Manga Review: F-Ken
After trying a small number of one-shots to make into articles for this website, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I ran into one that finally kinda turned me off. The one to score that first point turns out to be F-Ken, a manga by Assassination Classroom-author Yusei Matsui. I'm afraid I don't know a lot about that more-famous title, aside from occasionally glancing at a few episodes of its anime adaptation, but aside from that, I'm actually pretty unfamiliar with Matsui's work. I have no idea whether or not F-Ken is anything tonally like Assassination Classroom, but I sincerely hope that it isn't.
Written in 2019, the plot of F-Ken revolves around a high school kendo team. They love doing kendo, but by their own admission, they aren't actually very good at it. That is, until a pretty and popular girl shows up and calls herself the manager of the club. I have looked through the pages of this one-shot a few times now and am not sure I have figured out what her name is supposed to be. It's possible I've just overlooked it, but even through searching around a bit online, I can't seem to figure it out. There's one small translator's note under a panel that seems to suggest she's been carrying a notebook with the name Asami written on it, but it's so small and has essentially no attention drawn to it that even then I'm not really sure that's her name. For all I know, that could be someone else's notebook, or a book authored by a different person. Frankly, we may as well just call her Manager for the sake of this article.
Anyway, so the manager girl shows up after having read some books about kendo, never having trained in it herself, believing that she knows how to save the club. And the way to do this, she has decided, is by identifying the individual fetishes of each member of the kendo club, letting them get fixated on that fetish with her, then withholding that fetish from them to allow them to get into a heated frenzy right before a kendo match, focused specifically on the body part they've been worked up over fetishizing, increasing their chances of landing hits to that same part of the body on their opponent and scoring a point to win their match. It is both as weird and uncomfortable as it probably sounds.
For what it's worth, the good news is that we don't see any gratuitous shots of T&A in this manga. And thank God, because these are high school kids and I am 39 years old. And thankfully, everybody in this manga getting all worked up over this girl at least seems to be age-appropriate. It's still kinda weird to be an adult and watching as teenage boys absolutely lose their shit over a classmate. We watch as dudes get riled up over the girl's neckline, waistline, and wrists, all sweating with bulging eyes and lashing tongues. Some panels are teasing their crazed horniness just enough that you could swear it was going to turn into a hentai at any given moment, and somehow it just barely manages to avoid it.
One member of the club, however—Fuji—thankfully has his head on straight and hasn't fallen for any of this nonsense. In fact, he's kinda mad about the whole thing and thinks that, even if his club is suddenly now winning matches, they aren't winning them the right way. I'm not a big fan of how he and other minor characters belittle her and seem to classify her as hating and belittling all men, though. This carries over into a scene in the back half of the chapter where another girl gets a boy classmate to snatch the Manager and threaten to beat her up for stealing her boyfriend. In fact, the male classmate does in fact pull out a kendo stick of his own and smacks her in the stomach with it, which sends alarm bells ringing in my head. I get that this guy's supposed to be unlikable, but still, that feels really unnecessary.
Thankfully, despite Fuji's reservations about his new manager, her personality, and the methods by which she is having them win matches, he still feels a righteous anger about watching a guy beat the shit out of a girl and does the right thing in protecting her anyway, putting himself in a fighting stance that scares off his asshole opponent.
It becomes apparent near the end that maybe the Manager is doing this whole sexy fetish angle for the kendo club because it's one way she feels like she can actually be useful to people, possibly because she's never been anything other than eye candy to everybody at school and wants to be something more now. It's a shame we don't linger on that any longer than maybe just a sentence or two. Anyway, we have to prepare for an entire kendo tournament, and maybe this time they'll actually win.
Uh, this sucks, I hate this.
Like, it's barely even ecchi, and instead is just full of gross dudes. Even if the Manager girl talks kinda sexy, she's actually not doing anything tremendously tantalizing or dressing in anything intended to rile up her audience. It's just dudes being fuckin' weird and horny. And the entire time, there's just sort of this belittling of her existence, framed as, "Actually, it's us guys who have been belittled by a female, I say!" I'm gonna hope that the framing of this story was based on a premise by a Shueisha editor or something and not by Yusei Matsui himself, because if I keep in my head the idea that Matsui is kinda like this, it might prevent me from wanting to read or watch Assassination Classroom in the future, and that's something I've wanted to try for a while now.
As it stands, F-Ken is weak at best, and just outright bad at worst. I don't really like that it thinks so little of the central girl character that it doesn't even give her an identifiable name, which sort of makes me think that it hasn't given me enough of a reason to remember it in the future, either. This is a manga that I imagine in one to two years' time I will have completely forgotten I read, and only after looking it up again will I go, "Oh, yeah, this one. There's a reason why I deliberately chose not to remember it." I'll probably have to read my own article to remember why.
F-Ken is available now on the Shonen Jump app or directly on Viz's web site.
Thank you to all of my Patreon subscribers for making writing about my thoughts and experiences possible. Blogs like this are able to happen more often with your kind support. If you are interested in becoming a member and seeing the perks available, please consider subscribing to my Patreon.
Special thanks to the following Phobos and Mars tier members: Scott Sandler, BetaRayILL, Andre, Mannekwin
Extra special thanks to the following Kasei Gumi members: Gomer
