SLAM DUNK 1

Legendary manga, fantastic art

This is one of the most influential and best selling manga of all time, and there are many cultural references stemming from it. A dear friend spoke of it so highly that it motivated me to read it. The first volume is really setting us up for the stage of the rest of the series, and I'm glad I knew that going in. So even though I would normally never picked up a sports manga or a high school romance, I loved volume 1. The art is fantastic, the characters are well defined. The humour is surprising and fun. And the basketball scenes are just soooo impressively rendered. The mangaka Inoue is a highly regarded artist and has even done historical artwork for a temple in Kyoto.

I'm really looking forward to the rest of the series.

For language learning, as others have said, the dialogue is mostly rough male slang - so loads of contractions and slang. The first two chapters were tough since I hadn't come across any of this before (but I linked some tutorials on the WK book club page). And, although I'll never speak like this myself, I do see these contractions in lots of different written work, so you probably have to learn it eventually if you read widely. If you want to learn it intensively, then read Slam Dunk. Also, I have learned a lot of words that I see pop up all over the place in other books, so, of course you inevitably learn useful daily life vocab.

Furigana: almost all kanji have furigana and kanji use is pretty normal which is nice. Of the few kanji without furigana, most are really really simple 1st grade ones. I haven't figured out the furigana strategy for the other 1%. Every now and then there is a random word without furigana. There is a vocab spreadsheet on the WK club that shows what kanji don't have furigana in Ch 1 so you can get a feel for it. I don't think it would be a problem for anyone ready to read this anyway.