At the age of sixteen Ryo Narushima was a genius and looked to have no trouble of getting into Tokyo University and joining the elite of society. However, that summer something cracked inside Ryo's head. With a small knife he brutally murdered both of his parents only leaving his sister alive and cowering in a corner. It is at this grotesque incident that our story begins. Note: At volume 20, the series changed publishers, which created a restart of the chapter numbers. Starting from chapter 61 in volume 26, the first chapter from when the series returned from a long hiatus, the series has been completely written & drawn by Tanaka Akio. While Hashimoto Izou did write the series in the beginning, he had been doing less and less work starting from volume 4. Tanaka and Hashimoto reached a settlement and Shamo continued.
Japanese study overview
Shamo is a Japanese manga of 201,076 characters, with 10,061 unique words and 1,916 different kanji. Its difficulty rating on Jiten is average, 2.8 out of 5. The full vocabulary list ranks all 10,061 words by how often they appear, and you can study them on Jiten or download them as an Anki deck.
Vocabulary highlights
Here are some of the words that appear most often in this media, as well as a sample of its rarer vocabulary.
- 話counter for stories, episodes of TV series, etc.×468
- 第prefix for forming ordinal numbers×336
- 成嶋Narishima×325
- 話talk×314
- 菅原Kanbara×304
- 殺すto kill×277
- 空手karate×266
- 番number (in a series)×249
- 竜dragon (esp. a Chinese dragon)×225
- 選手player (of a sport)×211
- 会meeting×210
- お前you×209
- 亜希夫Akio×174
- 橋本以蔵Hashimoto Izou (1954.2-)×128
- 直人Suguhito×126
- 黒川Kurokawa×95
- 號number×86
- 望月full moon×80
- 館長superintendent×69
- 東京ドームTokyo Dome×54