Hourou Musuko
Wandering Son

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After having a tough time getting into the series and having to restart a few times, I raced through the second half of Wandering Son in a single day. Now I’m just lying here in a haze, trying to collect myself into a human being again. I feel like this writeup is a necessary step in the process. Let’s do this.

Wandering Son, or Hourou Musuko, is a manga about the self. It's extremely introverted, with characters lost in thought, staying home from school, and mulling over their anxieties all the time. When a character makes a particularly bold decision, they’re often ridiculed and punished for ... it. There’s always other stuff going on, but most of these bold decisions are about gender identity. This is a manga, perhaps THE manga in the eyes of many, about dysphoria and being transgender. The uniqueness of Wandering Son is that it starts our cast off in elementary school, right before the onset of puberty. This gives us a different perspective than many other trans mangas, which star college-aged characters grappling with their identity while being young adults. But wow, this is a uniquely brutal perspective.

At the start of the manga we are shown our main characters, Nitori Shuuichi and Takatsuki Yoshino. Shuuichi wants to dress like a girl and Yoshino wants to dress like a boy. Pretty early on, Yoshino’s identity issues are sidelined so the plot can zero in on Shuuichi - compared to everyone else, he’s suffering immensely. He’s trapped in a world that doesn’t know how to help girls like him, but even he doesn’t know that yet. However, his world seems to be built perfectly around enabling his crossdressing, from friends that keep encouraging him to endless school festivals revolving around gender-swapped plays. Unlike other mangas, our trans character here is not deeply repressed, which makes the relentless march of time all the more painful to watch.

Going into Wandering Son, I didn’t realize that we would see these kids grow up all the way from sixth grade to the end of high school. Instead of timeskips or focusing on a single year, our cast just keeps gaining years. You know how in a lot of anime and manga, high school graduation almost feels like a metaphor for death? For once, that implication actually carries some extra meaning. Puberty stops for no one, and with every passing year our protagonist Shuuichi will be less and less able to convincingly present as female. Throughout these 123 chapters, we see Shuuichi grow, not okay with any of the physical developments happening to him but unable to do anything. This is cruel and painful, especially as a trans woman who went through the exact same motions, just more internalized.

If you read through Wandering Son with the adolescence of Shuuchi as your guiding narrative thread, you will end up with a truly existentially depressing manga. Seriously, this perspective is more personally painful to me than anything even Goodnight Punpun can conjure up. It’s a good thing there are other, more palatable narrative threads woven throughout. Yoshino’s story, for one, never reaches these levels of anguish. Their classmates have fights and relationships and arcs. The adults in this story stand out a lot – more on some of them later. And last but not least, there’s a wonderful slow-burning romance throughout the second half of the manga. Shuuchi having friends and lovers through all of this is the authors’s greatest act of kindness throughout the story, reminding us that even people who are very clearly suffering still deserve and will find people who support them. This is a very important message for any dysphoric people who find this manga and want to use it as solace.

*********************SOME ENDING SPOILERS BELOW***********************

But still…this is not a very hopeful manga. At least it isn’t to me.
Shuuichi gets the girl, so that’s a happy ending, right? Except every little bit of subtext is arguing the exact opposite. Let me explain further. Shuuchi meets 2 adult trans women throughout the series. The first is young, pretty, and lives happily with her husband. This seems like the perfect role model for Shuuchi and any dysphoric readers! A beacon of hope that yes, it is possible to transition and live a great life. But she kind of stops being an influencing voice for Shuuchi, for whatever reason. Instead in the manga’s endgame we are introduced to an older closeted trans person. Living as a husband and father for all these years, after their wife’s death they took to crossdressing in her clothes. This character is totally unable to pass. In a sense she doesn’t care, although she worries immensely about how her young daughter will view her. Forgive my weird pronouns throughout that. Anyways, compared to the first trans woman this is a character we are clearly supposed to feel pity for, unable to pass in a world where passing means everything, and burdened with single fatherhood at that too. I would love to comment more on the specific hardships of transitioning at an older age, but alas I lack knowledge of that experience. This old woman shows up in the third-to-last chapter, so clearly she’s meant to represent something. As Shuuchi grows older and older we mentally associate him with her instead of the younger trans woman. Shuuchi’s love interest even makes a passing remark about being okay with dating a weird crossdresser well into old age, which is kind of cute but also reinforces that Shuuchi will never be able to truly transition and will be stuck uncomfortably as a man, feeling like a crossdresser instead of a “real woman”. This is immensely depressing. I’m lucky as all hell to have the resources and social ability to start transitioning as a young adult. Too see the subtextual conclusion of this manga boil down to “yeah, Shuuchi is forever stuck as a boy wanting to be a girl, but that’s kind of okay” feels like a punch in the gut. This is a very good author who is able to write to the trans experience impressively well for being a cis woman. However, for the love of me I can’t tell if she intended the ending to be this melancholy or if I accidentally extracted an extra layer of suffering out of it. It doesn’t matter, this is how I still feel at the end of the day. This is my ultimate takeaway from Wandering Son, and it’s what tore me apart. I’m sorry if my feelings are unrelatable or if my writing style was accidentally problematic or if my takeaways are just plain wrong. I wanted to make my wallowing as productive as can be and this writeup/explanation is what I settled on. So thanks for sticking through it.

************************END OF SPOILERS***************************


Wandering Son is good, I think. It’s not as deeply relatable for me as some other trans-themed mangas, but it’s still a worthwhile read with a unique youth perspective. It’s not fetishistic, instead it’s both sympathetic and cruel in oscillating doses. If you can relate strongly to the dysphoria stuff in this manga, then that’s wonderful. But don’t be fatalistic about your assigned gender, even if the manga seems to be towards Shuuchi. A happy future may seem impossible right now, but one day Things Will Be Better.

If there's one word to describe Hourou Musuko, it's meandering. It's long, and it feels long. You cover a group of kids' entire school days in the span of the manga, which is pretty impressive. In that way, you do grow attached to the characters. They're with you for so long that they become very familiar.

And I think they will be with you a long time, because this really isn't a manga to storm through in a couple of "can't wait for the next chapter, must keep reading!" sittings. There aren't many cliffhangers, and the pace can seem quite glacial at times, circling back on ... itself, or fixated on small things. That's not to say that Hourou Musuko doesn't have high points where it's a joy to experience, it does. They're just scattered throughout quite a long span, so you're likely going to pace yourself with this series.

The themes are quite complex, and handled delicately. To some extent, I wanted the author to bite right in, instead of nibbling around the edges, but I guess it does build up the tone of kids trying to figure themselves out quite well. The tone is absolutely slice-of-life, with underlying plots running as themes throughout, but often not being the main focus.

Story: Trans kids growing up and going through puberty.

Actual story: Young kids being confused about gender identity because they don't fit their own gender's norms and attribuating it to not being their sex. Also, transgender girls being taken more seriously kinda, even though the kiddo isn't a trans girl but a crossdresssing boy.


It seems really liked and hyped, especially by the lgbt community, probably cuz there isn't anything else that is so openly ''trans'' with its story setting.
It's not a trans story though, so I don't get the praise for that specific aspect. It's a story about kids being confused and not conforming to ... what people expect of them in term of gender roles rather. Which is good for japan since they are kinda uptight about it I've heard, but it's not a trans story in any way AT ALL.

Alternative translated mangas:
Hommonculus did the trans aspect way better, in less time, and it's not at all a ''trans story''. There also is I.S, an intersex manga which def isn't good, did a similar thing but way better. Even tasagore (or somthing) does a better job, with the trans guy (the trans girl is kinda meh) and that manga is WAY overhyped and really boring and archetypal (the boring part is my opinion, but it's def not 10/10 good at all objectively either). Only good trans story would be Kanojo ni Naritai Kimi to Boku. (so far, might suck with later chapters)
Ah and the zombieland one is supposed to have a transgirl in... I dunno, dropped the thing.


Pros:
-The art could be enjoyable for someone that likes cutesy/ more innoncent looking art. It's really simple but mostly well done.
-The concept that it aimed to achieve isn't common, even if the attempt is quite frankly really, really misinformed and not the reality of real transgender guys and girls. Kinda is what someone that doesn't know anything about it transgenderism would think trans is rather that a realistic story about the subject.
-The slice of life parts are fine if you remove the ''transgender'' component. It's about young kids being confused and lost with themselves.

Cons:
-Dreadful piss-poor trans representation (but it's a good crossdresser/gender noncomformity story I guess.)
-Characters are quite forgetable and could have been explored in better ways, and not with a trans angle, since it failed miserably in the aspect. The feel bland and charicatural, rather than complex and realistic.

So if you came hoping for a trans slice of life, honestly, don't bother at all. Unless you want to read what not to do about this topic.
If you came to see a crossdresssing and kids being vonfused about gender (more of a girly guy/ tomboy chick story dynamic), please go ahead and enjoy your reading time.
p.s.: sorry for any typos xd