He's well-trained, well-armed, and well-fed. And if you work for one of his competitors, he's coming to kill you.
Carlton Mellick III's 31st book.
Written at a time when Mellick was discovering anime and Japanese culture in earnest, The Morbidly Obese Ninja is set in an otaku-futurist society where bodies are fully customizable, buildings are so high that nobody's ever seen the ground, and corporations employ whole clans of ninja as part of their business ventures.
One such ninja is Basu, the Oekai Corporation's biggest, deadliest weapon. His 700-pound frame is far from a hindrance—in fact, his crushing weight and impenetrable girth are among his greatest assets. His current mission: stealing coveted trade secrets from the rivalling Kakera Corporation. But it turns out the Gomen Corporation, led by Basu's nemesis Crow, is interested in them as well. What's more, the secrets are stored in the body of a cyborg child named Oki. And, as Basu soon finds out, that's not the worst part...
This work contains examples of the following tropes:
- Animesque: Mellick describes the book as "an experiment in creating anime in prose form."
- In-universe, a popular form of cosmetic surgery is to make one resemble an anime character.
- Acrofatic: Basu is an extreme example. He's 500 pounds overweight, but he's so strong that he can still do the sort of physics-defying ninja stunts that the genre requires, albeit not as well as he could back when he was in shape.
- Affectionate Parody: Shades of this, towards Cyberpunk and cyberpunk anime.
- Artificial Human: Oki, the Kakera Corporation's "piggy-bank," was grown in a lab and made to resemble and think like a Cheerful Child. Most of his body is metal, and he has to be periodically winded up with a key.
- Badass and Child Duo: Basu and Oki.
- Big Eater: Basu, who has to ingest over 45,000 calories per day or the nano-poison in his blood will kill him.
- Bittersweet Ending: The final paragraph acknowledges that neither Oki nor Basu are going to live much longer - the former because he was designed that way, the latter because if his weight doesn't kill him, the nanopoisoning will - but they're going to be together and live free for whatever time they have left.
- Blessed with Suck: Basu has incorporated his massive weight gain, a symptom of his efforts to stave off nanopoisoning, into his ninjutsu practice, making him nigh-unstoppable.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: Inverted with Crow's Elite Mooks. They have trained to fight as a team, making them almost impossible to defeat as long as all four of them are standing, but as soon as Basu takes out one of them, the other three get wrong-footed and Basu makes short work of them.
- Darkest Hour: Basu has one in the last fight against Crow, when he's exhausted, outnumbered and feeling his failing health start to drag him down. Then he rallies.
- Elite Mooks: Crow's team of four elite ninjas, who are Color-Coded for Your Convenience and each have a special power.
- Everyone Has Standards: Cutthroat as the corporations are, their ninja follow a strict code that prevents them from hurting civilian employees, and most corporations Would Not Hurt A Child.
- Evil Former Friend: Basu and Crow used to be best friends until Crow, jealous of Basu, killed the board of directors they had both sworn to serve and infected him with an incurable nano-poison.
- Fantastic Slur: "Bug-eyes" for animese people, since their Big Anime Eyes bulge out from their heads.
- Fragile Speedster: Animese people have had the density of their bones reduced, making them very quick and agile. However, those bones also break very easily.
- Gratuitous Japanese: Even the chapters are numbered in romanized Japanese.
- Honor Before Reason: Basu believes strongly in this, claiming that everyone must do their duty without question.
- I'm a Humanitarian: After incapacitating a particular foe, Basu realises that he's hungry and chows down on the foe, ending up eating him to death.
- iProduct: Most technology; in particular, the tools of the ninja trade include the iKatana and the iPet.
- Kevlard: One of the ways Basu makes his obesity work for him. His opponents find it difficult to target his vital organs, since the layer of fat around them is so thick.
- Loophole Abuse: It would be against the ninja code to kill the director of a rival corporation without having been issued a formal order of execution, something Crow counts on to keep him safe from Basu. Turns out, the ninja code says nothing about dismembering the director of a rival corporation.
- Loving a Shadow: Chiya claims to be in love with Basu, but Basu notes that they've never even really talked that much, and that she must have filled in her own conversations in the silence.
- Non-Human Head: Crow has had cosmetic surgery to make his head resemble that of a bird's.
- The Quiet One: Basu doesn't speak much. He usually just grunts.
- Rule of Three: Three times over the course of the story, Crow attacks Basu with his Signature Move of hooking someone with his chain sickle and pulling them off balance. The first time Basu dodges and we get to see how it works on the Gomen ninja Crow hits instead. The second time, in a flashback, Crow does hit Basu and pulls him off balance. The third time Crow hits Basu and tries to pull him off balance... and discovers that's a lot harder now that Basu weighs 700 pounds, and Basu ends up pulling Crow off balance instead.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Basu, after finding out that the trade secrets scores of ninja have died over—and Oki would have to die over—were just a new iPalm app to let users customize their fingernails. He breaks the ninja code, beheading his boss, saving Oki, and leaving the city with him.
- That Man Is Dead: Basu and Crow, towards as Keigo and Susumu respectively.
- Would Not Hurt A Child: Most corporations, which is why the Kakera made their piggy-bank in the form of an artificial child who would die if opened. Unfortunately, the Gomen Corporation has no such scruples.
- Wrench Wench: Chiya is a high-tech version, making a living by repairing electronic weaponry like the iKatanas used by corporate ninja.
