Real

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A manga revolving around wheelchair basketball. This is another representation of the manga form's greatest asset: variety. There are manga out there about any subject, topic or issue. There is a manga out there for everyone. Real is for everyone. Everyone with matured tastes anyway. It needs to be made clear that this manga is heavy on characterisation and not on battle royales involving hoops.

Takehiko Inoue's Real is his most mature and accomplished work. You won’t find constant court action here with secret techniques powering up people. This is a tale about three young men, the issue ... of disability in Japan, and of course basketball.

Nomiya is a rash outspoken school dropout searching for a purpose in life. Everything about him says he should not give a shit and just be a hooligan, but inside that rough exterior of his is a decent person wanting to make good use of his life. This is a man who acknowledges who he is, a very mature act indeed. He looks for redemption in the girl who he caused to become disabled thanks to a traffic accident.

Togawa is already in a wheelchair and a rabid basketball player. His arc is more predictable in the Slam Dunk mould of wanting to be a better player, setting his sights on a rival to use as a measuring stick for his own skills. How he got into the wheelchair is more interesting than what he's doing in it, but regardless his predicament is still engaging in a conventional sense. You root for him to succeed.

Takahashi is an antagonist introduced early on, making Nomiya's life a misery by not adhering to the spirit of sportsmanship, causing Nomiya to become an outcast by turning the school team against him. He's pretty much your typical teenager, ugly egotistical traits and all. He unexpectedly becomes the reader's guide to disability and enables Takehiko Inoue to explore the horror of having control of your own body and senses wrenched away from you. This character's arc is by far the most compelling, as Inoue slowly turns the hateful archetypical bully of the first volume into a relatable person by the fourth.

Reading this manga I kept trying to spot how Takehiko Inoue would go wrong; would make glaring mistakes or fall for convention. But he doesn’t. There's no typical genre formula for the basketball games, there's no beat by beat rundown of disability like you'd expect in some shonen genre tale with commentators spelling everything out for you. This is simply a tale led by three main characters dealing with what’s real in their lives, how to differentiate between reality and fantasy whether it be in society status or relationships, the falsities between the lines, how to hold onto truths, how to discover them in the first place.

How to deal with the cold harsh and undeniably true-to-life act of being abandoned by your so-called friends when you lose the ability to walk. How to continue to live in your new state, bearing that crushing defeat, the humiliation and loneliness that comes rushing in when you are outcast by nearly everyone in your life.

Real is Takehiko Inoue's best manga to date, it doesn’t use basketball games as a crutch, it doesnt revel in clichéd tropes of manga, it’s just simply a compelling story with a backdrop that’s rare to the manga form, so kudos to the author for going there and tackling it responsibly and creatively.

Real isn’t going to be everyone's cup of tea, because some are so used to associating manga with certain tropes. This most certainly isn’t Slam Dunk part two, but if you've an open mind and want to be pulled into the plights and trials of three young Japanese men dealing with life's challenges, drawn exquisitely by one of manga's most skilled artists, then read Real.

What can be said about REAL, that hasn't been said yet?

It is masterfully written manga by Takehiko Inoue revolving around overcoming what life throws at you. Three main characters are trying to live their lifes and find their path.

You relate to them, because atleast once in your life you had similar thoughts. As manga progresses you progress with it. You want to join them in their fights with obstacles. You want to go out and start playing basketball. You want to start studying and live your life at the fullest possible way. You are inspired not by their victories, but by their transformation. ... Jorney is sometimes more important than the destination. And this is one of those times.

Favourite quote from the manga: "I just want to be a better person"

I tried the first 4 volumes of Real, and it's kinda just "meh" or "average". Let me explain.

PROS:

1. People say the story is amazing because it realistically depicts wheelchair basketball, rehab, and the grueling reality of stuff. Which is nice, since wheelchair representation is almost non-existent in most manga. So it's a good thing that Inoue decides to make Real about wheelchair stuff.

2. The story dares to show a dude fully naked without oddly placed objects or smoke covering. Like in volume 3, the character who did rehab just took a shower there with nothing in the panel covering his pp. So it's a good ... thing that the author dares to do that. Courage.

3. It shows the stuff in the sports world that people don't really talk about, which are the wheelchair sports (examples: wheelchair basketball, wheelchair fencing, wheelchair hockey, etc), and mostly wheelchair basketball since Inoue is the famous "basketball author" who makes basketball stories.

CONS:

1. It's kinda a slow-burning slice-of-life psychological drama story that might be too slow for some people. Yeah, it's kinda too slow for me. It's not that "slow" is bad; it's just that it feels like nothing much is happening. Yeah, real life sometimes feels like nothing much happened and a day is over, but if a book is the same thing, then some people (including me) would rather just live life. A person can know the quality of the story is good, but the story just doesn't suck them in enough to be "I want to read more". It doesn't mean it's a bad story, since it's not, because it has 3 pros and 2 cons, but it's just that not everyone likes slow burn to the point that it's this slow.

2. It tends to go on hiatuses. Inoue is super busy for whatever reason, so he spends months or years not making Real and randomly makes a volume or two of Real out of nowhere, and vanishes again. So it's quite unpredictable when the next volume will show up. So it kinda crashes the momentum for the readers, even though the reader didn't read that much yet. It currently has 17 volumes, and the 17th volume was released in Japan on April 17, 2026. But for reference, the story started on October 28, 1999. So it's taking a long time. I know the author might be busy or dealing with life stuff or dealing with health stuff or whatever, but it's like, it kills momentum. So if someone don't like the start and pause loop, then that person might not like it.

OVERALL:

How much you will like this story really depends on your tastes in things. You're old enough to make your own decisions, so decide for yourself.