Kyuma and his dog Inui live in the mountains, where Kyuma trains every day to become a great ninja. But when Kyuma mistakes a baseball coach for his training master, the local baseball team ends up with its first ninja player! Can a ninja step up to the plate and learn how to play ball? Find out in Ninja Baseball Kyuma!
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Kyuma, the last of the Hattori clan of ninja, lives and trains on the mountain with only his dog, Inui, for company. Kaoru is the captain of the Moonstar community baseball team, made up of elementary-school students. One of his teammates tells Kaoru that he will find help for the team on the mountain, and sure enough Kaoru finds Kyuma there. The young ninja, who knows nothing of the contemporary world, thinks that Kaoru is his liege lord and that the game of baseball is a literal battle against the other team. Will Kyuma’s new team members realize he’s a real ninja, and will Kyuma ever figure out that baseball is just a game? This is the first of a new manga series aimed at young readers, introducing them to the hallmarks of the genre: the right-to-left format, stylized figures, and lots of movement lines and explosive sound effects. This has plenty of action and humor to entertain kids who are curious about manga but not yet ready for the more mature options. Grades 2-4. --Kat Kan
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty much a one-joke manga, but Maeda milks it for all it's worth,
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This review is from: Ninja Baseball Kyuma Volume 1 (Paperback)
Ninja Baseball Kyuma takes a couple of clichés--the scrappy underdog baseball team and the warrior who doesn't know the war is over--and mixes them up with plenty of action and a really cute dog.Kyuma Hattori is a young ninja, the last of his clan, who lives alone in the mountains with his dog, Inui, waiting for the messenger who will come someday and give him a mission. While he waits, he sharpens his ninja skills by throwing shurikens (throwing stars) with Inui. Down below, in the city, the Moonstar City Club baseball team has just been handed yet another drubbing by their opponents, the sixth-graders. Their captain immediately challenges the winners to a rematch, but it's clear that the Moonstar team needs some extra juice in their lineup. The captain goes up into the mountains, sees Kyuma, and recruits him for the team, not realizing that Kyuma is a real ninja who thinks he's going into a real battle. Kyuma agrees, and hilarious complications ensue. Kyuma, of course, takes the game way too seriously and doesn't have a clue as to how baseball actually works. He's a strong hitter, sending the ball 100 feet--straight up. He learns the rules by breaking every one of them, with his teammates shouting encouragement and corrections as he goes. As bemused as they are by this new player, they are also inspired by his manic dedication to the game. And when the team wins the game, without a drop of blood being spilled, Kyuma realizes that he likes this new type of battle and resolves to continue. The team really bonds in the next chapter, in which Kyuma, trying to be helpful, smoothes out the baseball field with explosives, obliterating the pitcher's mound in the process. He spends all night dragging dirt from the mountain to rebuild the mound. In the morning, his teammates show up with bags of dirt, each having come up with the idea of rebuilding the mound on their own, only to find the mound rebuilt and Kyuma fast asleep in his wagon. This chapter ends with a nice save, as Luo, the temperamental pitcher, ends up praising Kyuma for his work. This book is a bit more complex than the other Udon kids' manga books, with more panels and word balloons on each page and more complex action sequences. The artist makes heavy use of Japanese sound effects, which are left intact and also translated. Readers who aren't used to manga may find this confusing at first. Ninja Baseball Kyuma is pretty much a one-joke manga, but Maeda milks it for all it's worth, and the result is some pretty funny sequences. We don't really meet the rest of the team until fairly late in the story, which is a shame, because they add a lot. Perhaps Maeda realized that he can only carry the clueless-ninja joke for so long; it will be interesting to see if he uses the team to bring more depth to future volumes. -- Brigid Alverson
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