Honestly, when I first saw the solicitations for Iron Wok Jan!, I was pretty sure it would be a novelty premise. I'd enjoy it as a wacky taste of crazy manga, but soon the novelty of reading a book based on cooking would wear off, and I'd lose my taste for it. Six volumes in, I'm loving the book every bit as much as I did from the start, and Saijyo shows in volume six that there is no end to the surprises he's prepared to bring into the book. Leaving aside the insight into Chinese cooking that Iron Wok Jan! gives, there's also outrageous humor and characters, and this volume introduces something I wasn't sure was possible: A character who is even more obnoxious and revolting, and yet just as compelling, as Jan himself.
This volume starts off with the fallout from the three-volume long cooking competition that has dominated the book recently. Though Jan lost, the circumstances of his losing have done nothing to cut down on his ego, and that has only increased the tension between him and Kiriko. While the increasing tension between these two is always entertaining, my favorite fallout from the competition was the addition of one of the competing chefs to the staff at Gobancho restaurant. Given how much I enjoyed her role in the competition, and the personality contrast she has with both Kiriko and Jan, I think that Saijyo has just added several stories' worth of further interaction just by bringing her in.
However, the bulk of this issue is dedicated to another cooking contest, and I'm surprised and pleased to see that this aspect of the book never really feels formulaic. Just as a martial arts comic must find new and interesting ways to have the martial artists duel, Saijyo must continue to cook up new ways for the chefs to cook off, and the introduction of an obnoxious former chef who has gained even more arrogance in his time abroad felt right in character with the strange goings-on at the Gobancho.
I'm still surprised at how well Saijyo has done in portraying Jan as just a completely incomparable bastard and yet making him a sympathetic character at the same time. We're rooting for Jan again this time out, partly because his adversary, Dan, is even worse, going beyond the mental abuse and into the realm of the physical. It's almost too over-the-top, what Dan gets away with, but he serves as an interesting take on the martial arts bully type, a classic staple of the martial arts genre, and Iron Wok Jan! really is as much a martial arts manga as it is a cooking one. Although, as usual, the "fights" aren't battles of fists and feet, but cooking techniques and imagination. The dishes served in this issue are the kind of thing I couldn't possibly bring myself to eat, but they're fascinating examples of fancy cuisine, and Saijyo does an excellent job of conveying that Chinese cooking is as much about medicinal properties and presentation as it about taste.
Probably the most startling aspect of that is when we see that the two chefs, Jan and Dan, have poisoned one another, in a move that now seems typically bold from Jan and which tells us how alike the two are, in case the reader hasn't picked up on their similarities at that point. However, there's also a key difference, as Jan shows an (as yet unexplained) loyalty to Gobancho, adding another layer onto the complex character and making him more than just a brutally mean, exceptionally arrogant and yet talented chef. Although that characterization does probably remain at the heart of why Iron Wok Jan! is so consistently entertaining.
