What Makes Blue Box Special

There aren’t any spoilers for Blue Box here beyond establishing the premise you get in the first couple of chapters.

I’ve been on a bit of a manga kick this year. I think finishing Berserk—I know Berserk isn’t actually over but to me, the series ended with Kentaro Miura’s passing—at the end of 2023, and spending the first few months of 2024 catching up on One Piece put me in the right headspace, then reading Dandadan on a friend’s recommendation about a month ago opened the floodgates. The next series I picked up after Dandadan was Blue Box. For the uninitiated, Blue Box is a slice-of-life romance manga with a sports focus that began its publication in Weekly Shonen Jump in April of 2021 and has an anime adaptation coming to Netflix at the end of this week. During my last major manga kick in 2021, I read and loved the wholesome and surprisingly nuanced volleyball manga Haikyuu!! and following Dandadan’s own compelling long-running romantic subplot, I felt the pull of a series marketed on its ability to scratch both of those itches. 

To lay some groundwork, Blue Box stars Taiki Inomata, a student and badminton player at sports powerhouse Eimei Junior and Senior High. On first pass, Taiki is your standard Shonen protagonist; ambitious, driven, earnest, hard-working, and deeply passionate about his sport. But none of these is the first thing you learn about Taiki. The very first thing we learn about our protagonist is that every morning, when he gets to the school gym to get his reps in before classes start, there’s one person he can’t wait to see; his senpai, rising star on the girls basketball team, Chinatsu Kano. 

So we have a fairly standard romance setup. Taiki is interested in Chinatsu, she’s a year ahead and very popular so he doesn’t think he has a chance, this doubt is reinforced when his friend and confidante, and my brother, my captain, my king, Kyo Kasahara points out all of what I just said. But the heart wants what the heart wants and, in Taiki’s case, it’s about to get a big assist from the hand of the author, but first, we get some more exposition. We meet Hina Chono, Taiki’s childhood friend and absolute beast of the school’s rhythmic gymnastics team, a sport with which I have even less familiarity than badminton. We also get a conversation between Taiki and Chinatsu at one of their early morning grind sessions during which Taiki expresses his admiration for her dedication to her sport. He shares a memory of seeing her practicing right after a devastating loss that cost her team a trip to nationals earlier in the year. He does not yet know how important this conversation will be.

When Taiki returns home, Chinatsu comes up in conversation with his mother who, we learn, played basketball with Chinatsu’s mother in high school. Here is where the aforementioned authorial assist comes in. Taiki first learns that Chinatsu’s family will soon be moving abroad for her father’s work, only to subsequently learn that she insisted on staying back to focus on basketball, in part because her conversation with Taiki reminded her how important the sport is to her. She tells Taiki she’ll be staying with family friends, and who, dear reader, did we just learn has a basketball-related connection to Chinatsu’s mother? That’s right, our love interests are now cohabitating. Now I will admit to turning up my nose at this premise when I first read it. Not only is it a pretty contrived way to manufacture proximity between our romantic leads, but this is a manga, and I don’t know if you know this, but manga can, on occasion, be a little cringe, particularly on the subject of women. A simple Google search would have told me that Kouji Miura is, herself, a woman, which, while not a guarantee to ward off misogynistic tropes, is definitely a strong positive indicator, but I neglected this search until after catching up on the series. So I sat, poised to put the story down at the first hint of Taiki, or the authorial eye perving out at the notion of sharing a living space with a beautiful girl or really being a weird little gremlin about it in any way. But that’s the first special thing about Blue Box. Not only does it avoid all of those pitfalls, it uses the situation to show a new side of its protagonist. Yes Taiki really likes Chinatsu, but he doesn’t want this living arrangement to be uncomfortable for her, he doesn’t want it to get in the way of her athletic ambitions, he doesn’t want it to interfere with her social life. He’s not thinking of these things as they pertain to his chances with her but purely as they pertain to her happiness and well-being. And so as much as he maintains his interest, he shifts his outlook.

You see this change in his conversation with Kyo the next day. The friend who yesterday assured him he had no shot, only to be met by Taiki’s insistence on trying, now suggests that, given the new circumstances,  yeah, maybe these two will end up dating. And now Taiki takes the other side. “Chinatsu senpai stayed behind in Japan, all by herself. That takes a lot of determination so I can’t just look at that and ask something as selfish as ‘Will you be in a relationship with me?’”

I didn’t notice it at the time, but in retrospect, I think this is the conversation that sold me on this series. On the one hand, it shows remarkable maturity from a fifteen-year-old. It might not seem like much but I speak from experience when I say that a fifteen-year-old boy looking past his own desires to this degree for the sake of what he believes the person he’s interested in would want and prioritize is remarkable regardless of the accuracy of his assessment of those desires. But, like every great line of dialogue, there’s more to it than just that. Not only does it reveal Taiki’s maturity and thoughtfulness, it also gives the reader some insight into what he sees in Chinatsu. See in so many lesser romances a male and female lead with little to no chemistry are smashed together with all the grace of two clashing action figures purely by virtue of proximity, as though their sharing space on the cover is sufficient justification for their mutual affection. But make no mistake, the chemistry in Blue Box is as clear as they come. Here we see the first, among many things Taiki admires about Chinatsu, her devotion to basketball. It makes sense, Their proximity at the start of the series is defined almost entirely by their shared time in the gym in the morning, each outworking all of their teammates. So here Taiki shows an understanding of Chinatsu’s devotion to her sport and places that above his own romantic desires, and in so doing, tells his friends and the reader that that devotion and work ethic on Chinatsu’s part are not only admirable in her, but traits he wishes to emulate himself, not as part of a scheme to win her affection, but purely because by seeing them in her he sees possibility in himself. So fittingly, this conversation ends with another of Taiki’s declarations of ambition; he too will work to compete at nationals.  

Sure enough, as their proximity brings them into more frequent conversation the two repeatedly bond over their shared athletic ambitions, like this scene where Chinatsu makes wish ribbons for each of them upon learning that Taiki shares her desire to make it to nationals. And we see how this pushes Taiki, not only reinforcing his affection for Chinatsu but also reinforcing his desire to make nationals. I think part of what works so well about his athletics is that at no point does it feel like Taiki is competing and pushing himself just to impress Chinatsu. It’s clear from the beginning that he is fully devoted to improving for the love of the sport alone. Chinatsu serves as an inspiration not because he wants to impress her but because every day that he is witness to her drive, her work ethic, he is reminded that he too can push himself, he too can put in the work. And it quickly becomes clear that Chinatsu sees the same thing in him. Through his devotion to his sport, the reader can see exactly why Taiki would admire Chinatsu and why she might grow to return his admiration.

This is the first step in their relationship past learning each other's names. They augment their implied support and inspiration for each other with words of affirmation and shared promises. This might not seem like much, but remember how important their sports are to these characters. This is the most solid possible foundation on which to build what comes next. 

Of course, admiration for their respective athletic drive and prowess is not sufficient grounds for a romance and Blue Box understands this. Sports are the context of their meeting, they are the common ground on which they start but Taiki and Chinatsu quickly develop a page-consuming chemistry, readily apparent to reader and character alike. You can see it in little things like the loosening of their body language, an especially stark contrast to Taiki’s general nerves, you can see it in the way they rib each other, the way he immediately looks across the gym when she falls, the way they both grow more comfortable probing and asking each other questions during their down time at home. Every time these characters are on page together, the chemistry is palpable, a necessary component to investment in a romance story, I think you’ll agree. 

Emotional intelligence and chemistry aren’t merely the realm of our romantic leads, however. Another of Blue Box’s key strengths is its fantastic supporting cast. I’ve been relatively tame so far in my praise of Taiki’s best friend Kyo up to this point, a character I referred to in a conversation the other day as Uncle Iroh in high school. The realest of real ones, always there to bail Taiki out of an awkward conversation, help him work through his feelings, or do other things that I won’t discuss in the interest of avoiding spoilers, if you know you know. It isn’t until the introduction of Ayame Moriya that we start to see Kyo deal with some of these things for himself. Ayame initially comes off as an unaware outlier in a cast largely defined by surprising emotional intelligence. At first, it seems she has become the badminton team’s manager entirely out of a desire to get closer to Shuji Yusa, a strong player from a rival school. She and Kyo butt heads over her casual approach to relationships but there’s never any animosity between the two. She involves herself in a few characters’ romantic lives to unfortunate results but Kyo sees her good intentions, as does the reader. But where she initially seems clueless she quickly shows herself to be every bit as thoughtful as the rest of the cast, offering support, not in direct words, but in the very act of her companionship. One of my favorite moments in the entire series sees a moment of teamwork between her and Kyo, mild spoilers in the following paragraph.

The essential gist is that the boys’ badminton and girls’ basketball teams are playing what seems to amount to a tame version of truth or dare where you sit in a circle, pick a card, and have to do whatever the card tells you. Kyo is forced to talk like a cat, Chinatsu has to get a goofy-ass hairdo, and, when it comes to him, Taiki is instructed to declare his affection to the one he loves. Now, whether or not he’s ready to do that, he obviously doesn’t want his confession to Chinatsu to come here, so Kyo bails him out, essentially saying ‘Well Taiki was talking about playing against Yusa in his sleep on the bus so he must be in a love triangle with Moriya.’ There’s this brief moment where the two make eye contact. Moriya, at this point, doesn’t know the significance of this moment, she has no idea about Taiki’s feelings for Chinatsu, but she sees Kyo coming to his boy’s aid and immediately plays into the joke, challenging Taiki for Yusa’s heart, successfully deflecting suspicion and saving him. This moment augments Kyo and provides a really fantastic scene for the connection between the two of them. I could go on with examples like this for basically every character in the supporting cast but you can go read the manga for that too.

I’ve shown a few panels from the manga at this point. I think these constitute the second thing that’s really special about this manga. This part will be harder for me to talk about because my ass can not draw and while I talk about narrative all day, I don’t usually spend much time talking about visual art. But here I’ve gotta give it a try because good lord look at these panels.

It’s not just a detail thing. I mean, don’t get me wrong I think they’re impressive from that perspective, but there’s a different Miura (rest in peace) I’d probably look to if I wanted to praise a maga purely on detail and general composition.

What I’m talking about with Blue Box is the specific way the composition of certain panels lets you see the world through its characters’ eyes. Take this shot of Chinatsu waiting at the subway.

For very mild spoiler reasons Taiki is not in the best mood, he’s heading home and he doesn’t expect to see anyone of note here and yet, there she is, clothes and hair blowing gently in the wind of the arriving train, a faint halo of light emanating from her head, and you can see Taiki’s day turn around in this one moment. 

It sounds cheesy but there’s this all-consuming feeling of warmth that comes with even the simplest proximity to someone you really like or love, and, especially in those early days, it can take up a truly absurd percentage of your mental real estate.    

Blue Box is full of these little moments, where an offhand line or a well-composed panel can communicate more affection than paragraphs of text. Where the reader is constantly confronted by the depth of a character’s feelings. It invites you to see things through Taiki’s Chinatsu-focused mind and strengthens your understanding of his feelings.

It’s not just that side of the experience that the art captures so well either, consider this shot of Taiki flopping face-first into bed.

Overwhelmed by a romantic angst that can’t rightly be called frustration, can’t rightly be called desire, but it’s something, and that something is expressed better through composition and body language here, or here,

or here,

or here,

than in four thousand words.

I think ultimately this is Blue Box’s greatest strength. It invites you in and encourages you to feel everything alongside its characters, its art the perfect vehicle for the reader’s empathy. There are scenes in this manga that I wouldn’t think about twice were it not for the incredible depth of feeling added by Miura’s artwork. And I think that makes Blue Box special.