The failure of a sports manga, or a sports story, comes when the activity is segregated from human perception and life itself.

There’s one scene in the completely over the top TV series Aoi Honoo where Honoo realizes that the secret to Adaichi Mitsuru’s success as a sports writer was that he wasn’t writing sports manga at all – but school manga. This, to me, is the secret to making a sports story shine – the activity must be an excuse to develop human emotions, because this aspect is where it really sticks inside your head beyond the mere manipulation of parts.

I find the same idea applies to mystery fiction, although a lot less people have opened up to this. The ingenuity of a trick is only one level, but when it becomes intertwined with heartfelt psychologies – like Isin’s mysteries or Hyouka – you have a way for the work to break its genre boundaries.

Genre exists because people have realized that a certain kind of narrative structure can be abused to invoke certain pleasures inside a human being, and a limited genre writer is basically a person who sticks to a baseline abuse without allowing it to be seen in a different light. I’m not saying this is a bad thing though, since those who pull it off the best will be representative of the genre, but although they win over a certain segment of experience – they cannot ever develop a full scope of it.

So mysteries would be abusive of the pleasure that one gets from a logical twist as well as fitting together disparate elements. Fantasy & Sci-Fi are abusive of the discovery of new worlds, ideas and cultures, while frequently forgetting that merely creating a new culture and explicating on it with high exposition is never going to ground it beyond anything other than a novelty. Slice of Life works on tranquility and nostalgia – but such a mood can be easily dissipated if it doesn’t allow for these moments to build upon one another.

The moment one extracts the core abstract concept of a genre – that allows for it to be broken and utilized, while still retaining the pleasures of the genre itself. This is the core strength of 3-Gatsu no Lion. Like Chihayafuru, it develops the community around the activity and focuses on the lives of these professionals who have devoted themselves to such a narrow scope of activity.

3-Gatsu no Lion’s primary strength as a Manga, and maybe even moreso than Chihayafuru, comes from Umino Chika’s talent for characterization and the kind of sentimental poetic mood that fits Shoujo Manga so perfectly. This gives it that atmosphere of ‘life itself’ – something which may deflect many viewers from enjoying it fully, but gives a resoundingly good payoff should one understand what it’s building up to.

A sign that this approach is working is when you look back upon a character and realize that this character has developed without you realizing it. Like life itself, you suddenly look back on yourself and you have the impression that you were still that person you were before, but somehow everything has been recontextualized – you become surprised at the change. The is more or less what it feels like to see the world through the eyes of Kiriyama Rei – and by the time he achieves his stability later in the manga and comes into his own, you cannot pinpoint any overtly specific moments of development – but can only ambiguously grasp that the accumulation of a variety of experiences has built up and stacked and multiplied themselves against one another to forge him anew.

More importantly, this change happens concurrently with the intersection of lives and other minds that populate the Shogi community Kiriyama is situated in, as well as the characters that inhabit his own personal life. This is vastly different with, for example, the kind of coming-of-age story that an author like Herman Hesse would write, whereby all the other characters serve as symbolic representations for the development of the protagonist (Hesse is still a good writer though, because of how well he does his style of plot).

You can see this development of a community in a similarity between Chihayafuru and 3-Gatsu. Both Manga are willing to take a break from focusing on the young, who are slowly coming into themselves, in order to focus on the struggle between veterans who are finding themselves displaced by the newer generations. This kind of focus on every age bracket and the overall community as a whole is the sign of a work that’s willing to build a larger universe of human feeling beyond its initial premises. Boku no Hero Academia is able to do this to a certain extent, but since it still has its Shounen battle roots to consider, it has yet to break out into a full examination of the community to the extent that something like 3-Gatsu has.

And here is the clear difference between a work that is about ‘loads and loads of characters’ and a work that is about ‘loads and loads of lives’. One seeks to push them like pieces on a Shogi board, towards a certain goal, while the other is willing to take the time to deviate from the goal in order to give it greater meaning. This is a skill that has to be learned – the importance of pause, digression, and atmosphere in developing a story.