[Book Review] Touch

Hello everyone. I am Naseka.
I define myself as a philosopher and book reviewer.
I define myself as such.

It has been a little over a month
since professional baseball started this year.
Even though it is based on sports news,
it has been about three years
since I started watching baseball again.

Since I was not in the baseball club myself,
my body does not ache for it,
but instead, I get an irresistible urge
to read baseball manga
several times a year.

So, while I was thinking about
what to read,
this work was the one
that caught my eye.

I had seen the anime that was broadcast
on SKY PerfecTV! at my parents' house
when I was a child,
so I know the general story in fragments.

But I have never actually watched the whole thing,
let alone read the original work at all.

“It is important to touch the original source of everything” is
a phrase I received from a mentor in high school,
and combined with that,
I decided to try reading it.

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Although it is a baseball manga,

I have known the fun of baseball
since I was about a middle school student,
and I have come to read various
baseball manga,
but what most works have in common is
“hot-bloodedness” and “special moves.”

The former is not exactly
what you would call “sports guts”
(although I have only read works from the golden age of sports guts,
like the Shinji Mizushima works familiar from Dokaben),
but in most crucial scenes,
there are many depictions of
fighting with rivals with a burning competitive spirit.

On the other hand, the latter is
what you might call “The Manga,”
with “magic balls” and “so-and-so batting styles”
that look spectacular.
This is something found in many works to a greater or lesser extent,
and in fact, I have the impression that there are surprisingly few works
that only have realistic depictions.

Considering that, “Touch” gives
a surprisingly (personally speaking)
unique impression.

Even though both Tatsuya and Kazuya
are sore losers,
I do not get the impression of “hot-bloodedness.”

Rather, they seem unmotivated,
or perhaps casual, or at least
I do not feel any stuffiness.
(Although Kazuya works on it seriously.)

Furthermore, there are no depictions of special moves at all,
and only very realistic
plays are depicted.
Well, I don't know if it's realistic
that Tatsuya goes all the way to Koshien with just a fastball.
(Actually, I wonder if he throws sliders or something.)

I don't know about other Mitsuru Adachi works,
but at least I can say that it is clearly
different from the baseball manga I have read so far.

The art of “omission”

Again, this is a comparison with other works, but
the complete reprint edition I read this time
has 26 volumes.
Since I read it as an e-book,
I don't have the physical sense of holding a book's thickness,
but it feels like a standard density.

Thinking about it that way,
it covers the period from the third year of junior high school
to the summer of the third year of high school within these 26 volumes.

Recent baseball manga
(though I haven't read enough to say for sure)
have such detailed depictions of individual games that
the pacing of the overall story
feels surprisingly slow.

For example, a certain work I like
covers only the time from before entering high school
to the end of the summer Koshien tournament in the first year of high school across 71 volumes.

Of course, this
might be quite extreme,
but even so,
I don't know many works
that manage to write out the full three years of high school
(or junior high, for that matter).
(In that sense, I think Shinji Mizushima's
continuity from Dokaben to Dai Koshien
was truly magnificent.)

Even considering that Touch is not purely
a baseball manga,
and that it has romantic comedy elements
represented by the love triangle between the Uesugi brothers and Minami Asakura,
this density (in terms of the timeline)
shows how good the author is at cutting out
the unnecessary branches that stray from the main plot.

The virtue of a simple conclusion

I believe that no matter the manga,
it can only be properly evaluated once it has reached its conclusion.

Of course, it is natural for there to be waves of interest
throughout the entire work, but
because of that, unfinished works are ultimately
left with the possibility of ending with the assessment,
"It was interesting up until that point, though."

Needless to say, regardless of the reason,
works that are cancelled or fade out
end up being evaluated as
"a manga where the XX scenes were interesting,
but it ended halfway through."
At the very least, for me,
a manga that ends halfway through
will never be highly rated.

Because of that, there are many frustrating works
that I liked but met an unfortunate end.
(Because of that, for a while,
I even consciously avoided reading unfinished works.)

Once you establish such values,
works currently in serialization are always
accompanied by the anxiety of "Will it successfully reach its conclusion?"
This is an anxiety completely unrelated
to how interesting it has been so far.

Even if the author's motivation and the work's popularity are constant,
there is no guarantee for anyone
that tomorrow will always be like today.

I think works that reach a solid conclusion
in a reasonable number of volumes
only succeed because they have both the skill to cut things out
and the skill to bring things together.

People likely look for different things in manga,
but personally, I would like to see
the aspect of "compactly summarizing"
become more appreciated.

In that sense, will the ONE PIECE and Kingdom
I am currently reading
reach the day they conclude safely?
I hope the day comes soon when I can wholeheartedly
call them masterpieces.

Recommended for people like this!

・People who want to look back on their youth
・People who want to feel the atmosphere of the Showa era
・People who want to experience famous (classic) works

Might not be for people like this...

・People who like dense baseball manga
・People who find simple stories unsatisfying

Thank you for reading.

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