There's just one English-language translation of the adventures of crazed bounty huntress Emi Rashomon, though Wikipedia lists the manga series as "ongoing" in a couple of Japanese magazines. I've the impression that this Makoto Niwano series was not a great success in Japan, but at any rate it didn't hit big on American shores.
To be sure, other *shonen* that were just as sleazy and ultraviolent HAVE been successful in the States, so BOMBER GIRL'S apparent failure says nothing about the refinements of American taste.
I've never agreed with the pop-psych notion that tough heroines were just "men in drag," a typical superficial Freudianism. But I *almost* might think it of Emi Rashomon, since she shows little evidence of even the most marginal femininity as she gleefully slaughters every criminal who crosses her path (not to mention a few innocents as well). Her weapons of choice are a pair of tonfa which also have guns built into them, though she fights just as well in hand-to-hand encounters. Her specialty in her one volume of translated adventures seems to be "the Rashomon back-breaker," a wrestling-move in which she snaps the spines of those she slams onto her shoulders. Of all the diverse battles she has in that volume, that one, however improbable for a woman not built like a female Hercules, would be the topper.
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