Bakuon!! Review: The Motorcycle Manga Where Brand Loyalty Becomes a Personality

I never learned to ride a motorcycle. In my town the older kids who did were the ones who scared me — the ones who rode past the park where I sat alone after school, engines too loud, going somewhere I was never invited. So motorcycles always lived in my head as a thing that belonged to people braver and louder than me.

Then I read Bakuon!!, and somewhere around the part where a blonde girl in a pink racing suit crashes into a pillar because she loves Suzuki too much to pay attention to where she's going, I stopped being scared of bikes and started laughing at them. That's the magic of this manga. It takes a hobby I always found intimidating and shows you the people inside it are just enormous dorks who argue about engine displacement. I love it for that.

Quick Take

• A motorcycle comedy that treats real bikes with real knowledge — the models, the brand wars, the riding culture are all specific and accurate, then weaponized for jokes
• The humor runs on character contrast: each club member's relationship to motorcycles is so extreme it becomes their entire personality, and the comedy is what happens when those personalities collide
• T+ (Older Teen) for mild fanservice and the occasional grown-up hobby joke — otherwise warm and goofy

Story Overview

Hane Sakura is dragging her bicycle up a brutal hill on her way to Okanoue Girls' High School when she sees a classmate ride past on a motorcycle, completely unbothered by the slope. That's the whole spark. She decides she wants that freedom, joins the school's motorcycle club, and starts down the long road of getting her license — which the series treats as a genuine ordeal, complete with driving-school failures and small humiliations.

What follows isn't a plot so much as a culture. Hane gets a pink Honda CB400SF and falls in with a club full of women whose devotion to specific motorcycle brands has reached a level that can only be described as religious. The series moves through license tests, club rides, touring trips, races, winter, and the slow accumulation of riding experience. Hane starts as a nervous beginner who panics on the road and gradually becomes someone who actually belongs on a bike.

There's no grand finale aimed at — the manga is still ongoing in Japan, running for well over a decade and past eighteen volumes. The "arc," if there is one, is Hane growing into the rider she envied on day one, surrounded by friends who would each die on a different brand-loyalty hill.

Characters

Hane Sakura — The audience surrogate, an ordinary, slightly clumsy girl who falls for motorcycles on sight. Her arc is the genuine one: she's terrified at first, fumbles the basics, and earns her confidence ride by ride. She ends up on a pink Honda CB400SF, and her ordinary-ness is exactly what makes the lunatics around her funny.

Rin Suzunoki — A blonde-twintailed beauty who is, in the manga's own framing, "infected with the Suzuki bug." She will love any motorcycle unconditionally as long as it's a Suzuki. Her devotion traces back to her father, she rides a Suzuki GSX400S Katana, and her skill badly lags behind her passion — she crashes, fails her license test twice, and makes her grand entrance at driving school by slamming into a pillar. Her certainty is the series' single most reliable comedy engine.

Onsa Amano — A bright, energetic tomboy from a motorcycle-shop family who cycles through various Yamaha bikes. She's the one person who can actually argue motorcycles with Rin on equal footing, which means the two of them collide constantly — Onsa trashes Suzuki, Rin defends it to the death, and the friction never stops being funny.

Hijiri Minowa — The absurdly wealthy member, who works her way up from a sidecar to a Honda Super Cub to a tuned Ducati, and is rich enough to occasionally treat helicopters as casual transport. Her money is its own running gag.

Raimu "Lime" Kawasaki — The former club president and the manga's great unsolved mystery. She never speaks (she communicates by writing notes), never takes off her Simpson helmet, and her face is never shown. She's supposedly been a high schooler for over twenty years, doesn't seem to have a real student ID, and the in-universe joke is that nobody can rule out that she's literally a ghost. She rides a Kawasaki Ninja, and the series builds her legend a little more every time an older character recognizes her.

What I Love About It

What makes Bakuon!! work is that the jokes only land because the knowledge underneath them is real. Rin Suzunoki isn't funny because "girl likes brand." She's funny because the manga genuinely understands what Suzuki means to the kind of person who is into Suzuki — the underdog reputation, the specific models, the way a true believer will defend the brand against all reason. Orimoto draws the GSX400S Katana with the love of someone who knows exactly what it is, and then has Rin treat it like a religious relic. The respect for the subject is what gives the comedy teeth.

My favorite detail is how the manga commits to its bits completely. Rin's Suzuki obsession isn't a quirk that gets dialed back — it goes all the way to a revelation that she has a Suzuki emblem branded onto her backside, the result of a childhood accident where she was pressed against a Suzuki bike that had been sitting in the blazing sun. That's the level the series operates at. It finds the most unhinged possible expression of a character trait and then says it with a completely straight face, the same straight face it uses to render the actual motorcycle. That tonal collision — total sincerity about machines, total absurdity about people — is the thing I love.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The brand-war fights between Rin and Onsa are the heart of the comedy, and the funniest ones are the ones with no stakes whatsoever. Onsa, from a Yamaha-shop family, casually insults Suzuki. Rin, the most devout Suzuki believer alive, treats this as a personal attack on her bloodline. The two of them go at it while the rest of the club watches, and the joke is that they're the only two people in the room who care this much — they can argue motorcycles in fluent technical detail precisely because they're equally obsessed, just on opposite sides.

What sticks with me is how the manga lets these arguments be both genuinely informed and completely ridiculous at once. You learn real things about the brands from listening to them fight. You also fully understand that these two are ridiculous people. The page doesn't pick a side — Suzuki isn't actually better, Yamaha isn't actually better, the point is the loyalty itself, and how loving a machine this much turns into your entire identity. That's a very specific, very real flavor of hobbyist that I'd never seen drawn so affectionately before.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Motorcycles drawn and discussed with genuine knowledge and obvious affection
• An ensemble where every member's personality is a different flavor of obsession
• The brand-rivalry humor is specific enough to be genuinely, repeatedly funny
• Hane's beginner-to-rider growth gives the comedy a warm spine

Cons

• Some jokes land harder if you already have opinions about motorcycle brands
• Mild fanservice that not everyone will want
• Lime's ghost-or-not mystery is played for laughs and never really resolved — that openness is part of the joke, but if you want answers, you won't get them. This won't work for everyone.

Is Bakuon!! Worth Reading?

If you like hobby manga where the enthusiasm is real and the people are idiots about it in the most loving way, yes. Bakuon!! turns motorcycle culture into a character comedy where brand loyalty is a personality and license tests are a trial by fire. The only catch is that it's still ongoing and not officially in English, so you'll be reading it in Japanese.

Official English Translation Status

As of now there is no licensed English edition of the Bakuon!! manga. The 2016 anime adaptation was licensed for North America by Sentai Filmworks, but the manga itself remains unlicensed in English — the original Japanese volumes from Akita Shoten are the only legitimate way to read the source material.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How Bakuon!! Differs
Laid-Back Camp	Girls enjoying an outdoor hobby with real, gentle knowledge	Bakuon!! is louder and more absurd, with brand obsession as comedy fuel
Touge Oni / car-otaku manga	Vehicle enthusiasm played mostly straight	Bakuon!! treats the machines seriously but the people as pure comedy
Super Cub	A single bike quietly changing one girl's life	Bakuon!! is an ensemble where every bike is a battle cry

Where to Buy

No English release yet. That just means you find it before everyone else does. If you read Japanese, the Akita Shoten volumes are the only legitimate way in.

Find Bakuon!! on Amazon.co.jp →

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