A Quality Coming-of-Age Love Story Feels Fresh in a Shonen Magazine

　Jump is a bona fide shonen manga magazine, yet there's always been at least one quality rom-com in every era of its history. Or maybe it's more accurate to say there's always a rom-com that feels distinctly shonen. With shoujo manga, something like 70 to 80 percent of stories are built around a love story at their core. It's said that women generally mature emotionally faster than men, and on top of that, women have cultivated a culture of "reading between the lines" among themselves, so there are probably plenty of girls riding an emotional roller coaster over men's obliviousness to romance. I get the sense that, to no small degree, these stories serve as tools for those troubled girls to learn "this is what love is like."

　I say this because, whereas shoujo manga love stories often depict complex emotional swings and human relationships, shonen magazine rom-coms tended to be somewhat predictable, and to put it less charitably, relatively many of them were the kind of "beautiful girls who for some reason fight over an unremarkable version of me," practically a product of wish fulfillment (though, of course, this absolutely isn't to say every single work is like that).

　And then there's Blue Box. Serialized since 2021 and still running in Jump today, it's a love story manga that commands enormous support. Blue Box draws a clear line away from the standard shonen-magazine rom-coms I described above, carefully depicting a realistic, coming-of-age love story of the kind that really does happen in real life. The frustration you might have experienced through club activities, and the helpless miscommunications of feelings between boys and girls, are expressed as delicately as in a shoujo manga. The fact that this kind of manga becomes popular in a shonen magazine might mean that today's boys, unlike in my era, can readily accept the female culture of "reading between the lines." Or maybe it's just popular because Chinatsu-senpai is cute.

A Score That Nudges the Inner Struggles of Youth Forward

　The anime is, of course, extremely well made, and it's already become a hot topic, mostly on social media. I've thought this many times now, but the level of Japanese anime animation just keeps climbing without limit, to the point it's almost scary. Not only is the original art faithfully reproduced, but even the movements of athletic club activities are, so far, depicted without any awkwardness. And the score! It's so full of youth, in your face about it, that I can't stop grinning from ear to ear. At the time of writing only three episodes have aired, but take the score just before protagonist Taiki Inomata's "Please go to the Inter-High!" scene in Episode 1: the air of early morning when the sun hasn't fully risen, the urgency, the gymnasium during morning practice, and the feelings you can't help but put into words, all conveyed by crisp, clear piano and strings. Tense scenes, relaxed scenes, what kind of score will be used across all the various scenes to come has me really looking forward to it.

　And the music's sense of dutifully sticking to a supporting role, in the best way, is also wonderful. It matches the work so well that even when you watch with the intention of listening to the music, before you know it you've been pulled into the story. In that sense too, isn't this a flawless, 100-point score?

　The score for this work is handled by Takashi Ohmama. He's a composer I have more of an impression of as someone who writes scores for live-action dramas and documentaries, but in recent memory he also handled the score for Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. Still in his thirties, he's a young composer from whom we can expect more and more great work going forward.

As I mentioned, realism is one of Blue Box's selling points, so scattered throughout the work are scenes depicting a certain cruelty of youth. How he'll color those scenes, what instruments he'll use to express the characters' feelings—after finally getting its anime adaptation, Blue Box looks like it'll be impossible to take my eyes off.

Image quoted from the official site https://aonohako-anime.com/