Bakuon Rettou

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one can be nothing but stunned thinking of how much Tsutomu Takahashi is as a storyteller (and if you ask me, also as a drawer).
Being in love with the bosozoku phenomenon, I was more than delighted discovering that one of my favourite mangaka used to be a gang member himself and even wrote a story that resembled his own experience with such fidelity (you can read him talking about his teen years after the epilogue). I've read tons of delinquent manga, but many of them romanticize the idea of being in a gang. all you see is cool kids riding their bikes at night, getting ... into trouble, outsmarting the police, and having a blast every day of their life. that's also portrayed in Bakuon Rettou, that feeling of invincibility, like you're gonna stay young forever, forever challenging society and its rules. but reading this work, you don't get to see only the charming part of being a bosozoku. the main protagonist Takashi strongly despises the idea of becoming an ordinary salaryman, and he joins the Zeros in the conviction that this is the only way for him to do great, extraordinary things. as the years pass, he slowly realizes how this decision has made him a sort of a social outcast forever. being a bosozoku means you can't just turn back to your past self, getting a degree and an office job. people will always look down at you, and it's not that without education you can do much...
that's why i say i got the sense i was reading a slice of life manga. most delinquent manga I've read only depicted the violent, exciting, attractive sides of Japanese biker gangs, with the characters almost never second-guessing their decisions. it's not that Takashi somehow
regrets his choices, but he does recognize how ineluctable are their consequences despise his bosozoku period will last very short. you're always being reminded how soon it will be over for Takashi as a bosozoku, and there is always a non-hidden deep feeling of sadness in him giving his 100% to organize the greatest biker gathering of all times.
it sort of reminded me slice of life comics, i say, because we get to see even the small details in the life of a gang member, his thoughts, his relationship with other members and how they develop, how the other members deal with life choises (becoming a normal person at 18? becoming a yakuza? staying a good for nothing, jobless rider forever?) with great psychological insight.
the whole manga is filled with melancholy and nostalgia, of course because the author is essentially writing his autobiography, but I guess it's something most of us can resonate with. the very short time of your life you get to be young, strong, untouchable, and you think nothing can bring you down, that everything is possible. and in fear of losing it all, you just ride as fast as you can, so reality won't reach you. but you know, you can't just run in eternity...

Most delinquent manga tend to devolve into insane, over the top fights and action as they go on. But for Bakuon Rettou, the story only matures, the same as Takeshi does. It handles the themes of drugs, sex, death, violence, and abuse with a blunt yet careful attitude. BK shows the struggles young adult goes through in their transition into adulthood, and how no matter how much you rebel, no matter how much you rage against the machine, you have to grow up eventually. BK, in my opinion, is a coming of age story on par with Catcher in the Rye. Takeshi's own transition into ... adulthood mirrors Holden's, with Holden trying to cope with the grief of losing his younger brother and graduating school by lashing out at the world and mindlessly wandering, Takeshi similarly copes with two of his bestfriends dying by further rebelling against society through bosozoku rides. The story is great, and Takahashi Tsutomu tells it amazingly. Check it out if you're looking for a down to earth delinquent manga where the MC actually learns and matures.

tl;dr: A manga that tells a story of a journey through youth that went absolutely nowhere. 

This manga is an autobiography of someone that grew up as part of a biker gang and is hence the story of a rebellious youth going from feeling out of place to finding a group where he feels like he belongs and can vent his feelings to giving his all for that group to ultimately having to move on from it. The manga portrays the core subject matter of motorcycles and gangs in a pretty interesting manner. It doesn’t seem like there’s much of an overarching narrative beyond the protagonist ... dealing with whatever issues pop up, but those result in decent stories with pretty good pacing.

The problems I had with this manga arise more from the characters and the character arc of the protagonist. This is probably heavily due to my personality type, but I’m not someone that has ever really understood rebelling for the sake of rebellion beyond it being a childish tantrum. Thus, while I can understand the fascination with motorcycles themselves, I don’t really much get the point of being in a motorcycle gang or everything else surrounding that. I can also understand the purpose of wanting a place to belong, but not why one would want to belong to a gang in particular. Furthermore, I felt the author didn’t really try to express any of this through the manga either. It may just be something that you get or you don’t and there was no real way to try to explain it, but ultimately this resulted in it not really being possible for me to sympathize or empathize much with the characters.

Similarly, while there is character and relationship growth, it either results in the characters further becoming a part of this world in which case it’s hard for me personally to get invested in those involved, or it results in the character growing in a direction that they move away from that world, in which case they disappear from the plot and don’t matter as much anymore, which similarly makes it hard to be invested in them. The protagonists character arc involves him becoming further and further entrenched in being in the gang, and it felt like he became an increasingly unlikable character as that progressed, up until the end where he finally has to leave, and then the manga just ends.

Coming of age slice of life stories generally make me feel nostalgic and give me at least some level of wishing I had used my high school years better, but this is the first time I’ve felt the opposite in that I felt glad that I didn’t waste them as bad as the protagonist did. Because in the end it felt like all of it was just a waste of time. Other stories relating to people giving their all for something temporarily throw in something or other at the end that show that they gained something longer lasting, even if it’s just good memories, friendships, or character growth, but the ending to this made it feel like absolutely nothing was gained. There are parts where it shows the protagonist thinking about how his life could be different if he never got involved with the gang, and though these scenes probably weren’t supposed to be that regretful, it gave me a very strong feeling that a major mistake had been made. Thus, even if the various stories in and of themselves were decent, in the end the manga just left me feeling hollow. The art was grungy and pretty elaborate at times even if it was rough, which fit the story well even if it generally wasn’t that nice to look at.