request 20 by Monegi [Twitter/X]
※Illustration shared with permission from the artist. If you like this artwork please support the artist by visiting the source.
The original article was about Elizabeth McCracken but this post is about Haikyuu
I have 90 minutes that I could do anything with right now. But all I actually want to do is STARE INTO THE VENTRICLES OF MY VOLLEYBALL-SHAPED HEART so I guess that's what I'll do.
We saw the Haikyuu movie this week, in theaters, which was cool in itself because I'd never seen (or wanted to see) an anime movie in a theater before. I mean, besides Ghibli (Ponyo and Boy and Heron), but that's its own thing. ~Back in my day~ if you wanted to see an anime movie you bought a region-free Chinese bootleg like god intended. The world is out here offering subbed (and dubbed) screenings of anime?? volleyball?? in a movie theater??? In NORTH AMERICA?? Amazing.
I don't know anything about Haikyuu fandom, but I know a few Normal People whose kids enjoy Haikyuu, and I feel like at least in the context of those conversations Haikyuu often gets shorthanded as being about "the power of friendship." I don't think that's it, though. I mean, friendship is powerful, and the friendships in Haikyuu are no exception, but Haikyuu is not about the power of friendship.
Haikyuu is about volleyball.
In one of my absolute favorite pieces I read in 2023, Yiyun Li cautions against defining fiction in terms of its "aboutness"--saying a (or your) work is "about" motherhood, or "about" grief, or about some amorphous concept. About the power of friendship. And she describes (in her case, Elizabeth McCracken's fiction) as being, instead, a triumph of characters you can truly come to know. Characters who breathe and move and are real enough not just to walk off the page but real enough not just to be known but also maybe to know you. She adds, paraphrasing one of McCracken's own characters:
If you take your characters’ feet for granted—if you haven’t washed and bandaged your characters’ toes, if you haven’t placed their feet on yours to lift them upstairs—perhaps they have a right to refuse to come alive. You’re stuck with sentient and bodiless beings: egos, ghosts, cyphers, fragments of an insufficient imagination.
This is what Haikyuu does so well--but in a very particular way (a way probably very unlike Elizabeth McCracken) where we know and see almost nothing about any of these characters that does not have to do with volleyball. There are no storylines that don't ultimately have something to do with volleyball. There's no "sure it's a cop procedural but we learn so much about the cops' complex home lives! what's where the real story is" Whoever these kids are (and some of them may actually genuinely be volleyballs all the way down), their aliveness does not have to do with suggesting all that they are beyond this one thing, what grand additional worlds they might belong to. It's about who they are, and all of who they are, being crystallized, focalized, pressure-cooked into volleyball.
I'm going to commit the very thing Li warned against and say that this Haikyuu movie (and Haikyuu in general) is "about" LOVING this one thing and growing and connecting through that thing and wanting to bring others to that place and share it. But it is "about" this thing in ways where there is no way to these ideas but through--though the feet and the bandages and the hands and the sweat and the sweat and the sweat. It is only about these things because of the way these things live in every cell and tic and expression of these characters and a volleyball. The film--like the series--is also so good at characterizing that one thing as simultaneously fleeting and menial while also, in the truest form of a both/and, being the most important thing in the world.
Haikyuu is about volleyball.
I've spent most of the last eight hours basically on the verge of tears because I am so overcome with love for THEMMMM; I'm pretty sure I watched the whole movie with my hands over my mouth like 😳🫣. I first thing I wanted to do after watching it was immediately buy another ticket and watch it again. I LOVED IT.