#trainman

*Mild Spoilers Ahead*

Proper romance themed seinen manga are hard to come by. Oftentimes, seinen categorized under the romance genre are primarily other kinds of stories that happen to have one or two romantic themes within them. Slow slice of life stories with romantic subtext, comedies that use a character’s crush as a catalyst for further jokes, eroticas and ecchis that use love as an excuse to throw beautiful half naked women at the main character. I do not mean to belittle those kinds of stories nor those that read them, but I would like to point out that more often than not, they don’t focus on being love stories. Train Man, however, is a love story.

Only once in a blue moon is there a seinen romance stories with a capital R, that are marketed towards young men and focus primarily on the characters’ romantic development. Precisely what makes Train Man so remarkable is that it is one such love story with a premise that feels completely grounded while still being truly unique. 

Train Man is based on the supposedly true story of a young man intervening when a drunk began harassing several women on a train. The young man chronicled the story on the forum site 2channel and explained how one of the women mailed him an expensive gift in thanks. Online readers dubbed the young man “Train Man'' for his heroism and the woman “Hermes'' for the expensive brand name of the gift she sent the young man. The titular “Train Man” began harboring a crush on “Hermes,” and at the encouragement of those online, invited her to meetups which eventually culminated in the two dating. Regardless of whether or not the story told by these posts were true, it captured the hearts and minds of enough readers that it prompted several media adaptations, this manga being one of them.

There are plenty of manga about two people going from strangers to lovers due to random happenstance. But you’d be hard pressed to find anything quite like Train Man. Its story centers on a man who has an entire online community of strangers united around their desire to give him advice and encouragement as he attempts to court his crush. 

A major part of what makes this story resonate, especially today, is that it puts the spotlight on how the internet can facilitate positive social interaction, particularly between total strangers. In our day and age, you can go on any forum website and you’ll find countless tight knit communities like the one that forms around our protagonist. Go on any question board and you’ll find people just like our protagonist, looking for real life advice, even if that advice is from anonymous strangers. You’ll also find anonymous strangers looking to help, trying to give useful advice, and genuinely rooting for the questioner’s success. 

What also makes the online community depicted in this manga remarkable is that it acts as an in-universe “real life audience” reacting to the protagonist. In this way, it is reminiscent of the movie the Truman Show, where an audience of real ordinary people watch and react to the life of the protagonist. The major point of difference is in the fact that this audience can speak directly to our protagonist via an internet forum which allows them to act as a very literal audience surrogate in a way that adds an interesting dynamic to the story. How many times have you watched a TV show or read a book and wished the characters could hear your voice and hear your advice? Well, this anonymous audience of everyday people advises the ML to act on his feelings as his courage in turn inspires his audience. Something I loved about this manga and wished it did more of was show how the online readers were encouraged to work on themselves as they watched the protagonist take their encouragement to heart to work on himself.

Speaking of self improvement, the emphasis on such work is what keeps this manga from wandering into the realm of wish fulfillment. The male lead realizes that one good deed isn’t magically going to make the female lead fall in love with him, so he works to make himself more appealing to her. With the encouragement of those online, he puts more care into his appearance and tries to come out of his shell. It can hardly be called wish fulfillment when a major theme of the manga is the protagonist putting in the time, money, and effort to improve himself in order to earn the object of his desire.

Naturally, as a bonafide manga about love, the romance part of the manga is one of its major strengths. Train Man does a good job of depicting what the early stages of courting and dating often look like, both the excitement and the uncertainty. A lot of the spotlight is given to the meetings between the ML and FML and is given to their gradual development from two strangers to acquaintances then eventually something more. All the way there are genuinely cute romantic moments that will make you smile, squeal, and kick your legs excitedly.

The pacing is another one of this manga’s stronger points. While many romance manga either develop so quickly that they feel forced and artificial or so slowly that they become unengaging slogs, Train Man enjoys a very steady sense of progress. The relationship between the two leads is constantly moving forward, with the only real pauses being there to allow the ML and supporting cast of online readers to discuss and reflect on his progress so far. The story is about as long as it needs to be, as if it went on longer the mangaka would have likely been forced to add in the padding and tediously sluggish development that plagues so many other romance manga. Train Man doesn’t overstay its welcome and that's part of what makes its story so engaging.

The manga’s art is made in a more cartoonish, old school style which I am personally fairly fond of. The cartoonish scribbles lend well to the manga’s lighthearted tone, but aren’t particularly aesthetically pleasing. Most readers would probably find art serviceable if occasionally found wanting, but it's not really a manga you’d read to enjoy the art anyway.

The characterization is arguably where Train Man is found most wanting, as you will find no complex or deeply fleshed out characters in this story. The manga is so focused on the relationship between the two leads that it doesn’t develop them out as characters anymore than is absolutely necessary for the narrative. Meanwhile, the supporting cast is made up of unnamed ordinary people whose lives are only really ever shown in brief snapshots as they read and react to the ML’s forum posts. This is an instance where the manga’s concise writing acts as a double edged sword. On the one hand, the narrative develops quickly and the characters are generic to the point of being ordinary and universally relatable. But on the other hand, it means that even the two leads lack much characterization beyond their relationship to one another.

One of Train Man’s quirks is that the male and female leads are never referred to by their real names, instead they are only called by their forum aliases. This was likely done for two reasons: because these aliases were all they were known by in the original forum posts and because it gives them an anonymity and universal character that makes them more relatable. As I read in the moment, I didn’t like this as I felt it robbed our ML and FML of their individual identities, as if neither of them had a birth name and their existence only mattered as it related to this story. But in hindsight I can appreciate this eccentricity as it acts as a narrative device to limit the manga readers’ knowledge about the two main characters to that which the original forum readers would’ve known about by reading the original posts on 2ch. You, the reader, never learn the real names of “Train Man” and “Hermes” because the people who originally read the original posts on 2ch never learned their real names.

Train Man is a story that I think most people would be able to enjoy on some level. However, it is not a manga to read if you are seeking complex characters, an elaborate plot, or gorgeous art.