teams, Ishida leaps at the chance to have a steady supply of food. The only real problem is that he lacks a complete, dependable team. After a flurry of recruiting (some of it by pure coincidence), Ishida winds up with a four-girl roster and a much better chance of earning some sustenance.

If you are looking for plot—as of volume two—that’s all you get. Some people may classify the manga as a lighthearted romp. I’m going to label it as mostly fluff.

I’d say that Bamboo Blade’s most glaring flaw has to do with the fact that every character operates with a single personality quirk… ad nauseum. Kirino? She’s chipper even though she’s always underappreciated. Tama? She’s quiet, though the most skilled member of the team. Sayako? She’s obsessed with being a writer… no, a guitarist… no, a writer again… and then she pedals off furiously on her bike, ready to become the best she can be. Miya-Miya? She acts coy around her boyfriend and then transforms into a cigarette-smoking sadist. In any given situation, you can accurately predict exactly what every character is going to do, every time. This super-heavy dependence on telegraphed punchlines keeps me from being drawn in to the manga. Instead of making the characters appealing, it makes them annoying.

Sadly, this second volume never really steps up to deliver any standout moments in terms of plot advancement or character development. The entire volume is dedicated to Kojiro’s dysfunctional team prepping for an informal match against his rival’s squad. The rival high school team also sports team members with a solitary, defining quirk. It is way too much of the same thing, which is especially deadly since it fails to be appealing the first time around.

I did like the parts where the manga became a kendo tutorial. From a technical standpoint, it appears that someone on the writing team really knows his kendo. If you have absolutely no background knowledge of the art (like me), you’ll be walked through a few basic principles that help to make the fights far more enjoyable to read. Compared to the loose plot of the manga, the sections covering stepping techniques, scoring rules, and etiquette are far and away the most fascinating sequences.

The strange thing is that Bamboo Blade has all of the basics covered. It sports a wide ensemble of characters, a coherent plot, and fairly steady pacing. The artwork is clean and the fights are easy to follow. Somehow, even with all of these elements working in its favor, Bamboo Blade never adds up to anything better than average.

Volume two of Bamboo Blade will be available on September 30, 2009.