Boys on the Run

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“I’m truly very sorry. Seems I ruined your humble little life.”

Welcome to Boys on the Run, a manga serialized from 2005 to 2008 in Big Comic Spirits that tells a story about the life of our twenty-six year old protagonist, Tanishi. A self-aware, self-deprecating employee at a toy company whose main responsibilities in life up to this point have been to make sure that the vending machines across various businesses are stocked. As you might have been able to tell from that description, the job is not an exciting one, Tanishi’s life up to when we are introduced to him, is not an exciting one, ... and so what is he going to do about that? Nothing, not one thing is he going to do in order to change the situation that he’s in because to him, well, that’s quite alright. See our meek little protagonist is very aware of the crushing reality that surrounds his existence. He’s a twenty-six, going on twenty-seven year old man who works at a small-time toy company, lives with his parents at home, and whose only strong connection with people of the opposite sex is through various teleclubs (places where you pay to receive calls from women who would be willing to go on a date with you) and the one female coworker at his job who he happens to have a crush on but at the same time interacts with her about as a well as you think someone with a life like his would. This all changes one day as he’s going about restocking the vending machines around Akihabara and he runs into an employee from a rival toy company, when their friendship is struck, so is the match that ignites the spark of this marvelous story.

The first thing I’d like to comment on is the characters of the story, there are many that we meet and are introduced to throughout the one-hundred and sixteen chapters that take up this manga and they all have their own role to play in the story. There is not one character that the author, Kengo Hanazawa, brings into the story that doesn’t influence the story in some way. Whether it be the man from the yakuza who’s in a dom & sub relationship with a teleclub member, or the deaf female trainer who works at the boxing gym, and even the constantly drunk older coworker at Tanishi’s job. All of these characters I’ve just listed, even though they’re not all major characters in the story, have a role to play in not just Tanishi’s life, but in their own life as well. That’s the thing about this story, the main goal as you might have guessed, is about Tanishi improving his life in some major way, however as the story goes on we are presented with many smaller goals that pop up along the way of our protagonists journey, and where other stories might have the protagonist helping out or playing some role in each and every one of these smaller goals, in Boys on the Run these other characters couldn’t care less about Tanishi, they all have their own fleshed out personalities and backstories that fill up the world that this story takes place in.

With Tanishi we have our protagonist and main character, and then there’s pretty much everyone else. That’s not to say everyone else is a “minor character” per say, it’s just that for about ninety-seven percent of the story we are only seeing things through his eyes, and following what he does, and because of this, and because of his general mindset on the various aspects of his life, we don’t always get to see what’s going on, things that have to do with other characters are implied instead of being shown, brought up in passing instead of focused on, and all the times this happens it helps to add a layer of realism to an already grounded story. The important thing to come away from this with is that there’s a colorful cast in “Boys on the Run” and one that doesn’t feel under-utilized in any way. Every one of the characters that comes into Tanishi’s life has their own life to live, and while watching him develop, you will also see them developing in their own ways at the same time. In a way it’s like an equivalent exchange between Tanishi, and the people who he’s crossed paths with, while they might not always be interacting with each other, the “rubbing of shoulders” that comes from their sometimes brief interactions does result in a lingering effect that shapes their development in ways that you won’t always see right away, in ways that once revealed or shown, will make you want to smack your forehead from how natural and genius it was pulled off, and that’s the real genius in this story’s characters, and their development.

But that’s only one part, another aspect of this manga is its art. The characters themselves all have a general shared style that is having a rounded and plain look to themselves, you won’t really see any characters pop up in this story with super chiseled features or a really defined body and that seems to be somewhat of a trait shared across the author’s works, at least with the faces. In a way it is a detractor because with some characters, mainly the females, it can be hard at first to tell them apart, however this isn’t a persistent issue and with the general variety in body shapes seen it quickly is forgotten. Otherwise the fight choreography is well-done, fights that happen in this story are all easy to follow and this can be pointed to as a side effect from the general simplicity of the character designs, or that the author just has a good grasp on how to properly map out a fight. Another small aspect that deserves some attention brought to it is the backgrounds, most of the time the backgrounds are left to be about as a plain, if not more so than the character designs themselves, as to not pull attention away from what the characters are saying and doing in each panel, however there are some moments where the backgrounds really stand out and this ties into what I really would like to touch upon, the paneling. Not the format of the paneling itself but the actual usage of the panels, there are a few moments scattered throughout the manga where we are presented with a textless panel that focus in on a specific detail in order to highlight its importance to the reader. It’s these textless scenes where emotion is forthright and the strength in Hanazawa’s skill as a writer, and as an artist, are shown to full effect. However these textless panels aren’t the only moments where emotion is captured well, this is a manga all about experiencing the different aspects of life, and no matter if it’s a dramatic or comedic moment, the emotions displayed on our characters during them hold a weight to them that is not soon forgotten. There are moments and scenes during the story that will have you remembering them long past the chapters end, and it’s that sticking power which elevates the manga as a whole to that of a masterpiece.

Speaking of the story, Boys on the Run executes its story perfectly, this is not your story of: boy has goal, boy works toward goal while overcoming the bumps along the way, boy finally reaches goal. instead we get the complex story of a man who so badly wishes to break free from the shackles of his current life, yet is unable to do so at any opportunity presented. This causes a lot of frustration, and I’m not just speaking from a reader’s standpoint, Tanishi constantly has the window of opportunity open before him but before he’s able to actually step through the mental block comes and it shuts off any opportunity for progress, and this happens constantly, as the reader you sit there screaming for him to just take that extra step, to finally flip the switch, but he won’t. As the reader this is very aggravating and where some commonly seen frustrations of the manga stem from, the fact that Tanishi is a weak-willed wimp of an mc is often times seen as the largest negative to this work because the way he is portrayed is done so perfectly. The author knows full well what he’s doing, every contradiction that comes from his mouth, every action, it all stems from the idea that he is just not worth it. See while there are a large amount of people who dislike Tanishi, none of them compare to the hate and disgust felt by the man himself. He is painfully aware of his shortcomings and missteps but he is unable to do anything about it, at least by himself.

The main plot device of the manga, or rather “devices” that move the plot forward are the women who Tanishi interacts with. Without them Tanishi wouldn’t get anywhere in this story, he bases everything in his life around them, should he clean up in order to look better for one? Should he start working out in order to impress them with looks? Or just be there for them any moment they need? He plays the role of a very subservient man, his existence up to that point has been devoid of an actual relationship with a female so when he starts to catch feelings for one, it not only pushes the story in a certain direction, but it pushes him to also better himself. This is also reflected in the differences between how the men and women are handled as characters. For a lot of the men we meet they generally have a specific role they play and it doesn’t really change from that, overall they have a smaller impact and role to play in the grand scheme of things, whereas with the female characters we see them looked at with a focus that is lacking in their male counterparts. But this isn’t a bad thing or a result of poor storytelling, in fact it is a nearly direct representation of how Tanishi views the two through his own eyes.

It’s through all of these different aspects that we see how tightly woven together this manga really is. So if you’re able to sympathize, understand, or even just try to grasp the mindset of Tanishi then you’re in for a treat. He’s not an easy character to like, almost none of the characters are, and some are made specifically with that in mind but you have to understand it isn’t just Tanishi’s life you’re reading about when you see him take the actions that he does, it’s about every single of those who pop up along the way as he’s figuring his life out. Without a doubt if you want to see a story whose characters hit too close to home, whose actions can take you on a trip down memory lane, and whose effects linger long beyond the last page, then I recommend you give Boys on the Run a read.

Ah I sure do love "Struggle Tweets (before struggletweets existed): the manga." Because no matter how often I took a gut punch in the feels department, no matter how angry I got over character actions, no matter how frustrating it might be to essentially watch a man be beaten down over and over again without learning a single fucking thing, I can't say that it was because this manga was poorly written. Like it or not, Kengo Hanazawa sure knows how to wright real characters with a hyperbolic spin: losers, assholes, and good people alike. And he sure knows how to draw too, every background ... looks amazing in contrast to the cartoonish characters. Only reason this gets an 8 instead of a 9 is because the epilogue pissed me off even if it fell in with the theme of the mc constantly getting the worst luck thrown upon him. Not that it is especially bad for people who grow concerns over this, it is still pretty satisfying.

tl;dr: A manga that’s mostly just the character screwing up and suffering, though in a pretty well written way that makes it pretty interesting.

This manga is not one that is supposed to make you feel happy or satisfied, at least not long term. It does have moments that may seem to hit such positive emotional beats, but they’re pretty much always there for a stronger negative emotional beat to build off of. Rather, the moments that do have a lasting positive feeling are the ones that are bittersweet, wherein the sense of happiness of satisfaction is so marred by complications that it’s greatly subdued. But ... in the see of pain that is the majority of the manga, those moments still stand out.

The mangaka very clearly isn’t afraid to put his characters through the wringer and make them suffer. And this very much includes the protagonist. Everyone in the manga has messed up parts to them, even the most normal of characters. Everyone suffers, and in return they make others suffer. The protagonist just wants to be happy and feel like he matters, but that’s not as simple as it sounds and a goal forever past his reach. He works hard for it, but the ways he works hard for it are pretty much always just barking up the wrong tree. They never actually improve things for him at all, rather they mostly just make things worse. The protagonist is a mess, but a believable mess, and one that’s easy to empathize with, even if he clearly is being incredibly dumb a lot. So, you can’t just hope for him to finally get his break and for things to finally go his way for once. They never really do though, even if they seem like they are.

Still, despite everything, he slowly but steadily does make progress during the second half. The implication there being that he makes absolutely none in the first half. The first half of the manga is just the protagonist getting screwed around with by everything and screwing up everything in return. I suppose that the aim of this half of the manga was to convey what sort of mindset the protagonist has and to get the reader invested in him despite his faults. The protagonist having no idea what’s going on and being directionless is a key aspect of this half of the manga, which results in it feeling like it dragging on and longer than necessary. Though I suppose this was necessary to a degree, to really convey how pointless everything is, though still important from a thematic point of view because it’s not just pointless but also a waste of the protagonist’s life, and I suppose wasting the readers time is an easy way of getting that across.

Now returning to the second half, it moves along much faster and there is very clear progress that leads to a clear conclusion. However, I would have to say this half went too fast, especially towards the final stretch where it basically felt like it was just sprinting towards the finish line and not really paying much attention to anything along the way. The ending especially, it felt like it completely glossed over and while that in and of itself it made for a pretty satisfying ending, the speed at which it just sped through it diminished that tremendously. The epilogue I suppose made it clear why it did so, because even with it’s faults, I suppose the ending was too happy or satisfying for the manga, and it needed to throw one last gut punch to diminish, though not completely extinguish, even that.

The art is gritty and generally gross, but it’s clearly supposed to be. There are rare times that it looks nice, so it clearly can, but the vast majority of the time it wouldn’t fit for it to be so, and so it simply isn’t. The art quality is somewhat hard to judge because of this, but overall I’d say it’s fine and works at what it needs to do.