Hikaru Katsuki's ​Baby Steps

Reviewed by Anson Leung

(Kodansha, 2008)

Hikaru Katsuki’s Baby Steps manga is about a high school boy, Eiichiro Maruo, also known as Ei-chan, who falls in love with playing tennis, then later dreams about becoming a professional tennis player. He starts off as an honor student, known for having intricate notes that are better to study from than the actual textbook. Because of this, he is consistently at the top of his class and gets perfect grades. The teachers admire his strong work ethic, and he gets along fine with his friends and classmates. At the beginning of the story, a chance encounter with a tennis-playing classmate has him going off to Japan’s famed STC academy to experience the fun of tennis. While trying it out at first, he does not have enough stamina to compete with the younger kids and gets embarrassed. However, he soon falls in love with how the ball contacts his racket. He video records himself and obsessively studies his form, in order to learn how to produce a perfect swing each time. From there, he starts to fall in love with the game. Armed with his obsessive notetaking skills that he learned from school, he records everything he learns on the court, while he is playing his matches. This earns him a unique reputation among his tennis community and labels the start of his journey.
 
To make a manga like this one stand out among its competitors, there must be a twist, or something unique about what is otherwise a standard shonen sports manga of a high school boy taking on the world. In many stories, the boy is initially untalented and also hot-tempered, in order to reflect the mindset of the average child who is part of the target market of shonen manga. This creates a “self-insert character,” where the audience can insert themselves into the protagonist’s shoes. In Baby Steps, the protagonist is the opposite. His talent is evident, and he is very even-tempered. This creates a realistic situation where the audience can see why he might be able to compete with higher-level players in a short period of time. His analytic skills come from a realistic place, and it is realistic that he has his talent, as opposed to having amazing speed or power despite never having exercised intensely in his life. A shonen protagonist usually gains power, speed, superpowers, etc.; anything flashy. But in Baby Steps, for the large part of the beginning stages of the story, his power is mostly focused on his ball control and intellectual abilities. These less flashy abilities make him the underdog you can cheer for with all your heart.
 
Baby Steps shows you mainly the perspective of Ei-chan as he slowly learns the ropes of tennis. Starting as an absolute beginner with nothing but control and his sharp mind, he slowly but surely gathers experience, ranging from understanding how the scoring system works, to learning different serves and tennis tactics that work effectively against different tennis players. It is a slow start, but also a fairly realistic one. It takes years in the manga before he can be called a competent player and start competing at higher levels. He grinds his way from town-level competitions to the All-Japan Junior Tennis Tournament, a competition comprised of the best tennis players in his age group from all across the nation. He wins some matches, he loses some matches, and he grows each time with the help of his trusty notebook.
 
There are conflicts in the story that Ei-chan contends with. The All-Japan Junior Tennis Tournament is the main hurdle for quite a bit of the manga. He must win it before he is allowed by his parents to turn tennis into a professional career. Two side conflicts are his relationship with the girl who introduced him to tennis, and his rivalry with Takuma, a far superior player at the beginning of the story whom Ei-chan vows to defeat after doing everything he can. A theme of the manga is Ei-chan’s hard work to catch up to pure talent. And beating Takuma is an incredible objective in proving this ideology.
 
The tennis match he has against Takuma is undoubtedly world-class by manga standards. The tension is unbelievable. The chapters are very long. Double-page manga spreads show Takuma unleashing his world-class serve against Ei-chan. And Ei-chan uses every trick he ever learned since the beginning of the manga to fight Takuma tooth and nail. It is no exaggeration that you would need to read the entire manga to appreciate the nuance of this tennis match/battle. It does not disappoint, and it is well worth reading the preceding two hundred chapters to get to this point.
 
Characters in this manga include: Ei-chan, the hard-working protagonist who is earnest, never gives up, and takes notes to an obsessive degree; Natsu, the girl who introduced him to tennis and later becomes Ei-chan’s girlfriend; Takuma, the overwhelming genius who looks down on Ei-chan because he started tennis so late and doesn’t have flashy talent; Ike Souji, the best player in Japan who made Takuma the way he is by delivering an overwhelming defeat; Kageyama, the coolest and most supportive friend a person can get; and Aki-chan, Natsu’s rival whom Natsu never once defeated. She is Natsu’s version of Takuma, in the sense that she is a rival Natsu has to catch up to with the help of Ei-chan and hard work.
 
Baby Steps is a manga where you can’t help but cheer for the protagonist. He has no malice, works hard every step of the way, and earns his victories.

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​Anson Leung is a graduate of the University of Alberta’s Bachelor of Commerce program. He is an Alberta-based writer who loves all forms of writing, including poetry and article writing. In his spare time, he loves playing tennis and board games.