Solanin: Five years later at 23 (3/22/2026)

About a month ago, I got an email from my 18 year old self telling me to read Solanin, the manga by Inio Asano. It reads as follows:

Dear the (hopefully) post grad Nathan,

Read Solanin, the manga by Inio Asano you read on 2/20/2021, and see what you think of it. Maybe even look back on that short reflection you wrote (on blogger). I think it'll probably hit different once you start to live that post college life. Maybe you could even look back on that myanimelist account you had.

link here, if that website is still around:

https://myanimelist.net/profile/wolfang135

From,

the currently first year at college Nathan

I'm actually still logging my manga regularly on MAL, except I've changed my username from wolfang135 to raffyreviews. I remembered reading the manga back during my first (online) year of college in the COVID quarantine, but I didn't remember much about the manga besides having a distinct feeling of not getting it. But, I kept hearing good things about it online, so I decided to send it off into the future where a potentially newly graduated and employed Nathan could further appreciate it.

Though my last month has been busy, I finally found the time to read it this weekend, and I'm glad to say that I greatly enjoyed it! I found it to be a great piece of art, with a lot to reflect on. I'm now just about the same age as the characters in the manga, 23, and I'm been starting to feel many of the same feelings as the characters. Perhaps it's just a side effect of being in your early twenties. 

Although I share many of the same feelings conveyed in the story, I don't want to say that the manga is specifically relatable to me. I say this because I feel as though I have established good goals and a direction for which to lead my life, and I'm pretty satisfied with where my life is currently. In simplier words, I don't really feel like I am a bum, while these characters, for a lack of a better term, are.

Allow me to go off topic for a bit. I knew I was getting into true young adult territory when I started enjoying John Mayer's third album, Continuum. It's considered by many to be his masterpiece, and he wrote it as a young adult in his twenties worrying about young adult things like feeling aimless, wanting to change the world but feeling powerless to do so, not wanting to age and become grown up, etc. It's a great album that I admit I did not like until I reached a certain age.

Perhaps my connection to both is similar in my brain because the story of Solanin is also intertwined deeply with music. The main characters met each other in their college music club, and they also spend much of their time wanting to pursue music.

I think now is as good of a time as any to summarize the story without avoiding spoilers. The main character, Mieko Inoue, lives with her bum ass boyfriend Naruo Taneda, and works a boring office job that she quits in the first chapter. The rest of the series has to do with how this couple figures out what they want to do with their lives, along with their friends including the drummer Rip, bassist and 6th year college student Kato Kenichi, and Kato's girlfriend Ai Kotani, who is also Mieko's best friend and probably the most mature person in the entire series. This is a series about ordinary people living ordinary lives, and somehow there's beauty in that.

When I first graduated college, there was this strong feeling of being doomed if I do, and being doomed if I don't, with the thing I'm referring to of course being empl*yment. Working a job feels like shit: you feel like you spend all your time just following orders and wasting time away in an office space, and most importantly there's this depressing feeling of having no freedom. But, just like Mieko soon finds out, having the freedom of unemployment also feels like shit: you realize there is too much time in the day to always be doing something, it's absolutely boring, and unfortunately, we still need to pay our bills. 

I think as humans, we have a subconscious need to need to be a part of something and to be productive. I've found that I actually feel the best when I am being productive, and I think the characters in this story also subconsciously feel that. Taneda may talk all big about how he wants to become a famous singer, but he spends all his time being depressed and too scared to try until he gets some more encouragement from Mieko. I think that he's only truly happy once he decides to go all in on his dream of making music, and I think that he is actually happier once that dream fails to pan out and he decides to go full time into his design job.

But it's also not that simple. Following your dreams is scary. I think Naruo knows that he doesn't necessarily have all the talent in the world, and failing feels terrible. But like it's said later on in the story: "Isn't it better to regret things you've done, than regret things you've never even tried?"

There's also a pain involved with growing up and letting go of your childhood self. When Naruo finally makes his decision in Chapter 14, he thinks to himself that he's finally happy, but he's betrayed by his body when he starts crying. It's painful to let go of your dreams and it's also painful to have already tried and failed. But life goes on, and at some point you have to move on.

That isn't to say that you can't still keep a fragment of that child inside of you, however. A character I really liked was Saeki, the record label producer. He used to be part of a band that Naruo was a huge fan of, but eventually that didn't work out and he became a corporate sell-out, in Naruo's words. But his conversation with Naruo in the bathroom in Chapter 11 goes on to inspire him, and he begins to spend his time searching out young bands with potential, a choice that he says may cost his future career, but is also a path that he is more satisfied by.

And I think this leads into my own disagreements with the characters in the manga. Although there are negative parts to living life, I think if you want to live happily you have to maximize what you have. I don't think that working a corporate sell out job is a bad thing, and between being unemployed and employed, I'd much rather be employed, and I won't even pretend to want to be unemployed. Spending most of my day in the office doing bullshit work doesn't feel great, but at the same time it has allowed me to use my time better. I think I have been able to spend a majority of my free time doing things that I actually enjoy and want to do, while paradoxically having all the time in the world pushes you to spend more of your time bumming around. And while I may have had dreams of being great in some way or another especially when I was younger, I think that there's nothing wrong with perfectly ordinary.

I think some of these thoughts that I have were explored more in the epilogue that Inio Asano wrote 11 years later. It starts off with another new couple moving into the old space that our MCs used to live, with the girl just breaking up with her boyfriend, and subsequentially trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life from here on out. 

The second part follows Mieko far into the future, who is now 36. She is now married to a dude named Yuki Tabata, and they are both employed, although Mieko is now newly pregnant. She and her husband are thinking about getting a big new place closer to the city center, and Mieko wants to take a break from work due to her pregnancy. There's a point in the epilogue where Mieko says that somehow, everything seems to have worked out and everyone's doing well, and it does seem to be that way. 

In the afterword, Inio Asano writes something that resonated with me. He "says that getting results through your own hard work means everything, and if you can't accept that, you/'ll never progress." I think when you are young, you have this feeling that it's so hard to change the world and your own place in it, so you rebel and don't even try. Maybe you'll hope to get lucky and get everything you want without real effort by hitting the jackpot or something. But that's not how the world works. If you want something, you have to work for it, and even then you might not even get it. But you won't know until you try, and trying is better than not trying at all. And no matter what, you'll probably end up alright if you keep walking forward.

There's a charm to stories like these. Inio Asano wrote it when he was also just out of college hoping to make it big as a manga artist, and it's definetely rough around the edges, especially with the random goofiness. I think that imperfection adds to the story however, sort of like how the band's charm itself comes from their own unpolishedness.

I read my initial review of Solanin and I'm surprised to have given it a 7 back then. That's the rating that I'm also thinking of, although it is pretty close to being an 8 as well. I think it's for sure worth a read.