I love sports anime. The best kind of sports anime can get your blood rushing like you’re watching a real sports game. You start to care beyond your Sawamura Eijun’s, your Kuroko Tetsuya’s, and your Onoda Sakamichi’s. Sports anime is about Seidou, it’s about Seirin, and it’s about Sohoku. It’s about the team and the team winning—at least, that’s how it usually is. Sometimes, it truly is about individual merit, like with Oka Hiromi of Aim for the Ace or Maruo Eiichiro of Baby Steps. Those are all about how those individuals grow as tennis players. But that’s an individual sport; it’s nothing like baseball, where there are nine guys on the field, or basketball with five on the court, or cycling with six on the team (at least how Yowapeda portrays it).
But I’m here to talk about Suzuka! Suzuka is a running anime…but it’s not really. You’ll find the running in it to be secondary to main character Yamato’s relationship with the titular Suzuka Asahina and unrelated-to-the-title Honoka Sakurai. Even relationships like Miki Hashiba, Saotome, and Megumi take the seat in front of running.
Suzuka is really a romance anime and its original creator, Kouji Seo, manages to hit at just the right moments with what needs to be shown and said. It’s touching in the weirdest ways and kind of insulting in a multitude of others.
Yamato is kind of terrible in a lot of ways. He goes out with Honoka because she likes him, but not really because he likes her. It’s more like he’s interested in her, but even that’s a stretch. Mostly, it stemmed from her just kissing him. He’s still in love with Suzuka while all this is going on, and it only puts strain on both of them because he’s being an idiot.
Suzuka is just as stupid, but for a way better reason—I mean, any reason would be better than Yamato’s, which is essentially “I’m a pretty self-centered guy.” Suzuka had her first love, Kazuki Tsuda, die in a car accident (the perennial sports trope of an athlete close to the main character(s) dying!). She just doesn’t want to feel that loss again, and that’s very understandable. She’s also like 14 or 15 years old when this is all happening. I barely knew anything about anything then (and know little more now, really), and she has to deal with this huge change in your life. A death isn’t something anyone can deal with properly because there is no proper way to deal with death.
Yamato is right, though, in one way. Suzuka did need to get over Kazuki. Yamato used WAY too harsh of words to do so; the dude has some speaking issues in that he should really keep his mouth shut in a lot of the situations where he ends up talking. What is actually great about Suzuka is how they allow this gradual letting up of the love for Kazuki to be overtaken with a love for Yamato.
I think that’s what I really love about Suzuka. I griped about it a lot, but it’s just kind of warming to see this happen right before your eyes. It’s young love and Kouji Seo does it really well. But to be honest…Suzuka struggles a lot more than Seo’s manga sequel, Fuuka, does. If you want this Suzuka experience, but better, Fuuka is the way to go. Though a few years down the line, I’ll probably be throwing Suzuka into the player again for a re-watch, so what do I know.
This article was originally posted in 2015 as part of our inaugural Ten Years Later project and has been updated to reflect that it’s been *heavy sigh* twenty years now by the editor.
