Height-challenged Shoyo Hinata has been a volleyball fan since watching the Little Giant’s amazing leaps on TV. Mostly thwarted in his attempts to put a boys’ team together in middle school, when he finally fields a team, they are destroyed by the opposition, who are led by Tobio Kageyama, aka King of the Court. Shoyo’s resentment of Kageyama drives his new ambition: to join a real volleyball team in high school so that he can oppose Kageyama again, and this time, beat him. As this is a manga, coincidence rules, and the two are fated to enroll in the same high school because other high school volleyball teams have rejected Kageyama for being an arrogant ball hog.
In an amusing page, Kageyama has it spelled out to him by one of his new upperclassmen teammates that it is strategically unsound to be a ball hog in volleyball, as the same player can’t set and strike the ball, because two consecutive hits from the same player are against the rules of volleyball. If you’re not familiar with volleyball, you will probably quickly absorb this information, all the while forgetting that you’re reading a sports themed comic-book story, because Haikyu!!‘s strength is in downplaying the negative “gym class” associations of the sports narrative, and focusing on the positive elements, such as competition, fair play, and achievement, as well as the intellectual textures of the sport, such as game play and game theory. U.S. readers that, as a general rule, do not have huge shelves of sports comics to pick from due to a preponderance of the adventures of those other fictional characters in athletic dress, superheroes, may find themselves enjoying Haikyu!!
Haikyu!! starts out as a a welcome change of pace, and won’t lose your interest, either, due to Haruichi Furudate putting his strong characters in interesting situations. while the characters may seem upon introduction like stock shonen manga archetypes, they quickly outgrow these preconceptions. For instance, Shoyo Hinata, the protagonist, may have the familiar shonen manga traits of being easy-going, eager to please, and affable, but we quickly learn that these shonen behaviors are dwarfed by his enthusiasm for vollyeball, which overcomes boyish inhibitions, so that he practices with girls and grown women in his desire to emulate the Little Giant. The foil and co-protagonist, Tobio Kageyama, is revealed to be competitive to the point of self-destruction, and his nickname is not a positive thing, but was earned through his inability at being a team player.
Haikyu!! Volume One is a great introductory volume that, at its close, makes you curious as to the street date of the next volume. For the best test of a good book, and a good manga, is whether you wonder what the characters are doing after you put the book down. Haikyu!! holds true in that regard, as the reader will find themselves more invested in Shoyo and Tobio than in the cliffhanger continuities of other, gimmicky-themed shonen manga.
(Editor’s note: Haikyu!! Volume One was released to stores on July 5th. Viz Media sent the review copy.)
