Title: Hourou Musuko (”The Transient Son” / 放浪息子)
Mangaka: Takako Shimura / 志村貴子
Originally Serialized in: Comic Beam (Enter Brain)
Scanlated by: Kotonoha
Nitori has always been a bit of a girly kind of boy. He likes to cook, he’s sensative and has little in common with the other 5th-grade boys. He’s even cuter than his older sister, Maho, who wants to be a model. Saori Chiba is a classmate who seems to understand him, but mostly just likes dressing him up. He strikes up a friendship with Takatsuki, a tall girl who is very much a tomboy and who everyone calls “Takatsuki-kun”. They meet and befriend a gorgeous
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 Alternative TitlesSynonyms: The Transient Son Japanese: 放浪息子 More titlesInformationType: Manga
Volumes: 15
Chapters: 123
Status: Finished
Published: Nov 12, 2002 to Jul 12, 2013
Theme:
School
Demographic:
Seinen
Serialization:
Comic Beam Authors:
Shimura, Takako (Story & Art) Statistics Ranked: #4212 2 based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded. Popularity: #621
Members: 30,380
Favorites: 1,299 Resources | Reviews
Filtered Results: 21 / 22
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Aug 19, 2018
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 ... 
Nov 27, 2010
From the standpoint of a storyteller, the slice of life genre is the biggest you can use and because it's slice of life it can make for a long story. The problem however, is that the genre is almost always filled with generic things. You'll get a protagonist in a high school full of tropes, and despite what the writer might want you to believe, if you've watch or read slice of life then you've probably seen it all before. That's where Hourou Musuko stands out. While it is slice of life, it is more specifically the characters' life, which makes it one of few
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Feb 10, 2018
I would say if you've ever struggled with your gender identity you have to read this. If you've never struggled with your gender identity, you still have to read this it's so good.
Ok so, the review, i read this whole series over the course of two days and it destroyed me emotionally. I think the ways in which the two main characters struggle with their gender identities is shockingly real and hit incredibly close to home for me. I'm a trans girl and like I have never found a character who I can see myself so clearly in. I think the characters and their growth ... 
Apr 5, 2023
Although I speedread this in only 2 days I'll give my best to review this
This is for me a hugely relevant in today's generation especially it is heavily focused on gender identity and anything LGBTQ+ All I can say that it is a rollercoaster of a story, as stated in the manga time is indeed unfair and as time went by their perspective on themselves changes, ones want to be themselves while one still wants to. . . . . Each character have their own respective character development which is great considering that they were being discriminate at middle part of the story. If you Like ... 
Apr 27, 2009
Hourou Musuko or The Transient Son is a beautiful slice of life story that you can relate to and seems so realistic.
It's about Nitori Suuichi, a boy who not only looks cute as a girl but seems so well suited as one. Thing is, he does want to become a girl. And his friend, Takatsuki Yoshino is quite the opposite. She is a girl who wants to become a boy... Story: 9 When I first looked at this manga I first thought 'ewww, there are gays in here!'. Man was I wrong. The story is so realistic you can't help but continue to read. Not everyone has ... 
Mar 10, 2019
Sexuality and gender orientation is the topic debated for many generations and is also still continuing.
This manga is a story about a guy named Shuuichi Nitori (Shuu) who has a best friend(a girl) named Yoshino Takatsuki who wants to be a boy, so she makes him wear her clothes instead of her. Although a bit reluctant at first but also interested, Shuu starts cross-dressing on the demands of her, various friends and even his sister as they all admire his cute personality. What started as a fun habit or for admiration, later leads to a point which makes him question his gender orientation. So as to ... 
Nov 20, 2018
I'll just start by saying this: I've never seen any media, manga or otherwise, deal with trans youth as well as this series. The messy, confusing and difficult nature of handling the transition through puberty as a sexual minority is handled here with nothing held back, characters are not locked into stereotypes but grow and change as they mature to the point where they are scarcely recognizable by the series' end. If that premise alone interests you it is a must-read. That being said I will stop short of calling it a masterpiece due to some issues with the way the plot progresses and is
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Aug 1, 2019
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 ... 
Sep 2, 2020
Spoilers bellow
-- I have a soft spot for Shimura Takako's idiosyncrasies as a writer. She tells mundane stories about mundane people - even if the subject matter is something fantastical, like "Sayonara, Otokonoko", it's still told in a way that resembles everyday life - but the way she does it is not very conventional in itself. The story is always jumping from present to past and then to present again, from a real situation to a imaginary one, from reality to dream. Sometimes a conversation is being held by two characters and in the next panel - without warning or proper closure - different characters are ... 
Apr 10, 2023
Ah idk, im not gonna talk about how accurate this is from a trans point of view since im not trans, but im not cis either (and afab while at it) so it still left a bad after taste in my mouth. I'll talk about more general things instead.
First off, it seems this manga suffers from the very same thing most manga about trans characters written by cisgender people suffer, which is a very dragging negativity. Not to say hardships aren't part of what comes with existing as someone out of the binary gender, but now that there's more trans authors coming forth with their ... 
Aug 22, 2021
Hourou Musuko can be described with one single word upon finishing it, dissapointing.
Throughout the years I've heard tons of praise towards this manga and at first I was convinced they were true, the first part of the manga was really engaging even when it focused on stuff that wasn't related to any transgender or gender identity/sexual identity issues...But then they go to middle school and it loses focus quick. Anybody wanting to look into this for it's LGBT+ themes, I'm sorry to say that the story doesn't revolve around it too much. It's more so a friend group drama with the occasional hints at transgender or ... 
Apr 1, 2023
A story following two trans kids as they grow up, figure themselves out, make new relationships, and go through their adolescence.
Both main characters are very endearing, and the reader only gets more attached to them as they watch them grow. It's really revolutionary to see a manga addressing being trans as a kid, (instead of showing it as a choice, a phase, or something that only shows up when you're an adult) to show what it's like going through puberty as a transgender individual, as well as other aspects of being trans (such as learning about binding, going in and out of denial, feeling alone, etc), ... 
Jul 12, 2021
It was pride month and I was just binging a bunch of LGBTQ mangas when I stumbled upon this one from a random person's list and... Whoa does this manga confusing, both literally and figuratively.
It's difficult for me to even rate this manga as I'm cis-gendered and I don't know how accurate are the trans depiction here is. But the thing that I can say is, this manga do be trippy. Sometimes we would jump from one scene and go back, then jump again, then a character is talking about something, then it just cuts off, or we will even follow some random ass character's ... 
Nov 19, 2021
The story primarily follows two students as they develop their gender identity from the last year of elementary school to the end of high school: one a boy wanting to be a girl; the other a girl wanting to be a boy. They are faced with the reality of puberty redefining their bodies in an unwanted way, losing the ability to outwardly be who they are. Whilst fundamentally their path is the same they are treated differently by society, the boy ridiculed as a pervert and the girl seen as a fashionable rebel. This feels like an earnest look at these struggles for people with
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Jul 21, 2020
For the last year or so, I've been thinking about the power of telling stories. Stepping into the shoes of a character we may be unfamiliar with in our own lives and seeing the world through their eyes does more for educating than emotionless facts and statistics ever could. Whenever someone asks me what fictitious story has most changed my life, I immediately think of Hourou Musuko. This is truly an incredible read, and I highly recommend it for everyone, regardless of whether you are completely ignorant of trans people or you feel like you already know more than enough.
TLDR: This story does an amazing ... 
Oct 17, 2023
Being completely honest I almost dropped this. After reading almost 60 chapters it felt like there was little progress made, and now that I'm done, I'm really glad I didn't drop it. The story (Without major spoiling, I hate spoilers) is about a girl who wants to be a guy, and a guy who wants to be a girl. As the story progresses they start to unravel their true feelings and what the desire. To truly understand this story, you kinda have to take your time to really understand the characters. Unlike some other story's almost all side characters have a lot of depth written
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Nov 30, 2022
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.
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 ... 
Aug 3, 2021
There are time skips, and a lot of them. A volume can end on a cliffhanger and the next one won't start back off where it ended but skip to when all is resolved and the character's are older and have moved on from whatever was happening before. Except, as a reader, I have trouble just accepting this so quickly. I end up reading the new chapter while just shell shocked/upset that the prior issue was just... resolved and what feels like abandoned. And the characters are portrayed to possess particular strong feelings about something or even someone, but the next thing we know they
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Sep 6, 2020
A manga that talks about gender identity is rare, and when it happens it usually also introduces comedy so this covers and ridicules the theme. It's even rarer the fact that it talks about gender identity in children and young people in a serious and mature way, so in my opinion, Hourou Musuko is very precious. This manga is very good at conveying an important and serious message while being bearable to read, it is also a good reflection of Japanese culture in terms of gender.
- Story (9/10): It has the right content of each thing, drama, romance, comedy, etc. Among those types of content, ... |
