About thirty-five years ago, a young mangaka from Kagoshima took Japan by storm with a little story about a relatively obscure sport—basketball. Fast-forward to today, it’s pretty safe to say that this artist’s love letter to shooting hoops became something of a Slam Dunk with its readers. While reading through the first volume of Satoru Noda’s Dogsred, I couldn’t help but feel a similar passion for hockey dripping from every page. Those feelings only intensified when I discovered that hockey is currently a niche sport on the rise in Japan, like basketball once was. Following the wild success of Golden Kamuy, it seems that Noda was able to convince his editors to get Dogsred (a reimagining of his 2011 series, Supinamarada!) out onto the ice.
On the topic of throwing weight around, the series’ opening chapter hits readers hard and fast with a heartbreaking, dramatic hook. We’re introduced to Rou as he’s about to perform in a competition that could make or break his Olympic aspirations as a figure skater. Despite the presence of his adoring fans, Rou’s simmering in grief after the very recent death of his mother, who also served as his coach. Channeling that anguish, the young skater nails the final routine she had devised for him and wows the judges in the process. But as he’s about to take the top prize, Rou has an intense public meltdown that results in chucked chairs, slashed stages, fierce fisticuffs, and an indefinite ban from competition.
As someone who’s had a public (but nowhere near as extreme) meltdown before, I found myself empathizing with Rou right away. When one throws intense stress, a highly competitive personality, and a personal tragedy into a pressure cooker like that, venting that cooker might become a precarious task. It got a little infuriating when I read the nauseating speculation from skating fans and talking heads that followed this incident. He didn’t handle himself well, there’s no way around that, but the kid just lost his mom for heaven’s sake. Anyone with a little bit of empathy would be able to see that as clear as day. It only adds insult to injury when Rou is branded with the rabid prince moniker. And all of that is only the first handful of pages.
Thankfully, that tension dissipates when Rou and his sister, Haruna, arrive in Hokkaido. While the pair waits for their grandpa to pick them up from the station, the reader discovers that Rou is a kindhearted (but arrogant) goofball when he helps an elderly lady who’s just taken a tumble. As they’re riding home in the back of their grandpa’s car, the Shirakawa siblings learn a bit about Tomakomai City, the convenience store twenty miles up the road, and the pond their mother skated on growing up. Rou runs off to that pond almost immediately after he gets home. He’s been trying to nonchalantly play off his feelings since leaving Tokyo, but stepping on the ice again is like looking at himself in the mirror for the first time since that competition. He hasn’t a clue as to what he wants to do with his life, but he doesn’t want to throw away everything he and his mother had worked so hard toward.
That’s when hockey comes crashing into his life. After a tussle with the high-sticking Genma brothers, Rou finds himself in the middle of his first game, as a stand-in for Miyamori Junior High’s team in a bid to replace a goal that’s now at the bottom of that pond. Here’s the thing: aside from skating, Rou doesn’t know a lick about hockey. Throughout this game, the reader learns a fair bit about the sport, Rou’s teammates, and some Japanese history. Before we even get to this point, Noda does a great job of introducing readers to the intricacies of hockey as they become necessary. This includes how penalties work, the skating techniques of NHL greats like Sydney Crosby, and the amount of work players might have to put in depending on the size of their team.
I appreciate the additional context, but I was won over by the cast’s overwhelming passion for hockey. Dohi, Kosugi, and the rest of the Miyamori team give it their all in this game as it’s their last hope of scoring a goal before they’re disbanded. It’s revealed that Miyamori Junior High is about to shut down due to Tomakomai’s dwindling population. In response to that news, their coach and best players had jumped ship to another school—the one they’re now playing against. With Miyamori set to close right after the game wraps up, it becomes clear that it’s do-or-die for the school’s final hockey team. Rou’s eventually won over by this passion, pushing him to make his teammates’ dream a reality. As the game (and the first volume) wraps up, Rou gets a little advice from the eccentric Coach Nihei of Tomakomai’s Oinokami High—the region’s reigning hockey champs. This practical, but bizarre advice seems to do the trick and scores Miyamori the goal they’ve been yearning for.
At the top of volume two, one of Rou’s old figure skating rivals briefly allies with Haruna to goad her brother back into the sport. However, after he watches the nail-biting championship game between Oinokami and Hachinohe’s Sameoh High, Rou decides it’s time to hang up the sequins for good—he’s a hockey player now. This moment of self-realization leads to an emotional explosion when Rou admits to Haruna that he only skated for the sake of her and their mother, as his heart wasn’t in it otherwise.
Across the prefecture, in Hachinohe, the Sameoh boys are in the middle of enjoying their championship win when the town is suddenly decimated by the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. The team’s captain soon turns to despair, but the team quickly rallies together to get back on the ice so they can have at least some sense of normalcy in such a tough time.
Meanwhile, Rou, Dohi, Kosugi, and the younger Genma brothers are knee-deep in Oinokami’s brutal training camp—forced to run for miles without water while being chased by Coach Nihei in his pickup. The whole time these boys are running for their lives, Nihei won’t stop shouting at them to run like a pack of mad dogs pulling a dogsled. Well-acquainted with modern sports medicine, Rou eventually comes to blows with Nihei over his coaching methods. However, he agrees to perhaps go along with it all if the mad coach promises him one thing: that it’ll get him on the Olympic ice one day. This final exchange between Rou and Nihei sets a great tone for the rest of the series—a heartfelt, but occasionally bonkers ride through the world of Hokkaido high school hockey and the community surrounding it.
I might’ve made Dogsred out to be an incredibly serious sports drama, but Satoru Noda masterfully weaves in his offbeat sense of humor to help balance out this tale’s more intense moments. Noda’s exacting use of body language sells the laughs in ways I’ve seen from few artists before. One could easily cut out certain panels into bespoke memes. For example, the look on grandpa’s face when Rou breaks his hockey stick—the same one he’d played in the Olympics with. Or even the very phallic Bokko sticks that the Oinokami boys are running around with during the training camp. On the topic of Noda’s strengths, I love how he flexes his Golden Kamuy muscles to dive into Hokkaido’s history and culture every so often.
On a similar note, the more Dogsred I read, the more I kept seeing parallels between Tomakomai and the town in which my alma mater resides—Marquette, Michigan. At the northernmost point of their respective regions, these snow-covered hockey towns are home to vibrant native cultures and quite a bit of mining, gold in Hokkaido and copper in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, respectively. It goes even further at the beginning of Volume 2, where Dohi schools readers on the intense rivalry between Oinokami and Sameoh—reminding me of the storied tension on the ice between the Northern Michigan University Wildcats and the Michigan Tech Huskies. Dogsred even brought back memories of the couple times I’d helped film NMU’s hockey games…and my rather jerky camera work.
At the top of this review, I made a few pointed comparisons between Dogsred and a certain sports manga classic. While Noda’s series deals in many of the same sports tropes, this wasn’t a comparison I made lightly. Like Takehiko Inoue’s Slam Dunk, Dogsred comes from a place of unabashed love for its subject material—a sport that hasn’t caught on with a wider audience just yet. From the aforementioned rollout of hockey facts to the included glossary. Noda loves hockey as much as Inoue loves basketball.
After wrapping up these debut volumes, I could tell that enthusiasm had also enraptured the team behind Dogsred’s spectacular English localization. Translation journeyman John Werry and editor Mike Montesa (a Slam Dunk veteran) convey Noda’s heartfelt hockey story to a new audience. Meanwhile, letterer and touch-up wizard Steve Dutro makes the reader feel like they’re in the stands, hearing every cheer, jeer, and wallop that travels across the ice. Dutro goes the extra mile to ensure that every bit of context is incredibly readable for anyone who might be casually flicking through. Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight handsome graphic design work by Julian “JR” Robinson as well.
With these final pages thoroughly flicked through, I can safely say that Dogsred’s first two volumes are an impactful and rock-solid opening to a series I’ve been greatly enjoying from weekly. I can’t wait for more people to discover this absolute slapshot of a classic in the making.
