I don’t know how closely the manga REAL BOUT HIGH SCHOOL follows the source novels, but if the former is an accurate reflection of the latter, then the manga-artists can’t be blamed for the overall messiness of the concept.
I’ve remarked here that BOUT falls into a popular tradition wherein teenagers go to high school not to get grades and learn things but to have a microcosm set apart from adult life, where the teens can enjoy romantic hookups and play crazy games. BOUT takes place at the fictional Daimon High, where the principal allows the students to engage in full-contact martial arts battles for no particular reason. On some level BOUT may be a spoof of Japanese students’ enthusiasm for all sorts of school clubs, not least those revolving around martial training, since this has been the subject of many other manga, including YAWARA and BATTLE CLUB.
In addition, though the students of Daimon High are many decades removed from the ancient traditions of medieval Japan, one of the most high-profile students there, Ryoko Mitsurugi, sincerely wants to attain the superior attitude of a samurai, even if she’s only armed with a non-fatal kendo sword. Though she’s not a contentious person by nature, she has enough pride to get pulled into the Daimon tradition of “K-fights.” She also has some minor romantic travails, mostly with an obstreperous brawler named Shizuka. It’s not clear whether Ryoko has any real erotic feeling for Shizuka, and his apparent passes at her seem largely to spring out of his tendency to trash-talk everyone. But she gets in minor fights with Shizuka at almost every opportunity, leading to a big culminating battle between the two of them in the last volume.
The manga boasts a few strong early scenes in which Ryoko tries to suss out how to be a “great woman” in the modern world, and even the crazy principal has an interesting moment, when he reflects that for the Japanese, their own society takes the place of a watchful God. But halfway through the manga-continuity, the story goes off the rails. Ryoko takes a bunch of girl vigilantes under her wing, and they spend a lot of time fighting various ill-defined rowdies. In the early episodes BOUT seems to be about as naturalistic as a martial-arts adventure can be. Then in later episodes Shizuka and other characters show themselves capable of manipulating “chi” in order to perform uncanny feats of might, though Ryoko still just has her kendo sword to fight with.
At best, BOUT has a few amusing moments appropriate to its farcical concept, and it’s short enough that anyone who decides to read it won’t be wasting much time.
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