頭文字Ｄ
Natively: 頭文字D 1 | L26
We’ve had a few rather difficult picks lately, maybe we could use a breather and go drifting down the slopes of mount Akina instead!
Soundtrack for this post:
Summary
Set in the Gunma prefecture some time in the mid-1990s, the manga follows high-schooler Takumi Fujiwara as a friend introduces him to the world of high-octane mountain-pass racing. Gangs of racers with souped-up cars compete for the best time but a persistent rumor claims that the fastest driver on the mountain is not among them: a legendary tofu delivery driver is said to drift down the slopes of mount Akina at insane speeds during his early morning delivery rounds in a simple black-and-white Toyota AE86.
Availability
Personal Opinion
I think this manga may not need an introduction for people my age. The anime and its very 90s use of CGI car races coupled with high-BPM Eurobeat soundrack was a staple of the era. I wasn’t a huge fan back then but I impulse-bought the first volume recently during a BookWalker sale and I was pretty thoroughly entertained while reading it.
It’s very trope-heavy shounen fare but the plot and character interactions are actually more interesting than the premise would have you expect. It’s not just an endless series of street races and a big chunk of the page count is actually people talking. You don’t need to know or care about cars and racing to enjoy this manga.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- No furigana but also no tricky kanji usage, I don’t think I’ve had to do a single kanji lookup reading through the first half of the first volume. I think generally pre-2000 manga tend to avoid complicated, low-frequency kanji because they actually used to handwrite a lot back then…
- Time capsule for 1990’s Japan with cord phones and cassette tapes.
- Interesting and distinctive visual style.
Cons
- The first few chapter are pretty slow-going which is a bit annoying in a book club setting where we’ll probably just read one chapter/week. That said since this is a relatively easy manga we could also go faster.
- Text density is a bit all over the place, some dialogues can be quite dense while the racing sequences have very little text by comparison (see screenshots below).
- There’s a significant amount of hand-written text that can be challenging to parse. I personally like this type of practice but it can be frustrating at times:
- The series ran from 1995 to 2013 and is made up of 719 chapters compiled in 48 volumes. Completing it is a massive undertaking. If we were to start an off-shoot club it would take us over 13 years to complete it at one chapter/week.
- The manga doesn’t automatically start blasting Eurobeat at full volume when you open it, you have to do that manually every time.
