Hello again everyone! With summer entering its waning days and school is starting back up across the nation, I felt it appropriate to look at a manga series that covers both school and summer activities. That manga is a series called Beach Stars by Masahiro Morio. Beach Stars focuses on the adventures of the diminutive 17 year old Iruka Nanase. On Iruka’s 17th birthday, she joyfully rushes to school hoping that everything would go as she dreamed it would, namely being named the captain of her school’s volleyball club. However, on arrival, things turn out to go the opposite of how she thought. Her school’s volleyball club was forced to close down as a result of only having three members, Iruka and her friends Rin and Kotomi.
Happy birthday!
One day while Iruka’s friends take her for a day of fun in the city to cheer her up, they come across a man-made beach filled with beach volleyball courts. Iruka and her friends decide to play some volleyball when they are kicked off of their court because it was scheduled to be used for a photo shoot featuring a famous volleyball player named Sanae Hayakawa. While passing by Iruka on her way off the court, Sanae insults Iruka’s height, a very touchy subject for Iruka.
*insert your favorite "burn" .gif here*
This of course pisses Iruka off and in the heat of the moment she challenges Sanae to a volleyball match. Sanae accepts the challenge and agrees to face Iruka, Rin, and Kotomi, in a three-on-two single set match with Sanae’s partner being who she was supposed to have a photo shoot with. Iruka and her friends end up getting perfectly swept 21 to 0. However, it was not because of a lack of trying, as after a rocky start due to getting adjusted to playing on the sand, Iruka was bouncing all over the court faster than anyone expected and was jumping higher into the air than even Sanae was. As a result, what was supposed to be a laid back casual match turned into a serious game of volleyball where both sides put in a lot of effort.
Because of their match against Sanae, Iruka realizes that she could form a beach volleyball club with her friends as it requires fewer players than indoor volleyball, in fact it only requires two players on both sides. After their match Sanae congratulates Iruka, Rin, and Kotomi, but Iruka, now inspired to play more beach volleyball challenges Sanae to an official match, and Sanae once again accepts the challenge, but with one stipulation, that the match be at the 2012 Olympics in London. As it turns out, Sanae is trying to qualify for the London Olympics and has pretty good shot at making it to the Olympics. Iruka accepts Sanae’s stipulation without even consulting Rin and Kotomi, to their horror.
It's....it's better when read in context....
So Iruka, Rin, and Kotomi set up a beach volleyball club at their school and even attract two additional members, Michiru, a tall and lanky nerd, and Taki, a short and chubby Ganguro girl. The team gets some personal training from Ryoko Tokuno, a real life Japanese beach volleyball player who represented Japan in the 2004 Athens Olypics, and through Ryoko learn of an annual tournament called the Madonna Cup and learn that Sanae appears in the Madonna Cup each year. Naturally the team decides to enter the Madonna Cup, but learns that they must win their prefecture’s preliminary tournament to qualify for the Madonna Cup.
The rest of Beach Stars focuses on the training of the team and their time in their prefecture’s preliminary tournament with Iruka teaming up with Kotomi for the tournament and Michiru teaming up with Taki as Rin sits out. During the tournament things start to well, go your typical sports anime/manga route, and by that I mean a good portion of the major characters involved in the tournament each have their own special move, which in the end are just different variations of spiking or blocking a volleyball. As it is a series focusing on volleyball, there is a pretty good amount of fanservice in Beach Stars, and in one of the earlier chapters there is even a brief nudity scene, so it isn’t the best series to read while at work.
Beach Stars only consists of 68 chapters broken into 7 volumes as a result of the manga magazine it was published in going bankrupt. Beach Stars’ story ends after the prefecture preliminary, but a sequel series, called The!! Beach Stars to differentiate from Beach Stars’ full name of The Beach Stars, was published in a second manga magazine to finish the series’ story.
If you look beyond the silliness and fanservice in Beach Stars, there is a pretty solid sports manga to be found. It has yet to be licensed for release in the Western world, and it may end up as one of the countless hundreds of series that aren’t licensed at all. Still, I give Beach Stars my seal of approval.