Like many of you, I was initially interested in this series because of Your Lie in April. While I have absolutely no musical talent, Arakawa crafted a coming-of-age tale that even music dunces like me could appreciate. Farewell, My Dear Cramer, on the other hand, is wholly devoted to soccer.
Too devoted.
Farewell, My Dear Cramer is actually a sequel to Sayonara, Football, a two-volume manga also licensed by Kodansha Comics. I didn’t know this when I started reading Cramer, and perhaps its prequel series does a better job of setting up the story and the sport. Because Cramer sure doesn’t.
Right off the bat, we see two middle school soccer teams competing. Afterward, the star player of the winning school (Shinozaki) invites an opponent (Suo) to check out a practice match. Long story short, Shinozaki wants to play with Suo, and they both enroll in a school that doesn’t feature a strong team. In 10 chapters, the manga goes through a blitzkrieg of games: an intra-team game, a practice match with a top school, a 5v5 store tournament, and a couple of short league matches for rankings. That’s a lot of games. In between, the manga bizarrely ties things together with a former pro with poor fashion sense, failing blackmail attempts, and a guy who calls a friendly, high school-age stranger “Mommy”.
There’s a reason why so many sports manga either start off with tryouts or feature a prominent manager. Authors need a way to covertly explain the characters and the rules of the sport. Here, both are almost nonexistent, and it’s hard to get invested in the story. Plus, in an unusual approach, there are at least three girls competing for the role of protagonist, and the story keeps jumping between different points-of-view. At least none of the main characters are the spunky underdog with untapped talent like in most sports series.
Those three, the club captain, and a few others have actual personalities — or rather, definable eccentricities. Suo, for instance, is the quiet type who prefers revenge, and another teammate is a haughty, self-proclaimed queen. But this series throws too many characters at readers, and it’s extremely hard to separate the good players from the bad, the important teammates from the fodder. I don’t know who is playing what position — or heck, what positions there are in soccer. (Well, besides the goalie.) But hey, at least Arakawa defines what a riseball is in baseball. Seriously, there are more notes about not to abuse safety cones than soccer terms.
It’s really too bad, as the actual soccer matches are well-done. From the dirty cleats to the sweating girls, the dribbles to the passes, Arakawa puts as much passion in to the soccer scenes as the music sequences in Your Lie in April. Whenever a player kicks the ball, it’s just as thrilling as watching a real match to see if it goes in. The author tries to include some different character designs (a “fugly” freckle-faced girl, Suo’s sharp eyes), but too many boil down to “girl with short, dark hair”. When characters crowd around the ball, with the sheer number of characters I’m not really acquainted with, it’s hard to remember who’s who and who’s playing for who.
These early chapters also seem to have been translated at different times, as the manga keeps going back and forth between calling the sport “soccer” and “football”. Obviously, it’s only us Americans who call it soccer, but it’s awkward for the characters to keep switching the name of the game they love.
Sports manga have been rising in popularity in the West, but stories starring female teams are still rare. Farewell, My Dear Cramer has come to correct this problem, but it doesn’t fill this niche well. Soccer enthusiasts probably won’t have a problem understanding how the game is played, but everyone will have trouble trying to navigate the sheer number of characters here.
Also, in case you were wondering, no, I have no idea who Cramer is, and I don’t know why we’re saying farewell to him. But the fact I don’t even know what the title means is one of the manga’s least severe problems.