Young adult fiction often asks its readers to imagine what happens when ordinary young adults find themselves facing extraordinary circumstances. Some of these stories’ teenage protagonists are suddenly and unexpectedly spirited away to far-off, extraordinary places, such as fairytale landscapes, extraterrestrial vistas, and dystopian futures. Other works depict the ways in which extraordinary problems can suddenly and unexpectedly intrude upon their protagonists’ everyday lives. However, within the subset of young adult literature known as “manga”, many protagonists face problems that are presented as neither sudden nor unexpected: problems with classroom violence and school bullying that have sadly become increasingly unextraordinary aspects of the lives of both the stories’ young adult characters and the stories’ young adult readers.
When prompted to consider how the issues of classroom violence and school bullying are depicted within young adult manga, one title that might immediately spring to a manga aficionado’s mind would be A Silent Voice (2015), a seven-volume series of manga novels written by Japanese author Yoshitoki Ōima. At the beginning of the first volume of A Silent Voice, high school senior Shoya Ishida is completing final preparations to take his own life. He has cancelled his cell phone contract, quit his job, and saved up enough money to pay back what he feels he owes his mother for raising him. Now, the only thing left to do is to find and apologize to Shoko Nishimiya, a deaf girl whom he mercilessly bullied in sixth grade.
In the six years since Shoya and Shoko last saw each other, Shoya has been subjected to relentless bullying and ostracization from his school classmates. They threw the contents of his locker in the garbage, wrote “you should jump off a building” on his desk, and beat him up on the way home from school. Shoya has accepted all of his classmates’ abuse, and has come to believe that he deserves it, chiefly because of what he did to Shoko.
When Shoko Nishimiya was in sixth grade, Shoya Ishida was her bully. Shoya bullied Shoko because she was deaf, but also because he was bored and wanted attention from his classmates, who laughed whenever he made fun of her disability. Shoya and Shoko’s teacher knew about Shoya’s bullying and initially tried to get him to stop, but soon more and more students began to follow Shoya’s lead and bully Shoko themselves. Shoya and Shoko’s teacher quickly lost control of the situation.
After Shoya began stealing and destroying Shoko’s hearing aids, the school administration became involved. Their teacher—desperate to minimize and downplay his own culpability—encouraged Shoya’s friends to place the blame solely on Shoya’s shoulders, making it seem as though the teacher was only negligent about interceding in a single student’s behavior, rather than the behavior of his entire class. Soon, Shoya’s classmates would quickly begin to bully and torment their former friend and ringleader.
Shoya perceived Shoko as the source of his troubles. He would eventually confront the girl, leading to a brutal exchange of blows between the two children, Shoko’s expeditious transfer to another school, and Shoya’s quick realization that Shoko had been staying late after school every day to erase the horrible things that his classmates had been writing on his school desk. At the end of the story’s first volume, Shoya finds Shoko, intending to apologize to her, leaving a clear question in readers’ minds: should Shoko forgive Shoya?
For Shoko, of course, the answer to this question had never been in doubt. Not only had she always been in love with Shoya, but—due to her own lifelong problems with crippling depression—she had always felt as though she was only bullied because she did not try hard enough to communicate with her classmates and make friends. Later in the story, after Shoya’s attempts to prevent Shoko from making her own suicide attempt land him in a coma, Shoko dreams about how much better her life could have been, if only she had been able to hear. Following a volume-long exploration of what Shoko’s life is like while Shoya is in a coma, many of A Silent Voice ’s young adult readers will certainly be rooting for Shoya to wake up and give Shoko her well-deserved happy ending.
Now, as far as young adult romance novel protagonists go, one would be hard-pressed to claim that Shoya constitutes the most upstanding gentleman that the genre has to offer its adolescent readers. Yet, neither is he a villainous cad, nor a cautionary tale to warn young women about what not to look for in a romantic partner. Instead, A Silent Voice makes careful efforts to never truly portray Shoya as either completely sympathetic or completely despicable. The story continually reminds readers of Shoya’s six years of suffering at the hands of his bullies, but it just as frequently reminds readers of the glee and callousness that he exhibited while he was bullying Shoko. In this way, A Silent Voice ’s depictions of Shoya are deeply complicated, as are its overall depictions of bullying and violence within the contexts of K-12 school environments.
By the time A Silent Voice’s first volume draws to a close—and Shoya and Shoko finally meet each other for the first time in six years—young adult readers may come away with a much more complicated impression of what it means to be a bully than can be found in many other novels written for their demographic. However, within the context of Japanese young adult literature, A Silent Voice is far from unique in the complexity with which it depicts the topics of school violence and bullying. Rather, it is just one of the many Japanese young adult graphic novels to tackle these subjects in ways that strongly resonate with the medium’s adolescent readers.
A Silent Voice was written and published in Japanese and then translated and distributed for foreign markets. Like most contemporary Japanese graphic novel titles, A Silent Voice is commonly referred to as manga, a term that—much in the same way as Japanese animation is often labeled as anime —is used in Japan to denote all comics and graphic novels, and used outside of Japan to explicitly refer to comics and graphic novels of Japanese origin. A Silent Voice was originally written for the Japanese twelve- to eighteen-year-old male shōnen demographic. However, like many shōnen romance titles, it was rebranded as a general young adult romance series for foreign markets in which romance titles were not typically geared towards young adult male demographics.
A Silent Voice has been lauded with critical acclaim, both in Japan, where it won Asahi Shimbun’s Tezuka Osamu “New Creator” Cultural Prize (Hodgkins 2015), and internationally, where it was named by the American Library Association on their 2017 list of Great Graphic Novels for Teens (ALA 2017) and nominated for a 2016 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award (Bunge 2016). Its film adaptation—released in 2016 by Kyoto Animation—proved to be similarly popular. Commercially, it opened to domestic audiences at #2 (behind Your Name, the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time), before eventually grossing $33 million on international release. Critically, it received both the 2016 Japanese Movie Critics Award for Best Animation Feature Film and the 2017 Japanese Academy Award for Excellent Animation.
Yet, although A Silent Voice was an unqualified success at virtually every metric, at the time of its publication it would have been far from the most internationally well-known young adult manga title to focus on issues of classroom bullying or violence. That particular honor would have gone to A Silent Voice’s fellow 2016 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award nominee, Yūsei Matsui’s twenty-one-volume action comedy manga Assassination Classroom (2014). Like many other internationally renowned action manga titles such as Dragon Ball , Naruto , and One Piece, Assassination Classroom was first published as a serialized work within Japan’s best-selling and longest-running manga anthology magazine, Weekly Shōnen Jump, before being collected into a blockbuster young adult graphic novel series.
Assassination Classroom is a kid-friendly comedy series with a decidedly dark premise. Its story focuses on a group of troubled students at a fictional Japanese middle school. Once star pupils, all of these students have since become disappointments to their teachers and parents. Now, they are regularly ostracized by their instructors, bullied by their peers, and repeatedly told by school administrators that they are failures. After having been physically isolated from the rest of the student body, and sent to complete the remainder of their junior high school days in a ramshackle old building at the top of a nearby mountain, the students had all but given up hope for a fulfilling school life. This all changes with the sudden arrival of a strange new teacher, a seemingly invincible extraterrestrial monster who claims to have just destroyed the Moon.
Assassination Classroom’s Koro-Sensei (a pun on the Japanese words for “unkillable” and “teacher”) is a canary yellow octopus who can move at speeds in excess of Mach 20 and has very particular views on pedagogy. Koro-Sensei states that he plans to blow up the entire planet following the students’ middle school graduation ceremony, but is otherwise a perfectly jovial teacher, whose mannerisms closely resemble those of Robin Williams’ character from the film Dead Poets Society. Although initially wary, the students quickly warm up to their strange new instructor when they realize that he deeply cares about his students, until a secret agent—posing as their physical education teacher—informs them that the government will give 10 billion yen to any student who can kill Koro-Sensei before the end of the school year.
Assassination Classroom’s comedic, off-kilter tone str...