Toriko 320 Review: Undead People and Sex Change

Toriko, Chapter 320: Eating the Food Treasure Pair

Whenever I think Toriko can never break the limit of Japanese manga wackiness, it freaking does. I mean, with Fake!Kaka being apparently monkey-beamed to death and Bambina being dealt with and Komatsu being revived, you’d expect this to be a generic ‘holy shit this food is so tasty’ eating chapter. Maybe with a revelation or two about the nature of the Back Channel (which it does). But does anyone expect Pair to give Komatsu boobs? Hell, does anyone expect Pair to give everyone boobs, make their penises retract into their inguinals and then send them into the afterlife?

The chapter really starts off pretty docile. Sani Satan-Vomits out Toriko’s arm (I didn’t consider that to be what Sani meant when he said he hid Toriko’s arm) and with a combination of Enbu and Dark Arts, Toriko reattaches it. Well they can go full on Bleach and lose entire limbs if that’s all it takes for them to reattach one.

The real Kaka (who is definitely a woman because she has pretty eyelashes and manga rule #24 states that any character of ambiguous gender with pretty eyelashes is a woman) shows up and apparently she’s a ghost. That is the Kaka we saw when we briefly see the back-channel before, which is a nice little foreshadowing there. And she delivers the method to cook Pair properly… which would take like several trillion years or whatever, and the process involves, at one point, staring at it without blinking. Because Bambina’s testicle is just that badass.

Of course, Komatsu uses his plot device cooking powers to just instantly prepare this super awesome ingredient by lightly poking it just once. And all the sperm – I mean soup – contained within Pair overflows to every single one of the monkeys. We get some generic ‘how can Komatsu do this’ ‘he can hear the voice of food’ and general food-is-tasty scenes. Toriko has apparently able to use two demon arms, unlocked a new gateway to ‘taste’… and is a woman. As is everyone.

Kaka notes how it’s part of the ‘two sides of the same coin’ that is Pair. But it’s not permanent and another mouthful will return them to normal, but at the moment they have arrived in the world of souls, the Back Channel… and it’s filled with the ghosts of the past civilization.

Also Guemon, who we saw all the way back. He apparently was killed by the Nitro back during the war, and not just beaten up… what does it mean to all the other members of the 0^th Biotope, then? People like Love and whatever who we saw in pretty bad shape, are they all dead too? Also with Guemon is -looks up- Knocking Artisan Malee of the 0^th Biotope. Who I don’t think has ever done anything in the series.

Well there’s that I guess. It's a weird chapter. I want explanations.