pictured: Kengo Hanazawa
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Well, I imagine some of you might be getting off here. While I definitely understand that feeling, you'll be missing out on a lot of good stuff. Haha!
BOYS ON THE RUN, by Kengo Hanazawa (ch62-63)
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These chapters, man. Dude.
Ultimate come·up·pance!
I LOVE this damn manga!! Oh my God! I was worried it was gonna turn into some lame beat-the-boss-and-all-is-well thing, but damn damn damn… thanks a lot for your continued work, Daniel.
Poor Aoyama. Yeah, you heard me!
If Kengo is good at one thing, it’s messing with our expectations.
I kind of like that Aoyama is still a jerk even after going through this ordeal with his health. It would have been too sappy/contrived if this had given him “perspective” and he repented for what he did to Tanishi.
Poor Tanishi will never get the second fight he wanted so badly.
@ D: Yeah, I kinda feel bad for the guy too. He got a colonoscopy for goodness’ sake.
KARMA AT ITS BEST
I’ve blocked some comments.
If you want to go and read the untranslated volumes in Japanese, knock yourselves out. You damn well should, it’s better in Japanese, and you can give Hanazawa the cash he deserves. But common courtesy would suggest not to go and talk about it here. Thanks.
For starters, thank you for blocking the comments.
And of course, thanks for your translations. These two chapters were great, I’ll keep F5′ing your site.
Nice pic you made for the summary, by the way.
If I were Tanishi, I would have possibly lost control and just punched Aoyama, but this is not about just hitting him, it’s about beating him and that will never happen, he will never get better, that’s obvious.
I guess Tanishi must learn to leave all about his past life really in the past. Forget about Chiharu and Mammoth… and specially, forget about the “you’re nothing” part. He must find a way of becoming something.
It must be hard for Tanishi, he started boxin just to get his revenge and now…okay, there’s still Hana, but the revenge thing was his fuel.
I kinda feel bad for Aoyama too, sure he was a dick but now his life is screwed. It must be hard for someone like him, someone used to be on the top of the social hierarchy.
Literally sick! Damn right with the spoilers too. I wish everywhere didn’t list I am a Hero as a zombie manga. Bet Hanazawa shocked the hell out of people expecting more of this sort of thing. Many thanks
This manga is really something else. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a story like Boys on the Run.
I hesitate to use the term “plot twist” because it makes you think of Bruce Willis finding out he’s a ghost or Luke finding out that Darth Vader’s his father. BotR doesn’t have those kinds of plot twists. Instead, it has shocking and unexpected moments that work precisely because they AREN’T shocking and unexpected, they merely deviate from the Hollywood playbook. After the fact you look back and think “yeah, it was realistic. I didn’t see it coming, but in retrospect it could never have ended any other way.”
We start out with Tanishi, a definitive loser, a man so pathetic that dog turds laugh at him from behind his back. A girl he loves has her honour insulted, and he decides to be a man for once in his life. All of his pride and dignity and self-respect is resting on one big fight.
At this point, I was expecting BotR to be an MA15+ rated version of Karate Kid. And honestly, I would have really enjoyed something like that.
Then…Tanishi loses his fight. He loses his job. His girlfriend turns out to be a complex and troubled character. He starts over, at square one, learning how to box in a class full of kids…and now we see that even if he gets his revenge on Aoyama, his revenge will be meaningless.
After the events in the middle of volume 5, it seemed like the manga lost some energy and intensity. Now I realise Kanazawa was just giving us a breather before his next sucker punch.
Goddamn, man. This whole time I was thinking the manga would just lead back up to Tanishi fighting Aoyama and getting licked again and Tanishi just giving up on life. Now that Aoyama’s not even viable as somebody to fight… What the hell is Tanishi going to do? This manga, I don’t even know what to feel.
Thank you for your hard work, Daniel and co.
thanks for the chapters. man, didnt expect that kind of thing happened to Aoyama.
First of all Thank you guys for the chapters!!! It was very thoughtfull of you to release two chapters! If you hadn’t done that, the tension would have been killed. You know what you are doing!
Secondly I hit my imaginary thanks button to MawBTS’s post!!
He summed up everything in the best way!
It’s true that this manga lost its energy and although I am a big fan I wasn’t anticipating for it lately the way I used to 2 or 3 months ago.
I was almost sure that it would take a wrong turn after the previous release, but boy what followed caught me totally off guard.
I still can’t believe what happened!! Boys on The Run, a relatively unpopular manga, gave lessons in this chapter of how you make an excellent story!
Now, I am even more sure that this is one of the top5 mangas I have ever read.
Aside that, I have to reread Aoyama’s description of his illness to figure out his exact circumstances.
I wonder if he has any chance to get back to his old self?!
Also, no matter the tone in which he spoke to Tanishi, I really think that he has regreted the way he behaved to him.
And lastly, I liked that Tanishi gave him courage in the end.
Now I am looking forward (more than ever before) for the following chapters!!!
Wow, you’re all taking this a lot better than I did when I first read it. As a development, it was a bit abrupt for me. As detestable as Aoyama was, I felt he deserved a bit more. It might’ve been at least poetic justice to give him AIDS or something.
As for the story losing energy after volume 5, yeah, but that energy took five volumes to build up.
The next chapter will conclude volume 6. Man, still four more volumes to go. As always, your comments and discussion will keep the fire burning.
@DL
Aoyama’s a pretty well-observed character. He’s not the kind of guy who actively sets out to be a prick, he’s just like that because people have been letting him get away with it all his life. For that kind of person to whom success comes so easily, it can be difficult to relate to less-successful people without feeling ashamed of one’s luck and privilege. Viewing others as losers who just didn’t try hard enough is kind of a defense against that, I think.
And to play devil’s advocate for a bit, I don’t think he’s THAT bad a guy. He didn’t steal away Chiharu until after she fell out with Tanishi. He didn’t call Tanishi a loser until after Tanishi started a punch-up with him. He is callous, but then Chiharu and Tanishi arguably invested way too much of themselves in him. It’s not his job to babysit the emotionally immature, y’know? Look at how he talks to Tanishi before / while they fight; calls him Tanishi-san, right? He’s polite, he’s not just trying to hurt him. He’s calling him a loser, but he’s also kind of willing him to stop being a loser.
You could have a good parallel story about Aoyama getting sick and taking stock of his life, I bet. Did he really steal the capsule toy design? I can’t remember. That was a dick move, I guess.
It… does feel a bit forced, but I like that now Tanishi will have to give up on revenge. Maybe now he’ll be forced to find a “positive” reason to fight.
I also liked how in the end he seems genuinely sad for Aoyama.
Oops, probably shouldn’t have asked, sorry. I’m dumb! I don’t know why I didn’t think about that at all.
Anyways, I’ll just thank you for all your work on both this and Crime & Punishment!
Wow. Kengo made everyone’s expectations pierce the fucking stratosphere and then pulled a complete 180º on all of us. I’m not exactly satisfied at this outcome but if anything else, that’s exactly what Kengo set out to do. We’re all as disappointed as Tanishi is, in a way.
4 volumes to go and we’re completely in the dark now. The hell is gonna happen from this point?
That was quite a twist, but I’m okay with it. As said before, I feel Aoyama deserved better, but I like the fact the ending can’t go a way we expected. Thanks for continuing this great and unpredictable series.
I knew something had to happen to make sure that Tanishi vs. Aoyama rematch wasn’t going to happen. Because that was never going to happen. But this?
Anyway, the more important news here is it looks like Kira won his fight you guys!
@DL
I dunno, the UC and ensuing medical fallout is way more humiliating and less potentially martyr-marking than AIDS. There’s also this terrible absurdity to it that just fits in this universe.
Aoyama doesn’t get life get the best of him. i wish tanishi can take example from him.
@ RobinOttens:
Wow, I was so preoccupied with the Aoyama thing that I totally forgot Kira won his fight! Looks like the Mammoth guy will be on the lookout for a new job now.
Once again, Hanazawa proves he transcends storytelling.
Before this release, imagine the worst case scenario for Tanishi. He encounters Aoyama and gets beat up, again. Maybe Aoyama steals Hana (that’d be a little surreal though). In any case, Tanishi would keep fighting.
But instead we get this. It’s far worse a blow than being physically beat up could ever be. The very identity Tanishi has been building for himself is blown away, rendered pointless. Tanishi has been beaten up, not physically, but existentially.
As someone who read the Japanese version awhile back, 10% of the fun of these releases is reading peoples’ comments. Ah man, I can’t wait to see comments on some of the other releases in the future…
So Chiharu and Aoyama have both left him with a simple “whatever”.
anonymous: Aoyama literally said something more along the lines of “lame” but that sounded kind a bit pre-teenish in English. Either way he was dismissing Tanishi for caring so much, but just to clarify it wasn’t actually the same words as Chiharu used. That was just an accident.
So kind of a silly side question. Who is that guy prepping Kira on p. 14 of Chapter 62? (http://www.batoto.net/read/_/143685/boys-on-the-run_v6_ch62_by_danielau/14) We saw him prepping/coaching Kira when we first met Kira as well. And yet we haven’t ever seen him outside of that boxing place. Even though he wears a shirt that says “sakurada gym”, we never see him at sakurada gym.
If I were Tanishi the first thing I would do is point and laugh at Aoyama’s face then proceed to smash it.