ソラニン

SOLANIN

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
2
RELEASE
May 2, 2006
CHAPTERS
29

DESCRIPTION

College graduates struggle to cope with the real world. Music offers refuge in this modern manga with an American attitude.
Meiko Inoue is a recent college grad working as an office lady in a job she hates. Her boyfriend Shigeo is permanently crashing at her apartment because his job as a freelance illustrator doesn't pay enough for rent. And her parents in the country keep sending her boxes of veggies that just rot in her fridge. Straddling the line between her years as a student and the rest of her life, Meiko struggles with the feeling that she's just not cut out to be a part of the real world.

(Source: Viz Media)

Notes:

The chapter count contains an epilogue published in October 2017 as part of the new Japanese volumes edition release.
It was nominated for the 2009 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material - Japan.
It was nominated for the 2009 Harvey Award for Best American Edition of Foreign Material.

CAST

Meiko Inoue
Naruo Taneda
Jirou Yamada
Katou Kenichi
Ai Kotani

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO SOLANIN

ONE SHOT Slice of LifeHaru yo Koi

REVIEWS

Vondervent
70/100
Review de Solanin em português.
__Uma profunda concepção da realidade.__ A maneira sincera e indescritivelmente humanizada que Solanin usufrui do coming of age para tornar a trama divertida, empolgante e envolvente é fantástica, se você estiver no clima certo. Sem falar na arte tão única e linda quanto o mangá. __O que me fascina em Solanin.__ Os personagens são perfeitamente vivos, humanos, orgânicos. A situação dos personagens é incisivamente identificável e cria para eles um "carisma auto depreciativo". A situação deles é tão simplória e real, que além de querer ver sua conclusão, eu torço por eles. Eles são personagens, ou seja, ficção. E é isto que mais me intriga, eu compro tão bem a ideia que todos são tridimensionais que eu tenho a sensação de que eu estou relembrando dos "bons tempos da juventude" (mesmo que eu seja menor de idade enquanto escrevo isto). __A "graça" de Solanin.__ Solanin é uma obra extremamente peculiar, como se fosse o suprassumo do slice of life. E o slice of life é um dos gêneros mais difíceis de se envolver, e isto pode ser um problema. Mas, Solanin interessante pra mim. Eu consigo me envolver devido à sua simbologia e representatividade. Não é como se a obra retratasse pessoas como a Meiko e o Taneda, mas como o mangá faz de pequenas passagens algo especial e ínfimo do ser humano. Como nenhum personagem foge de seu contexto ou comportamento padrão e são divertidos. __O fator realidade.__ De maneira excessiva, eu insisto que Solanin é uma obra estritamente realista até seu mais ínfimo detalhe. A maneira como os personagens agem, afetam seus arredores e são afetados uns pelos outros é perfeitamente plausível, mas o que de fato trás o impacto da realidade é o ritmo da história. Ao final de cada time skip, a diferença sutil e, obviamente, o mais verossímil possível no comportamento dos personagens é única. __Conclusão.__ Apesar dos elogios, Solanin continua sendo uma obra de difícil acesso. Devido ao forte fator realidade, é difícil entrar no ritmo sem um pré-preparo e boa vontade, pois ele é tão realista que é superficialmente seco. Mas, o clima com o qual o leitor lê não é culpa do mangá. Ele é cheio de simbologias e esmero para com as cenas, que enriquecem a história.
Adendos especiais (completamente fora de ordem).

-Pode parecer estúpido que um menor de idade fale sobre o coming of age, e é.
-Eu fiz esta resenha após a minha releitura da obra, e cheguei à conclusão de que Solanin é uma obra perfeita para releitura constante. Provavelmente, eu entenderei melhor o que leio a cada releitura.
-A primeira vez que li Solanin foi por obrigação, quando eu tinha 14 anos (achei uma merda, dei 3/10).
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Fyodorisdead
92/100
Another testament to Asano Sensei's genius
__Have done my best to keep spoilers out of this__ __My review of Solanin__
A short yet stimulating story which makes you laugh, cry, think and cry again for good measure. I took a liking to this as I'm in my twenties too and the pain and the characters were very relatable.
The story is about a couple and their friends who have just graduated and are trying to make find their place in this world amidst insecurities, fears and the question of "Am I really happy?".

It's a dark whisper calling to me. But I'm not brave enough to listen. I'm old enough to know I don't have any special talents. So no matter how depressing... I have to suck it up... And live the life I have.”

The negativity and rejections we go through in our lives turns us into mindless drones and by the time we are adults, we don't even know what we want anymore and are filled with thoughts of uncertainty. This leads to us conforming to a life we might not really want but one we think we want. It's a rare sight to see people break these chains and live the life they love, the life which makes them feel truly alive. These convoluted emotions we go through in our twenties makes life seem impossible and very scary. But we must not give up as there is happiness in waking up. There is happiness in sharing a beer or having a smoke with your friends. There is happiness in kissing the one you love and caressing their hair. These are not moments which will make us happy forever but these fleeting moments are worth living for. They are worth struggling for.

Asano in his usual style manages to jerk a tear or two out of you, yet in Solanin he has always kept a tinge of hope throughout. The characters are extremely likeable and although there is not a lot of pages dedicated to character building, each character is well established.
This is also the first physical manga I ever bought and the experience was amazing.
The art in Solanin is quite nice and is very striking; the cartoonish character design coupled with the hyper realistic backgrounds is characteristic of Asano, and definitely adds to the story. The conversations don't feel dragged out and everything someone says is integral to the story. The depiction of young love and the ever looming feeling of doom, as a person is suddenly thrown out into the real world is beautifully presented. The paradox of being an adult is poked fun at a lot of times.
I would definitely have liked Solanin to have gone on for longer but the beauty of it is that it is as short and beautiful as the message it tries to convey.
This is not a book which would absolve you of your feelings of existentialism but it would definitely help you see hope in your life and the profoundness of our daily lives.
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MasterCrash
95/100
Most people find themselves lost at some point in their life. This is their story
Inio Asano doesn’t really need an introduction to most manga readers, if you don’t know his name, it’s quite likely you know his “magnum opus”, Goodnight Punpun. It’s probably one of the most famous manga without an adaptation of any kind, and in fact, none of his works have yet to be turned into anime. Yet Asano still remains relevant in the animanga landscape.

He’s mostly well known for his melancholic dramas, stories about realistic people struggling to find their position in the world. Goodnight Punpun finds our author trying his best to write a pessimistic, dark and depressive story about a boy with a chronic depression. Yet, even in this, he finds time to make sure his characters are grounded in reality, that we can understand and relate to most of them. His currently ongoing work, Dead Dead Demon’s Dedededestruction is a sci-fi about space-ships and alien invasions, yet, it too focuses more on these characters, their emotions and their relationships. While these two are, to me, the best that Asano has to offer, before he made those, he achieved some success with a smaller manga, a manga that we will be talking about today, Solanin.

I first found Solanin when I was in my early twenties, and I feel like that’s important to note, because Solanin is about your early twenties. It’s a weird time in your life, because when you’re in your teens, you’re growing up, you’re developing yourself into who you will be from there on out, and you kinda get “lost” with your growth. I felt like an adult when I was seventeen or eighteen, I felt like I was mature enough to face the world. But four, five years later? I felt the complete opposite, I felt lost, I felt like I wasn’t an adult, at all, and it took me a while to find myself in a position where I could say I did. It felt like I had failed at growing up, I was failing college, I was working at a call center getting paid less than the minimum wage, I was feeling useless and alone. A great part of what helped me overcome that phase of my life was my friends who were always there for me. A first, really. This was the perfect state of mind to read Solanin.

Solanin isn’t a recreation of my situation, it talks about Meiko, a office worker who isn’t really happy with her job, but doesn't really have any other ambition or dream, and her boyfriend, Taneda, who doesn’t really have a job at all. Taneda’s dream is to have success with the band he formed with his friends. Friends that are also a bit lost on what they want from the future. While Kenichi is still in college due to flunking a year, Rip works in his dad's drugstore, a safe place, sure, but not really his dream.
What’s so good about Solanin from the start is that it shows that a lot of people can feel lost at this age, that it’s normal to feel so, it doesn’t matter that you have a dream you’re trying hard to follow, that you have a stable job or that you’re still lost in college. This is the time where life really starts and the time where it first feels like you can’t go back, that maybe you screwed up, and fucked your only chance at life. Similar to most of Asano's works, Solanin drops it’s messages with beautifully written monologues and dialogues between these characters. Each of them offers a different point of view or opinion.

Yet, contrary to some of his more recent output, Solanin doesn’t go out without a flicker of hope. Sure, the events in the second half of the manga aren’t necessarily the happiest of times, but there is a message here, a message that maybe it’s not too late, and maybe it’s okay to not have your childhood dream come true. There’s more to life than being famous. There’s friends, there’s moments, there’s smaller dreams. There’s definitely happiness in that life and you should cherish it.

But to say that Solanin is a good manga because of having a message that I needed to hear when I did, isn’t really enough. Sure, it’s part of the reason why I love it so much, but the message would’ve failed if the execution wasn’t on par with it.

Solanin works because it has a great cast of characters. It’s a short manga, only two volumes long, but it’s quite enough, the first volume alone does a great job setting up the characters, their motivations and their relationships with one another. It helps that they feel familiar, they’re not super intelligent or extremely quirky characters, they are a store clerk... an office lady… a guitarist of a dying band. It’s natural to associate them with either yourself or people you know. Yet, this doesn't mean that the story is boring at all, on the contrary while, yes, the first half is a bit uneventful, it's in the second half that this manga really shines, and without spoiling it, it does lead to a pretty satisfying and incredibly emotional finale. A finale that feels emotional not because of the message, but because of how real their friendship feels throughout the 29 chapters of Solanin. When you reach the ending you can't help but cheer for these characters and their dreams.

The artwork also does a great job at conveying their emotions. Solanin sees Asano still perfecting his style, but the cartoonishly simple characters contrasting with the realistic backgrounds still works. His characters are simple in design, but yet they are drawn in a way that you can always know what their current emotions are. It makes you want to smile when smile, cry when cry and scream when they scream.

When compared to the rest of his works, I wouldn’t say that Solanin is Asano’s best. Punpun and Dead Dead Demon’s are way more ambitious and manage to be incredibly solid works that I would put on my Top 3 manga without hesitating. Solanin is, in comparison, simpler, yet, I think there’s still some merit in that. To me Solanin was always the easiest to consume and, more importantly, to relate to. It shouldn’t be dismissed to fans of Asano, and I think it should be the first manga for people who are trying to get into the author’s manga.

And for all of those getting lost, just know that we all end up finding the way somehow.
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