For those following the anime, Food Wars! Volume 15 follows Food Wars: The Second Plate, and is probably what we can expect for the first episode arc when Food Wars returns in 2017. Because of this, the following review and recap offers spoilers not only for this manga volume, but for the next season of the anime. If you don’t care about spoilers, scroll below the cover art.
Food Wars! Volume 15 begins as Soma’s craving for recognition drives him to challenge Terunori Kuga, the eighth chair of the Totsuki Institutes’ Council of Ten, to a shokugeku. While this bid is rejected, Soma’s smoldering competitive spirit will not be quenched, and he carries the challenge to the Totsuki Institute School Festival, where participants must run a profitable booth, by selling dishes to hundreds of foodies, or be expelled. And rather than aiming at an easy win by filling a food niche that isn’t already represented at the festival, Soma throws down a gauntlet by selling Chinese cooking, Kuga’s specialty.
Yuto Tsukeda and Shun Saeki paint this as a lopsided competition, with Yuga drawn as a polished perfectionist, and Soma, struggling for ideas, falling back—again, though it never gets old—on memories of his father’s cooking adventures. And this isn’t new, but an ongoing theme in Food Wars!. Soma peels away his old self in each Food Wars! lesson, only to find his old self still underneath, but if you chip under that layer, you find memories of his father. In this way, Food Wars! isn’t a story of the making of a great chef so much as the remembering of one, and his son’s re-creation in himself of his father’s gifts by following memories that may as well be recipes. With each success, Soma proves that heart and family values are more important than the elite pedagogy of the school. Soma’s unchanging idealism and neverending battle are reminiscent of the non-stop ouroboros cycles of western superhero comics, and he even has a ‘Rogue’s Gallery’ of flamboyant adversaries that are never quite defeated, some of whom made idle threats to him this volume.
Artistically, Volume 15 was a high point, as Shun Saeki takes advantage of the absence of the foodgasms to create new points of focus for the reader’s attention. More than in any other volume, you can see the contrasts created as he juxtaposes striking details with simplified shonen manga facial expressions, and as he cinematically alternates wide-angle panels with close-ups on the major players and plated entrees. Saeki’s expansion and contraction of the reader’s lens happens at will, and it has the effect of rushing or slowing the readers’ perception of time, with the richest moments occurring as plates are served, and the reader lingering on the nearly photoreal presentation of the food.
There is the sense that Food Wars! Volume 15 is an entree that we’ve ordered before, but because of the art values and the introduction of Terunori Kuga, the third most interesting antagonist we’ve had after Subaru Mimasaka and Akira Hayama, I enjoyed the opening of The School Festival as much as the more unique Staggiare and Fall Classic volumes.
Food Wars! Volume 15 arrived in bookstores on December 6th, and if you find it sold out, you can also order it through this link. You can also find the following volumes of Food Wars! Reviewed on NerdSpan: Volumes 10 and 11 are through this link; Volume 13 is through here; and Volume 14 is over here.
Viz Media sent the review copy.
