The Spring 2020 Manga Guide

Wave, Listen to Me

What's It About? 

Minare likes to drink. And who could blame her? Her crappy boyfriend just dumped her and took several thousand yen from her in the process. But there is such a thing as being a little…too vocal when the liquor hits you. Being a little too candid. Such is the case when, one night, she opens up to an older gentleman in a bar. The next day, she finds that the man (a rather prolific radio producer in their city of Hokkaido) had, without her knowledge, recorded her inebriated confessions and is currently playing blaring them across the airwaves, even in the restaurant where she works. To save face and dignity, Minare breaks down the doors of the station BTS and, at the behest of the producer, fills the space of the segment with her own, off-the-cuff ramblings. And so begins a surprising new chapter in Minare's life, as she is pulled deeper and deeper into the strange world of radio broadcasting. At least, when she's not drinking and hollering and carrying on.

Wave, Listen to Me! is an original manga series by Hiroaki Samura. It is available for $10.99 digitally and $12.99 physically from Kodansha Comics. An anime adaptation is also currently airing, and is available on Funimation.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Faye Hopper

Rating:

I like the vibe of Wave, Listen to Me!. I like the realistic, down-to-Earth art. I like the premise. I like all the insight it has into a world I am none too familiar with—the world of local Japanese radio DJing—and how it voices the particular cadence of those who sit behind the mic. I like how it shines a light on the everyday concerns of working-class people. And yet, I did not enjoy this first volume.

The reason for this is primarily wariness of the manga's worldview. This is best examined through how the book treats its protagonist, Minare. Minare first enters the world of talk radio after being surreptitiously recorded at a bar by a radio producer. This inciting incident is framed mostly as a joke, and is never really called out as being what it is: taking advantage of a drunk woman (the producer even talks Minare down by showing her a permission notice she wrote while she was plastered). It is not the only instance of noxious behavior being played for laughs or as ‘just the way things are’. Her co-worker basically strongarms Minare back into a job she was just fired from because he has a dream of starting his own restaurant with a wife at his side.

Minare talks about her boss's potential sexuality (the book makes light of and maybe even frames as a kind of predatory queerness his sexually harassing male employees) as a weird, deviant outlier. Through this uncritical depiction, it feels like the book is normalizing unpleasant behavior and suffocating social roles as immutable facts of life. Cap this off with how the book mostly sidelines its main premise (I.E., how someone like Minare navigates and finds an outlet in a strange world like radio broadcasting), sagging the pacing and leaving the book without a clear narrative through line, and you have a manga that I genuinely struggled to get through.

Wave, Listen to Me! does have a fun leading lady at its head. Minare can be quite endearing and relatable in her drunken, no-filter venting and in her awkward, bitter honesty. But I feel the series' dedication to realistic authenticity does it a disservice. Yes, there is truth in how Minare spends most of her time uncertain of if she wants to do radio or not. Yes, her co-worker's clingy possessiveness is really the pathology of a lot of not-fun dudes. But without a clear indication of when its protagonists are in the wrong and when they are hurting others, it feels like all the manga is doing is reinforcing societal mores that are tearing people's lives apart. And as a woman who is so, very tired of toxic social norms stifling expression and preventing happiness, I found this a difficult and unpleasant read.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Wave, Listen to Me! is the kind of book that I can recognize as being well-written, well-drawn, and well put together without actually liking it at all. Certainly its pedigree as being by Hiroaki Samura helps – he's a very good storyteller with a distinctive art style that gives his books a grounding in reality no matter what the genre. The problem with this particular work is, for me, twofold: one, my father worked in radio broadcasting (and is still involved in public radio as a retiree) and two, Minare goes annoys me to a ridiculous degree.

The first issue is one that is very likely unique to me as a reader, or at least applies to a smaller subset of people than some others. The shenanigans that the owner of MRS pulls in order to get Minare on the air aren't just underhanded, they're skirting the lines of legality, and so little of what goes on in this volume feels at all true to what I've seen that it kept distracting me from the actual story. And when that actual story centers on a character like Minare who is one not-so-internal monologue away from intensely obnoxious, well, that doesn't make this a particularly enjoyable reading experience. (It is, however, much more palatable than the anime's first episode due to manga being a silent medium.) Minare is something of a mess, and while that's in almost equal parts her own making and some really bad luck, reading about her whining about it doesn't seem to show that she's trying to do anything all that different from what landed her in this position in the first place. Her last boyfriend conned her out of most of her money, but she's not doing anything to get it back. When Mato coerces her into signing a document while drunk that says he can use a secretly-made recording of her on-air, she just accepts it and doesn't try to fight. The only thing she seems willing to go to bat for is her moderately unpleasant job at a curry-and-bread restaurant, and then only because it's the job she's got and therefore easier to stick with.

Minare comes off as preferring to complain than to do anything to improve her situation. She ends up at the radio station for a 3:30 am job when she has no other options, she rants into the mic because it's easier to be angry than it is to move ahead. There is something relatable about this, but in a way that doesn't make it fun to experience on the page. Wave, Listen to Me! is a well-written, well-drawn series that I just simply do not like. It happens.