One-Shot Manga Review: Koe no Katachi (The Shape of the Voice)

 One-Shot Manga Review: Koe no Katachi (The Shape of the Voice)

Be nice kids...

A would-be doujin was the last place I expected a story like this.

    Here I was browsing through the latest uploads in my favorite hentai doujin site (read: porn), and I come across this little entry that stood out from the rest. There's no sex in it, no innuendo, not even nudity. All it had was the story of a deaf girl suffering from the teasing and bullying of her grade-school classmates.

    That was all it took to reel me in.

    Koe no Katchi (trans: The Shape of the Voice) is a one-shot manga that had one the 80th Newbie Best Mangaka Award and, after some difficulty, ran in the February edition of Bessatsu Shounen Magazine and in Weekly Shounen Magazine. The reason it was difficult to publish was because of its content, which showed a bitter and unabashed look at bullying in schools.

    The abuse was hard to stomach, and at some points hard to believe. Your mileage might vary on this one, but readers are guaranteed to be either surprised or shocked (maybe both) at the unfettered display of annoyance and outright disdain for the girl. Even more so when you see them brush off all responsibility of it and took their frustrations on the one person who tried to point out their hypocrisy. Said person, who was the narrator, was also the only one who apparently had grown guilty of their teasing and had just started standing up for the poor girl.

     The portrayal of children as bastards and adults as irresponsible have never been portrayed so vividly. This was only a 60-page work but there was a goddamn boatload of emotions evoked here.

    The last seven to eight pages gives us what maybe the only sense of relief in the story. A chance for closure, redemption, and an open-ended development for a pairing. And, according to some forums online, the chance for some serialization.

    Koe no Katachi was a recent scanlation released by the Futari Wa Pretty Anon translator group. The author Ooima Yoshitoki is a new name in the manga community and, personally, someone I've added to my list of favorite up-and-coming authors.