A SILENT VOICE by Urizen

A Silent Voice Review
by Urizen

As many who know me personally are aware, I am a huge fan of anime and manga.  It started with shows like Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon, before I knew what anime even was or that it existed,  then evolved further and further as time went on. From friends, magazines, and eventually YouTube and various sites, I learned about a variety of series. Some were forgettable, some were bad, most were great, but few have stuck with me in the way that A Silent Voice did.

   A Silent Voice, or Koe No Katachi, was a one shot manga published in Kodansha's Bessatsu Shonen Magazine in 2011 before being serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2013. Written and illustrated by Yoshitoki Ōima, the series ran until 2014, and consisted of a total of seven volumes and eventually received an animated film in 2016. The series as a whole has revived multiple awards and praise, including getting recognized by the Japanese Federation of the Deaf (which should give a hint on what this series deals with). So what's it all about then?

    A Silent Voice tells the story of Shoya Ishida, a former bully. As a kid in elementary school, he, like most children that age, was bored. To relieve that boredom, Shoya and his friends would do things such as wrestle,  and jump off bridges into the lakes below.  One day as Shoya is thinking how bored he has become,  it is announced that the class is getting a new transfer student.  Enter Shoko Nishimiya, a little girl who pulls out a notebook and flips it open revealing the pages that introduce herself and say that she is deaf, but she hopes that they can use that notebook to communicate with each other.  Shoya’s face lights up at the idea of Shoko. To him she was almost alien. New, exciting, different, but most importantly, she was the cure to his boredom.

   Things start off not being too terrible. The students do their best to help and include Shoko while Shoya will come up behind her and yell or make fun of her voice, knowing she can't hear him. From there though,  things escalate. The students grow more annoyed at falling behind and messing up a chorus event due to Shoko. Meanwhile the teacher grows more complacent to the bullying.  Eventually more students are joining in, with Shoko's notebook getting thrown in the lake and her hearing aids getting damaged or thrown out, with one being ripped out in a way that caused damage to her ear. Shoko’s mom demands the school find who did it and wants payment for the damaged hearing aids. Instead of admitting to being in on the bullying, everyone uses Shoya as a scapegoat. The teacher even accuses him of lying when he tries to say the other students were involved.

   From there is where the bullying of Shoya begins.  His friends all begin to turn on him, his shoes get stolen constantly, he gets beat up. He grows to blame Shoko, thinking how thanks to her all of his friends changed. One day he sees Shoko cleaning off a desk and comments on how she must still be getting bullied. He confronts her,  calling her a coward and saying she never speaks up for herself.  This to an extent is true. Instead of standing up for herself, Shoko would always smile and apologize. This confrontation ends up being different though. The two get into a bit of a fist fight, with Shoko breaking down saying she is doing the best she can. There are many very well done emotional moments in this series, and that is one of the best.

   It isn't long before Shoko transfers schools again. Everyone still targets Shoya, with even his former best friend saying to stay away from him because he's a bully. Shoya starts to doubt his own sanity to an extent, wondering if he just imagined everyone else bullying Shoko. As he gets to his senior year in high school, Shoya has blocked himself off from everyone. It’s shown he has anxiety and depression. He hates how he used to be, and has been going through selling all of his belongings to make back the money his mom paid for Shoko’s hearing aids. He decides he doesn’t need this stuff anyway as he plans on killing himself. Having taken sign language classes to communicate, the only thing he had left on his list to do before committing suicide was apologize to Shoko. After tracking her down and giving her the notebook, what is meant to just be an apology and a goodbye, Shoya in the spur of the moment asks if they could be friends.

   Here is where the story really starts. We get two people,  learning to overcome their differences and their problems as they grow to be friends while wondering if they had understood each other and heard the other’s voice, how different would things have been for them. Along the way they are trying to reunite the class, with old friendships being rekindled and new ones coming into being.

   One thing worth noting with A Silent Voice is the characters. There is maybe only one I don’t like and that is Miki Kawai. She is annoying. She is so annoying. Miki is so desperate for everyone to love her that she can’t admit to doing anything wrong. As the series progresses, she becomes more tolerable, but as a whole, she’s the one character I don’t care for.

   I feel like it is worth going through some of these characters, specifically Shoya. I imagine most people look at him as a bully character and wonder how one is supposed to sympathize and like someone like that. The thing is, while there is never a good excuse for bullying, I think the series portrays a different kind of bullying. Instead of the bully who is out to just be a jerk and make people’s life miserable, it is shown that Shoya is just a bored kid. As sad as it is, it is a pretty realistic portrayal. It’s that class clown archetype. He is presented with someone different and doesn’t know how to react. Given he is already so terribly bored, and how the others in the class react and give him attention for his behavior, it really fits. The fact that he has shown to have grown up and regret who he was as a child is important. It becomes a very realistic portrayal and one I appreciate.

  When it comes to Shoko, there almost isn't too much to say.  She is a wonderful character all the way around. Shoko has a lot of self loathing , resulting in her wanting to kill herself from a young age. It doesn't help at all that her mother is a pretty cold person, which that is a whole spoiler topic I won't get into. Despite how she feels about herself and everything that happened, after meeting back up with Shoya, her desire is to get to befriend those in her class that she never got to. I love Shoko’s character.  It is also worth noting that in the English dub of the movie,  she is voiced by an actual deaf actress.  It’s a small touch, but a very nice one.

   I don't want to go into everyone because there are probably seven or more important characters and that would be a bit too much, but I do want to talk about this last one.  Shoko has a younger sister named Yuzuru. I feel about as bad for her as I do Shoko. Yuzuru gets the brunt of their mother's coldness, often leading to fights between the two, especially when it comes to Shoko. Yuzuru cares deeply for her sister,  willing to go to almost any lengths for her. She has had rocks thrown at her while defending Shoko, has had to sit by listening to her sister want to die,  cut her hair short when their mom forced Shoko to cut hers, and just puts up with so much. Yuzuru is also a photographer and, much to her mother's annoyance, constantly takes morbid pictures of dead animals and shows them to Shoko so she can see how cool they are. In actuality though,  she keeps trying to show them to Shoko to show her just hope horrible death is so that way she won't kill herself.  At first she hates Shoya, trying to keep him from Shoko, but as time goes on the two become close and have a bit of a sibling relationship. As I said,  I love most of these characters, even one character I’m supposed to hate, Ueno, I love.  She is so unapologetically terrible and while I don't agree,  I get what she is saying throughout this.

   The art is also worth talking about.  While the manga looks amazing, the movie goes a step beyond. It is absolutely gorgeous animation that is right up there among the best in my opinion. One thing I love that both the manga and movie do is showing Shoya’s anxiety. Everyone around him is down with a big X over their face. As Shoya begins to trust and befriend people, they begin to fall,  revealing the person underneath. It is a very good way to show it. If I had one problem with the movie it would be that some stuff was cut out and changed to streamline it a bit. It is still a great adaption and movie, with the core of it all still there.  There are just things that would've been nice to see animated that weren't.

   Overall,  whether a fan of anime or not, I can't recommend A Silent Voice enough. As of writing this,  the dub of the movie has just recently been put on Netflix, providing everyone with more of an opportunity to experience this. With the world we live in today, I think it is especially important for people to check it out. Anxiety and depression are running rampant. Intolerance is becoming a huge issue.  If we took the chance to teach kids that people are different, but just because they have a disability, like a different gender, or believe in a different God, doesn't make them a bad person. They are human. If we all took the chance to hear each other's voice and understand one another,  maybe the world could be just a little bit better.