Playing With the Boys: Figuring Out Shonen Manga

When you are just starting to read manga, you’ll quickly get into more material than you know what to deal with!  Even major chain bookstores now have racks and racks of manga, so how do you start narrowing it down to figuring out what you like?  As with any large entertainment medium, you can start doing it by genre, and one of the largest genres that you will run into is shonen manga.  “Shonen” can be translated from Japanese as “boy” and you’ll find these stories are mostly aimed at men and young boys in their early teens to mid-twenties, though the audience is considerably wider than that.

If you are looking for lots of action and fight scenes, shonen manga is the place to go, but remember that this is only a broad generalization.  While it is true that shonen manga will often focus on very action-oriented storylines, this does not mean that they are simplistic or trite.  There are several shonen manga on the market today that are based on various pieces of literature or folklore, and oftentimes the stories can be fairly philosophical in nature, exploring not only martial arts, gun fights or battles, but also the philosophies and the significance behind them.

While keeping in mind that shonen itself is a fairly broad genre, you will almost invariably find a young male protagonist placed in a new or foreign situation where he must fight or compete to defend himself or his family.  You’ll find that shonen manga is often features a wide ensemble cast, where the hero is supported by friends and will face a wide variety of opponents; martial art schools and sports clubs will often provide a great background for these conflicts.  While the situations can be quite grave, there is often an element of humor involved, whether it comes from verbal jokes or physical comedy.

One of the best representations of shonen manga on the market is the Weekly Shonen Jump, more commonly known as Shonen Jump, which has the distinction of being one of the longest-running weekly manga compilations in Japan.  In the past, this magazine has released the immensely popular Death Note, which ran for a very successful 108 chapters.  This manga series revolved around a young genius who had found a dangerous artifact that had been dropped by a death god; whenever Light Yagami wrote a person’s name in a special notebook, that person would die.  When Light decided to cleanse the world of evil using this notebook, the world’s best (and seemingly most eccentric) detective L begins a desperate hunt to stop him.

The manga Bleach has topped the charts in both Japan and America and at more than 300 chapters, is still currently being released in Shonen Jump.  Ichigo Kurosaki, a normal high-school boy, is dragged unwillingly into a world of soul reapers and invisible monsters known as Hollows.  Though at first his goal is merely to protect his family and friends, he is forced to fight increasingly stronger foes in battles that range across the human world, that of the soul reapers, and in an arid wasteland that is home to deadly spirits.

As you can see, the world of shonen manga is quite varied, and if you are looking for high adventure and thrills every minute, this is where you want to be!