What happens when a high school student has trauma and trouble communicating? How do they get out of that? Maybe we’ll find out this time.
“Given” Band Members
Mafuyu Sato is a 16(at the beginning)/ 17(at the end) year old high school student. He has salmon pink hair and salmon eyes. He’s calm in nature, innocent looking, soft spoken. And he’s very, very good at singing.
Ritsuka Uenoyama is also a 16/17 year old, goes to the same high school as Mafuyu. He has black eyes, blue eyes. He’s also pretty calm in nature, enough outgoing, not very friendly but a good guy sort of way, and totally not soft spoken. He’s also the guitarist.
Akihiko Kaji is a 20/21 year old college student. He’s friendly, outgoing, and usually a pretty decent guy. He has lots of piercings so he looks mad hot. He’s is the drummer and canonically muscular.
Haruki Nakayama is 22/23 year old guy, studying in the came college as Akihiko. He’s just straight up a nice guy, decent, friendly, outgoing, the mother hen. He’s the bassist and also crushing really hard on Akihiko.
Some Other Important Characters
Among the few other characters who aren’t part of the band, we have Yuki Yoshida (Mafuyu’s ex boyfriend and childhood friend. He’s dead during the whole story timeline), Ugetsu Murata (A violinist. He has been with Akihiko since High School. They are shown together to be in a pretty complicated relationship), Hiragi Kashima and Shizusumi Yagi (childhood friends of Mafuyu and Yuki. They were also Yuki’s bandmates), Itaya, Yayoi, Koji and many more.
Their Musical Journey
The story starts with a very depressed Mafuyu meeting a sleepy Uenoyama. It proceeds with Mafuyu joining Uenoyama and his band, Akihiko and Haruki. It takes a bit of convincing and music skills. Mafuyu carries a Gibson ES-330, which is very significant to the story.
The guitar used to belong to Yuki before his death, after his death, his mother offered the guitar to Mafuyu. Later Uenoyama taught Mafuyu how to play the guitar. The Manga also gives us a glimpse Mafuyu’s journey into the band.
We get to see how Mafuyu’s relationship with Hiragi and Shizusumi before and after Yuki’s death and how it affected Mafuyu. We also see the relation between Akihiko, Ugetsu and Haruki. All while a relationship begins to form between Mafuyu and Uenoyama. And all of it is so musical.
The manga also gives us the view on the relationship of the side character, with and without the main characters. It’s pretty refreshing because there are many characters where the side characters exist only for plot purpose. It was a good break.
Humming The Music
Reading the Given Manga was fun because of all the music stuff. As a music person myself, I was totally in my element with this manga. This manga actually has an anime. The music is brought to life in the anime. Perfection.
One of my most favorite part of the manga is how Yuki’s death affected Mafuyu, the trauma and everything. The way he recovers from it is also pretty great. The emotions were deep and I connected a lot with those. On one hand, Mafuyu was struggling with Yuki’s death, Uenoyama was struggling with his growing feelings for Mafuyu.
While the teenagers are struggling with their feelings, the adults, Akihiko, Haruki and Ugestu had their own issues and feelings to sort out. Akihiko and Haruki’s relationship was very unique and maybe a bit toxic. All these situations felt so real while reading, I grew a bit of a love hate relationship with Ugetsu.
Hiragi and Shizusumi, the only one remained in their band, SYH, were also had a bit complicated relationship. It included a bit of misunderstanding and a lot of crushes. Oh, and a bit of argument and hurt, just to spice it up.
So, This was the first BL manga I read. As a first read, the emotions in the manga were very intense. Then i did the mistake of watching the anime and ended up bursting in tears. The story is so good, there isn’t enough words to describe it. Not to mention, the music are so, so good.
My favorite one is Fuyu No Hanashi. It’s in the anime and I’d suggest every BL lover to watch it. The anime pretty much covers the whole of the manga. But reading the manga is a different feeling.
In the end, I’m glad this was my first BL manga and I’d suggest anyone trying to get into BL to start here.
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