Monkey Turn

STORY

Kyotei is the motorboat race, which is one of the public gambling authorized in
Japan.
Similar to horserace, but motorboat does the race instead.
The main character, Kenji Hatano comes to a racetrack taken by his teacher at high school after losing summer Koushien (high school baseball tournament in Japan) preliminary contest.
Impressed by the splendid and high-skilled technique ‘Monkey Turn’, rotating motorboat on the water with full speed, Kenji decides to be a professional racer.
As committed to baseball, he puts the energy to study, and uses his talented sports ability to enter a training school.
As a result, he passes the test.
Through meeting several rivals there and racing with them, Kenji makes efforts for becoming the best racer in Japan.

(Katsutoshi Kawai/1996-2005/30 books/Shogakukan)

COMMENT by Shun

The story begins the scene that Kenji gives up his dream, becoming a baseball player, because of his small height, and decides to be a professional motorboat racer.
As an authentic sport cartoon, this story is as fun as a Judo cartoon ‘Obi wo Gyuttone!’ written by the same cartoonist.
Besides, this cartoon focus on Kyotei itself.
When you first read this, you may have a question of “how to be a professional motorboat racer?”, then you will find about the training school.
“What do they learn at the school?”
Or, “what decides winning and losing?”
Such queries come into your head one after another, and then those will be all solved in the comics.
You can have fun this comic as such textbook.
One regrettable point about this cartoon is that Kyotei is difficult to make one ‘strongest character’.
For example, boxing cartoon is easy to create a ‘the strongest champion’ in the cartoon because such champions do exist for real.
In Kyotei, however, they do not exist.
In the motorboat race world, even the strongest player holds only 10% winning rate, so it is not unnatural that the main character loses frequently.
As a result, I personally feel this cartoon becomes boring from the scene Kenji has won some prizes, because I can’t image Kenji grows up more.

Shun's Score 7