Author: Masahiro Totsuka
Manga-ka: Aguri Igarashi
Publisher: Yen Press
Rating: Older Teen (13+)
Release Date: August 2012
Synopsis: “After the intense drama of the Burnish Academy TV shoot, each member of the Muroe kendo team has a new outlook on their involvement with kendo, and Tamaki is eager to learn what reasons her friends have for participating in the sport, hoping they will help her find her own motivation. Kojiro plans a trip to observe the Gokuryuki national tournament to help Tamaki in her search, and with the support of her family and friends, Tamaki takes a confident step toward the future in the final volume of Bamboo Blade!”
The back of this book features an afterword from writer Masahiro Totsuka about the series. In it, he describes how he wanted to give readers who are not sports fans a story that demonstrates the passion that athletes put into sport and how much it shapes them as a person. In this final volume, Bamboo Blade more than delivers on this plan as the story is brought to a very satisfying, though not completely conclusive, conclusion. It thus achieves another thing mentioned in the afterword, which was Totsuka’s goal of putting his characters “on the starting line” by the series’ end.
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