The manga this week
Aoashi
By Yugo Kobayashi, with cooperation from Naohiko Ueno (Shogakukan)
Since I have no interest in sports in general, I only but glanced at TV broadcasts of the recent FIFA World Cup finals in Russia. I love to read soccer manga, though. The first one ever published in boys' manga magazines was "Kutabare!! Namida-kun" (Drop dead! My tears) by Isami Ishii in 1969. Since then, I've been reading soccer manga right off the shelf as it was being created.
During the World Cup, I was responsible for "Soccer Manga Retsuden," a series of articles published in The Yomiuri Shimbun evening edition. It was a very ambitious project that featured selected masterpieces from over the past 50 years and interviews with their authors. I reread soccer manga old and new for this project and realized something -- namely, that it's really difficult to express soccer in the manga format.
Baseball manga, after all, is about battles between the pitcher and the batter. The moment of their face-off is one on one, and in this aspect, it's intrinsically no different from boxing or judo.
In other words, it's relatively easy to liven up the story. In contrast, in the case of soccer, a total of 20 players, excluding the goalkeepers, move freely about the field. This is especially true for modern-day soccer. You might go so far as to say that it's a sport without any specific hero. That is why it is possible that a head coach who manipulates his players on a soccer field as if they were just chess pieces becomes a protagonist, as in "Giant Killing," which has been published since 2007 by the author simply named Tsujitomo.
But manga definitely needs a hero in order to be truly entertaining. It's difficult to hit that delicate balance, yet this week's manga "Aoashi" has brilliantly achieved that feat. It is already unique in that this manga describes members of a youth team who are trained to be players for J.League. Particularly remarkable is the character of the protagonist Ashito Aoi.
Ashito starts out as a classic protagonist of a conventional soccer manga, constantly attempting to shoot at the frontline. Midway through his training, he is changed to a defender. Actually, it turns out that Ashito's true worth is in his ability to be a command center, calling out accurate instructions based on his awareness of, as if in a bird's eye view, the positioning of all players on the field, both his own team's and the enemy's.
When his position is changed, Ashito originally despairs. But eventually he finds the satisfying delight in scoring goals by moving his team members without shooting for the goal himself. In other words, the development of modern soccer strategies is reflected in a hot-blooded manga. Through "Aoashi," I was able to understand for the first time that soccer, as a highly competitive sport, is in fact a kind of art involving intelligence and imagination.
It's difficult to create a soccer manga. However, this also means that it's an unexplored area full of possibilities. This thought has even motivated me to watch real soccer games (just on TV, though).
Ishida is a Yomiuri Shimbun senior writer whose areas of expertise include manga and anime.
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