Wind Breaker: Inverting The Hero's Journey

Why change the world when you can let the world change you?

Preface.

By now, we all know that unique character design is what gets me to poke my nose into a manga. When I saw Sakura on the cover of Wind Breaker, I thought, “hey, look at that hair.”

And that’s all it took.

I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed stories of delinquent high school kids, but it makes sense, since I was a delinquent high school kid. No further comment on that, but it was the latch that got me hooked on Wind Breaker. Fun hair and juvenile delinquents, that’s me.

What I got from there, though, is so much more. I always admire a manga that can take bold narrative gambles and get such a rich reward from it.

Preface over!

Pick any mainstream shonen manga and you get essentially the same idea. The hero—Midoriya, Asta, Tanjiro, Luffy, Laios, Chihiro, the list is endless—enters or is a part of a world in need of saving from bad guys, and they subsequently step up to save the world from said bad guys. Along the way, they change the world, perhaps with their perfect morality and their glowing personalities (and fun hair, maybe).

It’s a tried and true formula with enough room for variation to continue to feel fresh and inviting. Who doesn’t want to see a benevolent, perhaps slightly flawed hero save a dysfunctional world alongside a kooky band of misfits? Maybe because our world is so dysfunctional that it’s fun to dream about the type of hero capable of saving it, maybe I’m forcing my own mentality on manga, who knows.

Wind Breaker tries something a bit different. And by a bit different, I mean they pick up that entire “hero saves the world” and flip it around to “world saves the hero.” It’s apparent right from the opening chapters, so much so that I was worried it would lose this inverted hero’s journey vibe too soon, but here I am through volume five, and the notion is still pressing on.

Sakura, our hero, is a reluctant hero. Not altogether unheard of, granted, but the way he is used is what makes Wind Breaker’s narrative structure unique and worthy of analysis.

A quick summary of the world of Wind Breaker: Sakura is going to Furin high school, known for its delinquent students and their fighting prowess. Sakura came all the way from an undisclosed out-of-town location because he believes that true power can be found by beating up everyone at Furin and becoming top of the school. It sets a familiar expectation, our hero is going to enter a battle gauntlet, fight his way through, grow individually, and change the world he’s a part of as he rises to the top. Cool, sign me up, I’ve needed another juvenile delinquent fight manga since Tokyo Revengers.

But that’s not at all what happens. Instead, Sakura finds the community at Furin supportive, friendly, warm, and caring. They defend their village and the people in it from other schools and bad gangs, not unlike Tokyo Revengers. Lots of fist fighting, lots of honor, lots of talking about how we can support and rely on each other in the name of the neighborhood.

This doesn’t jive with Sakura. Like, at all.

From the moment he arrives, he’s told by the lady who runs the local cafe that he is alone. And that, so long as he is alone, he will never be top of Furin. This word seems to get under his skin—alone. And of course it would, because it’s true, even if he doesn’t accept it yet. He’s ready to wreck the world, just to prove he’s the most powerful fighter. He isn’t here to make friends or collect a posse of bros.

When he shows up to Furin ready to crack skulls, he finds a collection of students who just want to help him. Who want to work together to enforce justice and protect their people. They don’t fight to achieve power, they fight out of necessity or, as the head of Furin puts it, to communicate. Fists work like words, he says, you have to want to know about your opponent for your punches to really work.

This also doesn’t jive with Sakura.

After winning their first fighting tournament as a collective Furin unit, Sakura begins to understand the supportive nature of the Furin community more, but he still doesn’t give in. While we don’t know a lot about him (he’s an outsider, after all), we know that he is, as suspected, quite alone.

One day, Sakura goes into school and is elected the head of the first year class.

This also doesn’t jive with Sakura.

You’re getting the idea here. Sakura has his hero’s journey in mind, but none of it looks the way he expected, and none of it goes the way he wanted it to. He does not think of himself as a good guy, yet everyone keeps insisting that he is. And that’s where the inverted hero’s journey really takes root. He may change this world in a small way, he will grow as a character, but this story is about him learning to be one with a world he had drastically misread. Not to mention a world he sorely needs.

I think often of the quote “know the rules so you can break them.” It’s about art, I forget who said it, likely Van Gogh or some similar schmo, but that’s exactly what Wind Breaker is doing. It shows such a sharp awareness of how the hero’s journey works, even the reluctant hero’s journey, and the amount of ways it doesn’t go according to plan continues to piss off Sakura as he slowly—oh, so slowly—settles into his new role in this world.

It’s such an exciting and amusing twist on the expected that thinking of mainstream examples is challenging. Frodo is a reluctant hero, but a traditional reluctant hero. Luke Skywalker was always bent on stopping the empire. You might consider Ron Weasley, of Harry Potter fame, a bit of a class tangent, since he changes so much because of the circumstances around him, without really changing the world all that much on his own. But even that doesn’t feel like a close enough comparison.

Which, again, is why Wind Breaker is rising above. While most shonen protagonists are predictably perfect and, as such, slightly annoying from a storytelling perspective, Sakura is everything those heroes aren’t.

Even if you want to do a straight delinquent comparison between Wind Breaker and Tokyo Revenger, you’ll find that Sakura and Takemichi are completely different. Takemichi is the unexpected, perhaps reluctant hero who brings tenderness (and a lot of tears) to a cruel world, but Sakura doesn’t do that either. He is not changing this world. At all. He’s merely learning to be a part of it, and to become the leader it needs him to be to continue the way it’s going.

For creative writers: Think of a writing trope you’re used to seeing. What is the complete opposite of that trope, and how can you use it?

For fans of Wind Breaker: How is it ranking against Tokyo Revengers for you?