Crimson Hero Vol. 1

Title: Crimson Hero Vol. 1
Author: Mitsuba Takanashi
Series: Crimson Hero #1
First Published: June 25, 2003
Publisher: VIZ Media
Pages: 192
Genre: Shojo, Sports
Format: Web
Source: Web
Rating:


Synopsis:

When fifteen-year-old Nobara Sumiyoshi transfers to Crimson Field High School, she hopes to play competitive volleyball, but her mother will do anything to keep her off the court and working at her family's Japanese restaurant.

Buy the Book: Amazon

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Review

I don’t like sports, I don’t like watching them, and I don’t like playing them, but for some reason I really like sports anime and manga. Crimson Hero was my very first. I had started reading this series back when it was serialized in Shoujo Beat just as I was graduating high school in 2005. Manga was only starting to gain some momentum in the United States thanks to publishers like VIZ Media and Tokyopop. I never finished the series, since Shoujo Beat eventually went under and the rest of the series hadn’t been published in English, and I had been so bummed out. Fast forward almost 20 years and the manga landscape has changed, though the series is still neglected. I got to thinking about the series recently, and decided to try and finally finish it.

Crimson Hero perfectly captures early 2000’s fashion and society’s lingering misogyny toward women, existing in that space between the third and fourth wave feminist movements. Nobara is an heiress to a traditional family restaurant with a passion for volleyball. She is a strong-willed tomboy that never felt comfortable trying to dress and act in a traditionally feminine manner, always feeling gangly compared to her prim and proper little sister. As a teen I instantly took a liking to Nobara because I could very much relate to her struggle of feeling too awkward and not feminine enough to meet the expectations of her mother. Even as an adult now, I can appreciate a character like Nobara for what she represents for young girls in similar circumstances.

Nobara is single minded in her passion for volleyball, transferring to a school that she had heard has a strong team, only to find that this only referred to the boy’s team. The girl’s team had been disbanded, the laughing stock of the school. The first volume does a decent job of establishing Nobara as a character doing everything she can to play her beloved sport, even at the cost of upending her life, and you don’t even really get to see her play in this volume. Her courage and determination in the face of so much sexist ridicule is infectious, it’s easy to get involved in her story and fly through the pages.

I think it’s interesting that a common criticism I’ve read is that the joy of a sports manga is the drama of the sports match which the first volume lacks, but that’s impossible to do as a young woman barred from even entering the court. It definitely suffers from first volume syndrome, in which all of the pieces of the main story are laid down, but it is a necessary evil in this case as it highlights the long and difficult task of carving out a space where women can be allowed to participate. Female athletes even up to the present day still deal with misogyny and are mocked as being manly and unfeminine, inherently inferior to men physically, and that’s very much a theme of this manga. Though the manga is starting to show it’s age I can still appreciate the issues that are explored.

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