The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

Shonen Note: Boy Soprano

What's It About? 

Yutaka Aoi has a talent few boys have: He can sing soprano. But when Yukata's voice begins to change as he enters puberty, the journey ahead will be one of self-discovery and reflection for not only himself, but also for those around him.

Shonen Note: Boy Soprano has story and art by Yuhki Kamatani, with English translation by Rose Padgett and lettering by Sara Linsley, and Kodansha will release its first volume both digitally and physically on October 18

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Is It Worth Reading?

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Shōnen Note has a very lovely concept and a fantastic, winsome protagonist in Yutaka. He's almost too pure of a lead, but he has a very rich inner world. And what people take as purity is just sensitivity. The story never outright confirms Yutaka as neurodivergent, but his hypersensitivity to sound and his strong emotions peg him for it. And even if Yutaka was just a charming little scamp who just really loved singing, Shōnen Note would still be an enjoyable read. The “Boy, Yutaka sure is a pure little snowflake!”-angle may get a bit worn in, the art is what really brings it all together: it's beautiful and evocative and altogether cozy.

The story can feel a little insubstantial, but it is nevertheless lovely to see Yutaka take his first steps into performance and to learn all of the magic there is to singing. His classmates are all fleshed-out, and not mere cut-outs that just talk about how pure he is. And the potential for rivalry with the Russian soprano Vladimir is tantalizing. Shōnen Note may be a bit of a hard sell, but I truly hope everyone looks into it. Strongly recommended.

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Christopher Farris

Rating:

It's always an interesting proposition to see how manga about music chooses to portray its selected subject matter. How do you go about illustrating sound in an inherently soundless medium? The basic act of pulling that off is probably the most immediately impressive thing about Shonen Note: Boy Soprano. In this volume's grandest moments, Yuhki Kamatani attempts to communicate those aural elements via the medium of abstraction, detailing lush forests or swirling symbolic star systems to evoke the ideas of the performances being put on. There's a ton of effort put in rendering these, the complexities of the art on the page seeking to mirror the complexities of the songs being sung, and it's an approach that works. Shōnen Note is pointedly about how music and sounds can make us feel, so a visual medium communicating that visually makes for a neat, understanding trick.

Not that Shōnen Note is constantly swept up in its own grandeur. Those reality-affecting performances are few and far between, but Kamatani's depictions of everything from the noticeable sounds of our ongoing world to collaborative choir practice sessions to the soothing tone of a tuning fork find their places detailed on these pages. A lot of your engagement with the simulated sound is going to depend on your own capacity for conjuring evoked mental sounds and imagery, but the idea of what's going down here is still effectively communicated. A scene depicting sensory overload can come across as all too familiarly relatable even before the technical explanation of main character Aoi's condition is given pages later. A key idea carrying Shōnen Note is that of understanding, with characters within the story exercising various degrees of patient empathy with each other's foibles, and us in the audience being drawn into the sounds in these people's lives and how they affect those experiences.

As for those people and their story, it's one that's complemented conceptually well by all that clever audio-visual illustration. Aoi is charming at first, appearing to be the goodest boy in the whole universe, which only compounds once we (and the other characters) come to understand the real reason he seems so incapable of simply not seeing the best in everyone and everything. It's an approach that extends even to initially-antagonistic characters like a pair of bullies or the prickly Takamine; even as everyone's navigating a complex web of school-club drama, there's no one that can't be brought around through sheer, emphatic, positivity. There are other dramatic elements powering the story, such as a somewhat insistent fixation on the prepubescent status of Aoi's voice and the inherent time limit that puts on him to utilize his abilities. And that in turn prompts some reflection on the question of such obligations: Should we feel the need to share our 'gifts' with others in the wider world, or is exercising them simply in pursuit of our own fulfillment acceptable? It feels like mostly slow-burn reflection with somewhat tougher drama on the horizon, but it comes together under that refreshing positivity and the impressive use of the art to create an overall unique tonal experience.

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MrAJCosplay

Rating:

When you have a story revolving around music and the concept of sound, communicating that idea in a silent medium like a manga can be very difficult. When you have characters describing a way that someone is singing or different ranges of tones, it can be hard to fully appreciate exactly what the characters are supposedly hearing because we as readers are not experiencing the same thing. However, within those limits comes the potential for creativity, and Yuhki Kamatani definitely did their best to take full advantage of their artistry for the sake of placing us in our main character's shoes. Shōnen Note tells the story of Yukata, a young falsetto boy who experiences the world differently from everybody else through his appreciation of sound and music. He very much lets the emotions of the sounds wash over him to the point where they seem to affect his very being, and the way that Kamatani's art portrayed this idea is nothing short of beautiful. Abstract blends of colors, and even the use of different speech bubbles that are shaped or colored in order to punctuate different forms of singing, are details that go a long way to making the music on the page come alive.

All of this is wrapped up in a relatively simple story: Yukata just wants to sing with everybody else, but his purity ends up conflicting with the frustrating ulterior motives of those around him. The emphasis on Yukata's purity can get a little repetitive, but the way that the narrative shows the gradual fact that both camps have on each other is still well done. I was actually genuinely surprised to learn that there are follow-up volumes considering the fact that this volume does a solid job of telling a complete story. I walked away from this volume mostly satisfied, but I have to admit I'm also curious to know what other types of songs Shonen Note: Boy Soprano will sing in the future.