One Piece, Vol. 9: Tears

One Piece, Vol. 9: Tears collects chapters 72-81 of Eiichiro Oda's serial, first published in Japan in July 1999 and released in English by VIZ Media in January 2006. It sits at the heart of the Arlong Park arc, and its title is not decoration: this is the volume where the series stops to explain its navigator.

Zoro, Usopp and Johnny trail Nami to Cocoyasi Village, the town where she grew up, and find it under the thumb of Arlong and his Fish-Man crew, who tax the villagers into poverty and kill anyone who resists. Luffy and Sanji arrive to find that Nami is wearing Arlong's mark. The volume then turns backwards, to the woman who raised her — Bellemere, a former marine who took in two orphaned girls and gave her life so they could keep theirs — and to the bargain Nami has been quietly paying off ever since.

What follows is the sequence readers of the series tend to name first. Nami, out of options, drives a knife into the tattoo on her own arm and asks Luffy for help, and he answers by putting his straw hat on her head and walking to Arlong Park. It is the emotional turn the rest of One Piece is built on, and the volume that most often converts a casual reader into a committed one.