The manga presents the story of three young people (Tomomi Nomiya; Kiyoharu Togawa and Hisanobu Takahashi) whose lives are intertwined by basketball, drama and immeasurable tragedy.
Nomiya is a boy who loves basketball but drops out of school after getting involved in a serious accident; Togawa is a wheelchair user who also loves the sport, an extremely competitive person but who still has fears and regrets about his life, and Hisanobu is a not-so-nice guy, captain of the basketball team at the same school he attends. Nomiya was part of it, but suddenly his life is completely transformed due to a certain calamity.
In the plot, we will see how the three boys relate to sport – all the love for the game and training – and how they live (seeking to overcome themselves) even under the aegis of despair and the imponderable.
Real is – at first glance – a generic manga like any other, in which we will see characters who love what they practice and who have their lives connected to it, seeking to improve themselves and trying to become the best of all. However, there is something clear and precious because it will not only deal with basketball itself, it will deal with wheelchair basketball and the way society and the players themselves see it. More than that, it will show us how people deal with real heartbreaking problems and try to accept and overcome events and their limitations.
This first volume is an introduction to the story and – although carrying out an analysis of it alone is not very fruitful – it already lays the foundations of a narrative that tends to be touching, sad and even terrifying for some, with the characters involved by the tragedy and the drama emerging at every moment. The plot begins, for example, with Nomiya out of school, after a motorcycle accident that left a girl who was with him paraplegic. With the world at his back, he will try to live with the anguish of what he has done and the traumas arising from it, while at the same time, he will need to find a place in the world.
Although he has the characteristic of being tough and cool, he is not unlike any other person who flirts with misfortune and ends up feeling guilty for what happened to the girl. He is afraid of traffic due to the accident and, in the middle of everything, he still has to work to survive. And it is in this context that his initial lifeline is basketball, or rather the encounter with a great player in the sport, Kiyoharu Togawa, a young man who, sitting in his wheelchair, manages to play much better than Nomiya.
Although he gets into several fights during the volume (one of which, at the end of the first volume is quite intense), basketball and the encounter with Togawa make Tomomi manage to survive, even though the fears and traumas remain, even though his personality stays present.
The introduction that this volume gives us is some of Togawa's history as well. Togawa is a young man who had one of his legs amputated, in the past, due to illness and has been using a wheelchair for a long time, having found salvation in wheelchair basketball.
Not only that, basketball becomes so important that he wants more than just playing, more than just having fun, he wants to win and he wants to be the best. In other words, he is a character who comes ready-made, with all his baggage from the past tragedy, now seeking to go further. In the meantime, he even uses his drama for his benefit (I can't say more because of the spoiler).
His big dilemma is precisely not being with people who also want to win. We soon discover that he left the wheelchair basketball team he was part of because his teammates just wanted to have fun and were happy even after a loss. One of the most striking scenes is exactly this, with Togawa hearing from one of his companions that they shouldn't care so much because nothing would change in their lives since they were wheelchair users. This is an emblematic moment, as it opposes Togawa's thinking, who wanted more and more, despite his physical limitations.
Despite everything, we see in Togawa still traces of the things that happened to him. In particular, he finds it difficult to accept help, thinking that it interferes with the lives of other people with whom he lives.
We couldn't stop talking about the last figure of the plot's triad, Hisanobu Takahashi. And the best definition of him is a person who is hateful, bad, lazy, treating others badly, etc, etc. Typical bad boy. But there is a turn in the story: after stealing a bicycle, he ends up being run over and becomes paraplegic.
If at the beginning of the plot, the great drama is about Nomiya, from the middle to the end, Takahashi is the star of the tragedy that takes over.
We will see him in a regrettable situation, unimaginable until then, having to deal with something and things that greatly affect his psychology.
And Real is basically that, an exacerbated drama that affects the characters at the same time that the basketball game is their soul, the strength necessary for them to fight. Despite his hurts and limitations, Togawa will be there playing for fun (and for money) despite being the cause of an accident, Nomiya will be fighting to get things going and so on.
Although it is a story originally intended for the Japanese public, Real brings a universal image of how we often see people with disabilities, with pity, as incapable and so on. A clear case, in this sense, occurs when Togawa goes to play basketball at certain times and everyone thinks he is poor, taking it easy on him because he is a wheelchair user. The move is right there, as we see the boy in a very athletic way and better than several players without any disabilities.
And perhaps therein lies the great point of the manga.
It makes us think about ourselves, think about how we see paraplegic people and how we would react in a similar situation. By presenting several people who have learned or are learning to deal with a certain condition, the story puts us in an impasse situation, which can make us feel sad about the situations shown and empathize with the characters at the same time that it can make us be scared of that.
Real inserts a little finger in the wound. It makes us reason about things that we try to forget most of the time, that we are not used to seeing in the manga, and that is one of the great qualities of this work.
Finally, remember what I said earlier: this story has a great introduction that smoothes the rough edges of the story. Even so, it is clear right away that Real is a work that speaks deeply – it touches on essential and uncomfortable points – and the whole development of characters seems to show us that the intensity of things tends to increase.
Real is one of those titles that are almost essential for comic book readers those that make us think about life, despair, happiness, fear and most importantly, not judging people just because they are different from us. We need to have empathy and help people because, in their minds, they are fighting a gigantic war to survive.
