What could be more romantic than Christmas Eve on a cruise ship? That's what Kaname is thinking when her school decides to schedule a make-up class trip... at least, until Sousuke declares that he's made other plans. He'll soon find that he's needed, though, as the ship finds itself beset by half-hearted terrorists, killer robots in the hold, and worst of all—a wannabe hero who's seen too much Die Hard! With the specter of Amalgam hanging over everything, can Sousuke probe the mystery behind them, while also keeping Kaname safe from harm?
Sagara Sousuke isn't your typical high school student. He reads military enthusiast magazines; he responds to questions with "affirmative;" he brings grenades to school in his bag. Though everyone at school takes him for a hopeless military geek, Chidori Kaname thinks there might be something more to him. When their plane is hijacked in the middle of a field trip, Kaname's instincts will prove correct: Sousuke is an elite, mech-piloting mercenary... and he's here to protect her!
The secrets of the Whispered have been revealed, but that knowledge has only brought new danger. Leonard has retreated to Merida Island, where he seeks to rewrite reality itself with Kaname by his side. And with Mithril's forces already aching and depleted, Amalgam has occupied a Soviet missile base—with the intent to trigger worldwide nuclear war! It's a two-fronted battle on Merida Island and the mountains of Afghanistan for the penultimate volume of Full Metal Panic!
Volumes 4-6, now in a collectors hardcover edition, and with a brand new translation! With the defeat of Gauron, Sousuke's life has entered a comfortable rhythm. He's adjusting to school--the occasional car bomb false alarm notwithstanding--and balancing his newly-found normalcy with the needs of his mercenary life. He's even started to turn his thoughts toward the future--a future that might involve Kaname. But that future will soon face a threat, not from North Korean soldiers, Italian mobsters, or Russian spetsnaz... but from the hierarchy of Mithril itself!
He may have survived the world’s most dangerous battlefields, but Sagara Sousuke is finding his tenure in high school to be no less intense. In addition to having to master new skills—navigating a romance for a karate-obsessed rival, subbing in as an actor for a tyrannical movie director, drafting a prospective student pamphlet for a special reward—his relationship with Chidori Kaname is becoming more complicated. After he participates in a girl hunt (to help out a friend, of course) and unleashes a biohazard in his homeroom class... if enemy snipers don’t put him in an early grave, Kaname just might!
Clouseau and Mao lead the charge in Afghanistan to prevent nuclear war, while Sousuke and Tessa invade Merida Island, intent on stopping Leonard and his world-changing TARTAROS device. With resources depleted and the very world changing around them, their desperation to find each other is all they have left. Will Kaname awaken from her nightmare? Will Sousuke get through to her in time? Will anyone survive?! All bets are off in the explosive final volume of Full Metal Panic!
While on vacation, Chidori Kaname is invited to a Pacific island by Sousuke Sagara, the world's biggest war nut. She is really excited--until she finds out Sousuke isn't planning a relaxing tour of nature, but a high-speed adventure full of thrills, chills, and danger. Young adult.
Takayuki Tatsumi is one of Japan’s leading cultural critics, renowned for his work on American literature and culture. With his encyclopedic knowledge and fan’s love of both Japanese and American art and literature, he is perhaps uniquely well situated to offer this study of the dynamic crosscurrents between the avant-gardes and pop cultures of Japan and the United States. In Full Metal Apache, Tatsumi looks at the work of artists from both sides of the Pacific: fiction writers and poets, folklorists and filmmakers, anime artists, playwrights, musicians, manga creators, and performance artists. Tatsumi shows how, over the past twenty years or so, writers and artists have openly and exuberantly appropriated materials drawn from East and West, from sources both high and low, challenging and unraveling the stereotypical images Japan and America have of one another. Full Metal Apache introduces English-language readers to a vast array of Japanese writers and performers and considers their work in relation to the output of William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, H. G. Wells, Jack London, J. G. Ballard, and other Westerners. Tatsumi moves from the poetics of metafiction to the complex career of Madame Butterfly stories and from the role of the Anglo-American Lafcadio Hearn in promoting Japanese folklore within Japan during the nineteenth century to the Japanese monster Godzilla as an embodiment of both Japanese and Western ideas about the Other. Along the way, Tatsumi develops original arguments about the self-fashioning of “Japanoids” in the globalist age, the philosophy of “creative masochism” inherent within postwar Japanese culture, and the psychology of “Mikadophilia” indispensable for the construction of a cyborg identity. Tatsumi’s exploration of the interplay between Japanese and American cultural productions is as electric, ebullient, and provocative as the texts and performances he analyzes.
The battle at Niquelo ignited in Sousuke and Kaname a new passion to find each other, but the rest of the world won't make it that easy. While Sousuke fights, waiting for the operation that might bring her back to his arms, Kaname endures new trials at the hands of a jealous tormenter. Everything comes to a head in an abandoned Soviet research town, and the winding tunnels beneath it—tunnels that hosted a catastrophe seventeen years ago, and which might hold the secret to the Whispered themselves!
