Second Piece: Koe No Kitachi Response

• Manga written and drawn by Ooima Yoshitoki

We’ve all witnessed or experienced bullying in some point in our lives, Koe No Kitachi handles serious issues and addresses the consequences towards them. This manga began publishing in August 2013 to November 2014. Both the story and art was done by Ooima Yoshitoki. The main premise of the manga is about how the main protagonist is trying to apologize to a deaf girl in which he had bullied during primary school.
The plot was very simple, making the characters and their interactions within the events that occurred throughout the story the main focus. The main character Ishida is a character who is a visual image of a “typical boy” when he is first introduced. I believe the author did this is so that the male audience is able to relate to the text and hopefully bring back some of those sweet childhood memories. When Ishida is first introduced he is in primary school. And as I said before I was able to relate to him with my child self, who always wanted attention and to be like by others. I remember almost willing to be able to do anything to gain attention, when reading the story I was a giving a very nostalgic feeling. Although some parts of his character was exaggerated, it helped the author find a way to keep the audience entertained, people don’t read stories just to remind them of the world they were just in. Ishida’s main drive throughout the manga is what intrigued me the most, and example of this is in one panel of the manga he is standing with a blank expression his face and the background is pitch black, with text around him stating his mind. The text said “it’s not enough, I haven’t been punished enough”, since the text is surrounding him with it constantly repeated, it shows that he is in some state of madness and has really reflected on his actions. He has a lot of emotions bottled up within him such as regret, guilt and shame. The author gives us a visual image of the faults that we as human beings have.
The second main character is Nishimya. Her disability of being unable to hear caused the early stages of her life to being more than just difficult. The introduction to her character was very unique, the reason for this is that in Japan when you first transfer into a new school you are expected to stand in front of the class to introduce yourself. Instead of using words she wrote on a little notepad which said “Hello, my name is Nishimiya. I am deaf, I will be using this notepad to communicate with you. I hope we can all be friends!” This heart-warming introduction was the author’s way of building up warm feelings toward the character. By doing so the author was able to trick the reader into thinking that the story was going to be a light hearted story with laughs and friendship, only to be crushed to find Nishimiya’s notebook had been tagged with cruel messages. The messages on the notepad said things like “ugly bitch, die”. This is very over exaggerated to what would happen in a real life situation, but this definitely made me as the reader feel sympathy towards her. On one page of the manga the author drew single panels in a collage like fashion displaying images of her daily struggles Nishimiya went through, there was a lot of physical abuse towards her such as her hearing aids being pulled out and there was also a significant scene in which the manga keeps going back to. That scene is when Ishida pushes Nishimya into the puddle. This scene is one that Ishida always gets flashbacks to since it increases the amount of guilt he feels. Nishimya’s mother didn’t want to forgive Ishida when he came to apologize to her, my favourite quote from her would be “would you be able to give her childhood back?”

The relationship between our two main protagonists was very interesting, even though they used a very common trope that can be found amongst many manga. It usually involves one or more characters conducting an action that would lead on of the other characters to misunderstand something, an example of this would be when Nishimiya was scrubbing a desk with hateful comments on it and Ishida happened to notice. Ishida’s initial reaction was to ridicule towards Nishimiya, but he finds that it was his desk that Nishimya was cleaning. Not only did the author succeed in creating a heart-jerking moment for the viewers, but also added to Ishida’s pile of guilt. This pile of guilt, as I said previously was Ishida’s main drive, it helps the viewer to empathise on his wanting to make things right between the two of them. This also gave depth towards Nishimiya, showing her kindness to her bully/enemy. A term I would use to describe her actions would be ‘killing him with kindness’. With Nishimya’s bery strong ability of forgiveness, I assumed that the rest of the story would be very short and boring. I was so very wrong. The author reminded me that these characters were human, by showing the viewers how the characters are still prone to the effects of stress and depression. The way he is able to illustrate emotions through his drawings is one aspect of the manga that I really enjoyed.
The most prominent scene in my opinion is the scene in which Nishimiya and Ishida go to a firework show together only for Nishimiya to try to commit suicide in the middle of the event, luckily Ishida was able to catch her by the hand as she tried to jump of a tall building and accidentally fall himself. The author used this scene to show that Ishida was willing to die for this forgiveness, as I have repeated multiple times, the manga is much exaggerated, but that’s what make the story all more moving and this scene especially had me at the edge of my seat. The author’s way of making Ishida pay the ultimate price for taking away Nishimiya’s childhood symbolises the intense friendship between the two characters.
Though the story wasn’t quite the romance novel I thought it would be, instead it gave me an extra view on what life is like with a disability. I don’t think the author once used euphemism for the things she couldn’t do and the pain she felt because of it. It gave the story a very raw feeling and managed to keep the reader entertained the entire way. It’s one of the more advanced Manga I’ve read, and the main target is definitely teen, as further support for this is that the main cast involves high school students. I would definitely give this a read again.