Ranked #65

Solanin (Manga)

Stories you can relate to on a personal level are some of the most powerful ones you’ll encounter, but sometimes, they can be a bit hard to swallow if they hit too close to home.

STORY - Solanin is about the quarter-life crisis: your quarter-life crisis, my quarter-life crisis. After graduating college, Meiko finds herself working as an “office lady.” The hours and pay are decent, but she doesn’t feel any connection towards what she does, her coworkers, or her boss. So she quits. How many other graduates find themselves wanting to do the same not long after starting their first job? We leave high school with the goal of finding something we want to do for the rest of our lives. We spend years in college or university trying to pinpoint what that is and to collect the necessary skills to pursue such a path. We graduate and find that the real world isn’t that easy. The time and money you spent on that degree may not help you get the job you want at all. All your work could have been irrelevant or the job you thought you wanted might not be what you expected after all.

Meiko flounders around her first couple of weeks without a job. She finds her freedom to be just as boring as her job had been. Direction is hard to find. “The rest of your life” is a scary thing to consider, but this story paces through a few months of that long journey. Solanin echos the twentysomething’s fears and worries very well, but is ambiguous in the answers it offers, if you choose to consider them answers at all. They are half-solutions, partially formed, and depend wildly on the person executing them. Solanin’s narrative feels very personal though, and despite that it’s very much a slice of life in that this is only a snapshot, the story feels complete. Growing up doesn’t happen between two predefined points. Meiko spends the story growing up, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t start long before the first chapter, and that doesn’t mean she’s grown up by the end. But she’s learned something.

The quarter-life crisis is a problem of self-identification, self-worth, and self-motivation. Who are we? Who do we want to be? What do we want to do? Why should we do anything at all? What is happiness? It is a coming of age problem that stretches on beyond the teenage years. So Solanin is about growing up, long after the ages at which we thought we’d already grown up. It is about life. It is about “saying goodbye to your past self.” We spend our whole lives growing up, always trying to figure out where exactly our childhood ended and when our adulthoods began.

CHARACTER - All of the characters in Solanin feel very real. Meiko could be anyone, absolutely anyone. The things she feels towards her job, the things she thinks and feels, her fears and doubts and hopes and pipedreams — I don’t know a single person her age that doesn’t think and feel at least half of the same things. This universality doesn’t detract from her identity though; Meiko is a person sorting out life in her own way. The decisions she makes are based on her own whims, and her failures and triumphs are hers to decide which are which. They could be anyone’s, but they are hers. The rest of the cast works in very much the same way. I feel like I could personally know Taneda, Kato, Jiro, Ai, or any of the others; they are all thoroughly convincing people and Solanin could have very easily been centered around any of them. The story details would differ then, but there would be very few thematic differences, if any. It’s fascinating that supporting characters could feel so in-depth and real despite only two volumes to develop in.

ART - Inio Asano has an oddly whimsical style. His girls in particular appear very childlike, which made it harder for me to see them as twentysomethings — kind of awkward for some scenes. Most of them were also very similar in design and body type, making them less visually interesting. His men were also rather young looking, but facial hair helped set a more convincing age range and widely varying body types made them seem more like real people. Regardless of stylistic drawbacks though, Asano’s artwork is very solid and all of his characters are wonderfully expressive; there’s a good balance between silly caricatures and serious faces as well. Many of the backgrounds felt like stock to me because the straight-up realism and details clashed a bit with the character art, but as the characters often interacted with their surroundings, it would have been impossible for all the backgrounds to be stock. Either way, all of the backgrounds fit in seamlessly and help emphasize that this is the real world — that these are real people facing their real problems in their own real ways.

OVERALL - Assuming I actually manage to scrape together all my credits and do it on time, I’ll be graduating college next spring. It’s easy to see why I could connect so well with the characters and story in Solanin. It’s every twentysomething’s story, even those that think they know what they’re doing (which, for the record, does not include me). My friends and I manage to talk about the future all the time without actually talking about the future, so it’s hilarious ironic that it takes a story like this to drive things in deeper for me. It isn’t like I hadn’t realized all of those questions and doubts before, but having them presented to me so clearly is like discovering them all over again. And it’s unnerving. And terrifying. And depressing. And something I’ll have to deal with again and again until I figure something out for myself. As I said, Solanin doesn’t really offer any answers, but there’s some kind of reassurance in that too. read more

Asano Inio's Solanin captures people in a pivotal moment in their lives. The early twenties. That awful precipitous moment of our lives when we are suddenly hit by pangs of self-doubt and uncertainty about our future, our path in life, all the more pangy because we've already been forced to study subjects we may or may not give a shit about and passed college and university and have been pushed into the wide world so there's no going back.

But there is going sideways. Speaking of sideways, Asano's stories feature elements that are so out of left-field it prevents his manga from falling into cliché, which is so easy to do because of the subject matter. The early twenties. That awfully awkward moment of our lives when we start consuming counter-culture entertainment like The Matrix and Fight Club endlessly reciting every bit of dialogue, reading Haruki Murakami, writing embarrasing poetry, dabbling in hobbies that could reap lots of fame and riches if we were to seriously pursue them but we don’t because it’s just a hobby that we're mediocre at. You couldn’t possibly make it to the big-time...right?

The character of Meiko is an office lady in this manga and she's at this stage of her life where she's sick of routine so she takes a leap into unknown waters and quits her job. An act that is more courageous in Japan than it is elsewhere, being that the country has such a rigid social order about it. Her losing her job puts pressure and a burden on her part-timer boyfriend who's dabbling in music with two college buddies. Could he pursue his hobby and make it big thus saving the both of them from impending poverty?

Her act of quitting sets in motion a collage of choices and events that propels the two through unknown waters, and although it’s scary it’s still life-affirming as in this century it takes courage to confront your own identity and purpose in life and ask yourself outright: am I happy? Can I change my life?

Asano's stories would drip with cliché and hackneyed nonsense in another author's hands; they are so ripe for rolling your eyes at. But Solanin is fresh, adult, funny, compelling and emotional. It manages to roll up those moments of our early twenties into two volumes of heart-felt drama presented in what is now a typically Asano fashion.

The humour is random and inspired, the dialogue is witty and honest, the story is realistic in scope and execution, the art is fantastic and full of memorable imagery that, again, avoids the easy and lazy route other authors would walk.

Asano's route is straight to your heart and his purpose is to make it sing Solanin. Read the manga with Shugo Tokumaru’s ‘Exit’ album playing and sing out loud. read more