Parenthetical.net

After a motorcycle accident that puts a girl he barely even knows in a wheelchair, Tomomi Nomiya gets kicked out of school — which means he can’t play basketball anymore. His old teammates treat him like dirt. One day he comes to the gym to practice by himself, and meets Kiyoharu Togawa. Togawa lost a leg to bone cancer, but he and his wheelchair can wipe the floor with Nomiya.

The story is complicated, but only rarely confusing: Nomiya devotes himself to the girl he paralyzed, but can’t bring himself to get back on the road; Togawa’s oldest friend Azumi works to get her driver’s license so she can drive him around; Togawa quits the wheelchair basketball team Azumi manages because the other players are too quick to use their handicaps as an excuse to go easy on themselves; Nomiya has repeated run-ins with his former teammates.

This is the first volume of a series, so few of the storylines resolve. I wish that the volume felt more self-contained, but it’s a minor quibble. This is a top-notch graphic novel — and I say that as someone who couldn’t care less about basketball or hot-shot boys. The action scenes on and off the court are gorgeously dramatic. I especially loved the characters’ faces: they’re deeply expressive, without overdoing it the way that manga sometimes does.

And these are people who have a lot to emote about. There are real issues here (uh, as the title would imply), and they’re handled with humor and sensitivity. One of my favorite sequences is a dream that one character has after a car accident hospitalizes him: his legs are bound with barbed wire, and they’re stretching away from him. He reaches out for his legs, but they aren’t attached to him anymore. I’m not paralyzed, so I obviously have no idea how it feels, but this scene is as evocative a depiction of paralysis as any I’ve seen.

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