Anime Review: Kengan Ashura
Kazuo Yamashita is 56 years old, and it’s been a pretty miserable life. He works as a salaryman in the sales department at Nogi Publications with a manager who’s constantly bullying and belittling him. Kazuo’s wife left him years ago, and he’s estranged from his sons, shut-in Kenzo and delinquent Yasuo. Every dream he’s ever had has been crushed by reality. But he is at his core a kind man, and his coworkers like him when not in direct line of sight of the boss.
One night, Kazuo stumbles across a back alley fight, where a young man named Ohma Tokita takes down a Yakuza enforcer much larger than himself. Yamashita finds himself strangely excited, and Tokita asks “Do you want to fight too?” Kazuo doesn’t immediately take up the invitation, but does get laid (by a prostitute) that night for the first time in a decade.
The next day, Yamashita is called up to the Nogi Group headquarters, which his manager interprets as him being called on the carpet for some failure. Instead, Hideki Nogi, the CEO of the conglomerate, lets Kazuo in on a few secrets. Unknown to the general public, Japanese corporations have settled their differences via illegal underground martial arts matches for the last 300 years. This secret organization is known as the Kengan Association. Nogi has chosen Yamashita to be the handler for a new fighter the Nogi Group is using, Ohma Tokita. He seems surprised but pleased that the two have already met.
(Much later, it will turn out that while neither Kazuo nor Ohma was randomly selected for their jobs, the initial meeting was an honest coincidence.)
Ohma Tokita is a very promising young martial artist with a shady background (not helped by the holes in his memory.) In addition to fortunate genes, he was trained in the almost unknown but very effective Niko Style, and possesses a secret dangerous forbidden technique called “the Advance” which allows him superhuman attack speed and ferocity at the cost of shortening his potential lifespan. This last has given him the nickname of “the Asura” from the powerful and sometimes destructive spirits of Hindu mythology.
Initially Ohma is motivated by revenge against the man who killed his master in the martial arts, and is participating in the Kengan in hopes of encountering him there. This is deflated early on when it turns out that man is already dead, killed by a man named Setsuna Kiryu, who wants to battle Ohma himself for reasons connected with their shared backstory–which Ohma doesn’t remember! But Ohma also wants to prove himself the strongest of martial artists, so he still has plenty of motivation.
Nogi pairing Ohma and Kazuo up turns out to be part of a massive multipronged plan to force a Kengan Life and Death Tournament for the chairmanship of the Kengan Association. He wants to overthrow current chairman Metsudo Katahara of Dainippon Bank for…reasons. Of course, many of the other corporate heads in the association are also aiming for the chairmanship, and their plots and representative fighters aren’t going to just roll over.
Most of this animated series, based on a manga that began publication in 2012, is about that tournament. The anime began in 2019 and recently had its final season.
The big throughline of the series is the deepening relationship between Ohma and Kazuo and their subsequent character development. Yamashita comes to care for Tokita like a son, and is inspired by the fighter’s courage and endurance to rediscover his own self-confidence and spine while never letting go of his core kindness. He turns out to have his own special gifts and wins the respect of others, even his own son.
Ohma comes to appreciate Kazuo’s kindness, and having a real friend for perhaps the first time in his life. He starts recovering memories damaged by his Advance technique, learns more about himself, and refines his martial arts skills as he battles to reach the tournament final.
The tournament formally starts with thirty-two contestants, all of whom are unique characters, and they each have a corporate sponsor, and there are multiple associated characters for the more important contenders, this results in a fairly huge cast, with most fights shown in full (there are a couple of very short blowouts), and even losing competitors being involved in continuing subplots. Even when Ohma and Kazuo aren’t on camera, there’s a lot of interesting things going on.
Due to only male fighters being allowed to compete in the Kengan, this does reduce the number of roles for women, but we do get a fair assortment of different personalities and levels of competence for them. One of the women even gets to have an honest-to-goodness superpower, as opposed to the “technically possible” favorable mutations and special techniques of the fighters.
This kind of series lives on its fights, and there are some awesome ones here. One of the plot points is that the tournament takes place over a very few days, so winning competitors have little time to recover from the injuries and exhaustion of previous fights. (The art reflects this with visible wounds on the warriors.)
The animation is heavily CGI-assisted, which can be distracting from time to time. Flashbacks are done in a more painterly style.
Content note: Lots of martial arts violence, with gore and body horror. A surprisingly low number of deaths during the tournament itself, despite the “Life and Death” subtitle. Child abuse, not all of it in the service of teaching martial arts. Nudity, both male and female (no genitals). Extramarital sex, some of dubious consent. Depiction of mental illness that may not pass muster with professionals.
This series shares a lot of its DNA with Baki the Grappler (and had a crossover movie with it) so fans of that series should also enjoy it. People who like the writing on Kengan who find it a bit too violent might enjoy How Heavy Are the Dumbbells That You Lift? which is set in the same universe, but is a lighthearted series about girls pursuing physical fitness. I recommend this series most to fans of guys beating the tar out of each other in hand to hand combat.
