Real vol. 16

Nomiya, Takahashi, and Kiyohara continue to plug away at life in this volume.  Nomiya is more determined than ever to become a pro basketball player, but his skills still need major polishing.  Fortunately he’s got plenty of friends to help him out.  Takahashi is getting ready to leave the rehab facility and has a place waiting for him on the Dreams.  Except he’s not feeling the same enthusiasm for the sport he used to, not when the young man is busy angsting about being a burden on his hardworking parents.  Kiyohara still has the same drive, enough to chew his fellow teammates out at the start for not having the same level of commitment.  Surprisingly, this only makes them more determined to keep up with him, and leaves the man himself frustrated by his own shortcomings.

Mangaka Takehiko Inoure directed the hugely successful “The First Slam Dunk” between volumes 15 and 16, so the fact that this only took four years to arrive feels like a small miracle.  Unfortunately it doesn’t feel any better for this.  Not that vol. 16 feels rushed, just that it comes off like Inoue is slowly taking his time in setting things up for the next stage of his characters’ lives.  That results in a volume which feels like it would try my patience even if it had arrived a year after the previous one.

To put it simply:  Not a whole heck of a lot happens here.  Even though the character beats still feel genuine, there’s precious little forward momentum to any of the characters’ arcs in this volume.  Which is particularly troubling given that they all get a proportional amount of face time in this volume, so you can’t say that this is because someone got shortchanged.  This isn’t going to get me to stop reading “Real” as what’s here is still good and will likely come off better when reading through the series so far.  It just doesn’t do anything to get me excited for the next volume.  Which might be a good thing as there’s no clue when we’ll be seeing it…