This is the sort of manga that desperately tries to be deeply meaningful and poetic, and completely fails at it. Or rather, if your definition of poetry is "lots of incomplete (but pretty) thoughts strung together on a page," then I suppose you could say this manga is quite successful. There are a lot of missing elements in this story, missing elements that should not be missing: Important moments of character motivation and development are skipped, the plot and back history are left sketchy, and generally all the things which work to ground a story and help readers become invested in the plot and characters are treated in a superficial way.
Let me briefly talk about the first chapter to give you a flavor of what I mean. The story begins with our heroine waking up next to a man she can't remember while her on-again, off-again sex friend stands outside her window, calling for her to come out and play pachinko with him. How often does she have one-night stands? Why does she do it? The story doesn't say. After they play pachinko (a few days later? who knows?) our heroine goes to sleep in a grassy field and the lead male trips over her. The narration tells us that was how they first met, during their mutual suicides. Suicide? The girl was just drunk and the guy was going for a jog... When the girl wakes up, she decides she's in love with the lead male because he has a white neck (or something) and begins stalking him at his boxing gym. The lead male eventually asks her why she keeps coming to the gym, she asks him why he boxes, and they both get a bizarre tragic past infodump. (The heroine's little brother randomly fell off a cliff one day and she's all torn up inside. I'm not kidding.)
And that's pretty much it, that's their relationship. Said infodump represents the sum totality of the character development both hero and heroine will receive throughout the course of the story. The rest of the manga consists of the heroine following the lead male around and supporting his dream. (Becoming world champion is the only thing that will make his sad past go away, you see.) There's lots of "meaningful" narration about not looking down, having hope, etc., but no real plot to get in the way of all the feelings. Is this starting to sound like bullshit to you? Because it should.
The manga wasn't entirely terrible. Having a boxer as lead male instead of the usual popular/famous guy was a nice change of pace. It was also nice that the characters weren't 15, and that they weren't embarrassingly stupid or naive. The artwork was good, too. Unfortunately, all the positives weren't enough to outweigh the negatives. There were enough people who loved this that I'm not going to say you shouldn't check it out; you'll know right away if the storytelling is for you or not. It definitely wasn't for me.
(-33)
