Inio Asano doesn’t really need an introduction to most manga readers, if you don’t know his name, it’s quite likely you know his “magnum opus”, Goodnight Punpun. It’s probably one of the most famous manga without an adaptation of any kind, and in fact, none of his works have yet to be turned into anime. Yet Asano still remains relevant in the animanga landscape.

He’s mostly well known for his melancholic dramas, stories about realistic people struggling to find their position in the world. Goodnight Punpun finds our author trying his best to write a pessimistic, dark and depressive story about a boy with a chronic depression. Yet, even in this, he finds time to make sure his characters are grounded in reality, that we can understand and relate to most of them. His currently ongoing work, Dead Dead Demon’s Dedededestruction is a sci-fi about space-ships and alien invasions, yet, it too focuses more on these characters, their emotions and their relationships. While these two are, to me, the best that Asano has to offer, before he made those, he achieved some success with a smaller manga, a manga that we will be talking about today, Solanin.

I first found Solanin when I was in my early twenties, and I feel like that’s important to note, because Solanin is about your early twenties. It’s a weird time in your life, because when you’re in your teens, you’re growing up, you’re developing yourself into who you will be from there on out, and you kinda get “lost” with your growth. I felt like an adult when I was seventeen or eighteen, I felt like I was mature enough to face the world. But four, five years later? I felt the complete opposite, I felt lost, I felt like I wasn’t an adult, at all, and it took me a while to find myself in a position where I could say I did. It felt like I had failed at growing up, I was failing college, I was working at a call center getting paid less than the minimum wage, I was feeling useless and alone. A great part of what helped me overcome that phase of my life was my friends who were always there for me. A first, really. This was the perfect state of mind to read Solanin.

Solanin isn’t a recreation of my situation, it talks about Meiko, a office worker who isn’t really happy with her job, but doesn't really have any other ambition or dream, and her boyfriend, Taneda, who doesn’t really have a job at all. Taneda’s dream is to have success with the band he formed with his friends. Friends that are also a bit lost on what they want from the future. While Kenichi is still in college due to flunking a year, Rip works in his dad's drugstore, a safe place, sure, but not really his dream.
What’s so good about Solanin from the start is that it shows that a lot of people can feel lost at this age, that it’s normal to feel so, it doesn’t matter that you have a dream you’re trying hard to follow, that you have a stable job or that you’re still lost in college. This is the time where life really starts and the time where it first feels like you can’t go back, that maybe you screwed up, and fucked your only chance at life. Similar to most of Asano's works, Solanin drops it’s messages with beautifully written monologues and dialogues between these characters. Each of them offers a different point of view or opinion.

Yet, contrary to some of his more recent output, Solanin doesn’t go out without a flicker of hope. Sure, the events in the second half of the manga aren’t necessarily the happiest of times, but there is a message here, a message that maybe it’s not too late, and maybe it’s okay to not have your childhood dream come true. There’s more to life than being famous. There’s friends, there’s moments, there’s smaller dreams. There’s definitely happiness in that life and you should cherish it.

But to say that Solanin is a good manga because of having a message that I needed to hear when I did, isn’t really enough. Sure, it’s part of the reason why I love it so much, but the message would’ve failed if the execution wasn’t on par with it.

Solanin works because it has a great cast of characters. It’s a short manga, only two volumes long, but it’s quite enough, the first volume alone does a great job setting up the characters, their motivations and their relationships with one another. It helps that they feel familiar, they’re not super intelligent or extremely quirky characters, they are a store clerk... an office lady… a guitarist of a dying band. It’s natural to associate them with either yourself or people you know. Yet, this doesn't mean that the story is boring at all, on the contrary while, yes, the first half is a bit uneventful, it's in the second half that this manga really shines, and without spoiling it, it does lead to a pretty satisfying and incredibly emotional finale. A finale that feels emotional not because of the message, but because of how real their friendship feels throughout the 29 chapters of Solanin. When you reach the ending you can't help but cheer for these characters and their dreams.

The artwork also does a great job at conveying their emotions. Solanin sees Asano still perfecting his style, but the cartoonishly simple characters contrasting with the realistic backgrounds still works. His characters are simple in design, but yet they are drawn in a way that you can always know what their current emotions are. It makes you want to smile when smile, cry when cry and scream when they scream.

When compared to the rest of his works, I wouldn’t say that Solanin is Asano’s best. Punpun and Dead Dead Demon’s are way more ambitious and manage to be incredibly solid works that I would put on my Top 3 manga without hesitating. Solanin is, in comparison, simpler, yet, I think there’s still some merit in that. To me Solanin was always the easiest to consume and, more importantly, to relate to. It shouldn’t be dismissed to fans of Asano, and I think it should be the first manga for people who are trying to get into the author’s manga.

And for all of those getting lost, just know that we all end up finding the way somehow.