Hourou Musuko

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Alternative Titles

Synonyms: The Transient Son

Japanese: 放浪息子

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Information

Type: Manga

Volumes: 15

Chapters: 123

Status: Finished

Published: Nov 12, 2002 to Jul 12, 2013

Genres: Drama, Romance

Theme: School

Demographic: Seinen

Serialization: Comic Beam

Authors: Shimura, Takako (Story & Art)

Statistics

Score: 8.20¹ (scored by 9,533 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #461²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #640

Members: 31,534

Favorites: 1,315

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Wikipedia

8.20

Ranked #461Popularity #640Members 31,534

MangaComic BeamShimura, Takako (Story & Art)

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Volumes: /15

Chapters: /123

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Synopsis

Shuuichi Nitori is a 5th grade student who likes to bake and has always been something of a feminine boy. When he transfers to a new school, Shuuichi is mistaken for his 6th grade sister on his first day. Then he ends up sitting next to Yoshino Takatsuki, a tall, boyish girl who everyone calls "Takatsuki-kun." They both have secrets they can't let anyone know...

The series deals with issues such as being transgender, gender identity, and the beginning of puberty.

(Source: Kotonoha, edited)

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Background

Hourou Musuko was selected as a recommended work in the manga division by the jury in the 10th and 17th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2006 and 2013 respectively. It was also nominated for the 2012 Great Graphic Novels for Teens list by the Young Adult Library Services Association.

The series has been published in English as Wandering Son by Fantagraphic Books in hardcover format since July 5, 2011.

Hourou Musuko received an 11-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2011.

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Characters

Nitori, Shuuichi

Main

Takatsuki, Yoshino

Main

Chiba, Saori

Main

Ariga, Makoto

Main

Suehiro, Anna

Supporting

Yoshida, Hiroyuki

Supporting

Sarashina, Chizuru

Supporting

Nitori, Maho

Supporting

Sasa, Kanako

Supporting

Doi, Shinpei

Supporting

Reviews

Aug 19, 2018

somaisbatman

Recommended

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.

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Aug 1, 2019

shysnail

Mixed Feelings

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 ...

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Jan 26, 2025

Nyaarlothotep

Not Recommended

At the core of Wandering Son lies a deep tragedy - Shuuichi Nitori wants to be a girl, and Yoshino Tatatsuki wants to be a boy, but the older they get, the farther their bodies drift from how they wish to present themselves. The march of time becomes a source of intense suffering for our protagonists, an omnipresent thread of depression constantly following the two as they slowly but surely transition from childhood to adulthood. It's not really the kind of thing I normally read, but as someone who enjoys sad stories it seemed like it was worth a shot.

If the story was able to ... hold a focus on that, it could have easily been a 9/10 or even a 10/10. Unfortunately, it rapidly becomes bogged down by the introduction of over a dozen side characters, most of which have their own subplots that are often tangentially connected to the main characters at best. The initial love triangle soon morphs into more of a love dodecahedron, and the pacing of the story slows to a crawl as it seems to devote fewer and fewer pages to its initial concept.

Yoshino's story is hit particularly hard by this. Despite being presumably the deuteragonist of the manga, the character's struggles end up buried amongst all the side stories, and the related chapters begin to feel more like a distant and fragmented part of Shuu's life than a full examination of Yoshino's. It's a real shame, because the most touching moments in the story involve the duo playing off each other, the shared aspects of their sorrow throwing a spotlight on the differing ways that it has affected their lives.

In some ways, this missed opportunity is more saddening than what the story shows us of the main plot's central conflict. The beginning of the story shows a lot of promise, very quickly establishing the pain Shuuichi and Yoshino are experiencing in a way that even someone who has not struggled with their gender identity can empathize with. Watching Shuuichi stare longingly at a pretty dress hanging just out of reach, or seeing Yoshino react with elation after being hit on by a woman in public are where the manga really is at its best, but scenes like those grow farther and farther apart as each new character is introduced to the plot. The art, while mostly serviceable, begins to struggle to differentiate many of these characters, and as the story progresses it sometimes becomes a challenge to remember whether a character in the panel is a newly introduced background character or an established one who just happened to be the focus of an earlier subplot that wasn't particularly memorable.

In the end, Wandering Son ends up as a story that is much better in concept than execution. It brings a forward both a unique and interesting perspective on the experience of growing up, but struggles to express that perspective in a clear and concise way. I did enjoy many of the lighthearted slice-of-life moments, and appreciated the attempt to create a balanced perspective on the ups and downs of getting older rather than being a non-stop barrage of pain. Still, I feel like the story would have benefited immensely from keeping a tighter focus on the two main characters, and slimming down the cast to a relatively small amount of supporting characters for the pair to play off of.

In the end, I don't think I would really recommend the manga. At its best, it is an intensely touching story about characters who do their best to seek happiness despite that search often requiring them to struggle against forces completely out of their control. At its worst, it is a confused attempt to tell many stories at once without giving any of them the necessary attention required to do so effectively. If the concept interests you, go ahead and read it - it's not like there are many other options for this type of story in the manga sphere (at least with regards to the ones that have been translated into English). However, in the end, despite some good emotional moments, it ends up a confused mess with an author that seems to have little idea what kind of story they would like to write.

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