Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad and the Music Manga That Came Before Music Anime

Harold Sakuishi serialized "Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad" in Monthly Shonen Magazine from 1999 to 2008. The series follows Yukio "Koyuki" Tanaka, an unremarkably average fourteen-year-old who has no particular direction until he meets Ryusuke, a guitarist with American connections and a singular vision for the band he is building. Koyuki gradually becomes the band's vocalist, and the series traces Beck's formation, development, and attempt to break through in the Japanese and American music industries over its fourteen-year run.

What distinguished "Beck" from the music manga that followed it is its specificity about the actual experience of learning to play music and perform it. Koyuki begins unable to play guitar or carry a tune; his development is slow, nonlinear, marked by genuine setbacks and genuine breakthroughs, and the series depicts this process with a patience that most shonen manga does not allow. The months of practice that result in a marginally improved ability to play a specific chord; the embarrassment of performing in front of an audience before you are ready; the specific quality of a band performance that works for the first time — these are depicted with the texture of experience rather than the shorthand of montage.

The series' relationship to music itself is unusual in manga. Sakuishi researched the music scenes he depicted — the American indie rock and alternative music that Ryusuke brings to Japan, the Japanese club circuit and battle of the bands culture — with a fidelity that gives the series a documentary quality. The manga cannot reproduce music aurally, which might seem a disqualifying limitation for a music manga. "Beck" addresses this by focusing on the relationship between musicians and the music they are making, on what it feels like from inside to play something well, on the faces of audiences who are hearing something that matters to them. The reader knows the music is good because the characters who hear it respond to it as if it is.

The anime adaptation, produced by Madhouse in 2004, solved the audio problem by scoring the series' key performances with music that justified the characters' reactions — the band Beck's performances sound as if they are genuinely good, which is no small achievement. The adaptation was well-received internationally, particularly in North America where the alternative music culture the series depicts was immediately recognizable.

The music manga genre that "Beck" largely invented — "Nana" by Ai Yazawa was developing simultaneously in a different direction — has since produced works of considerable quality. "K-On!," "Your Lie in April," "Bocchi the Rock," and "Blue Period" (visual arts, but in the same tradition of depicting the work of becoming an artist) each owe something to "Beck"'s demonstration that the inner experience of making art — the process, the uncertainty, the specific satisfactions — is as dramatically rich as any combat system.