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Beck — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Plot summary

Yukio Tanaka, known as "Koyuki" by his friends, is a regular 14-year-old Japanese boy starting eighth grade in junior high school. His boring life is changed when he saves an odd-looking dog, named Beck, from some kids. Beck's owner turns out to be an emerging rock musician, 16-year-old Ryusuke Minami, who soon influences Koyuki to start playing the guitar. The story focuses on the trials and tribulations of their rock band named Beck, and Koyuki's relationships with its members, in particular Ryusuke and his 14-year-old half-sister Maho.

After hanging out with Ryusuke and seeing him play with his former band, Koyuki slowly becomes interested in Western rock music. Ryusuke gives him a guitar, but when Koyuki breaks it, Ryusuke tells him never to speak to him again. At the same time, Ryusuke forms his new band Beck, with vocalist Tsunemi Chiba, bassist Yoshiyuki Taira, and Togo, the drummer from his previous band. Koyuki begins working for, and learning guitar from, 44-year-old Kenichi Saito in exchange to have the guitar fixed.

He reunites with a forgiving Ryusuke a year later, and begins to rehearse with Beck. Koyuki then makes friends with his classmate Yuji "Saku" Sakurai. When Togo leaves the band, Ryusuke has Koyuki and Saku, who plays the drums, join Beck as support musicians, becoming full members only when the band hears Koyuki sing. Eventually Beck releases their first album, which gets released on an independent record label in the United States, under the band name Mongolian Chop Squad. After gaining popularity from their US album and Koyuki being in an internationally screened concert documentary, Beck earns a spot at the music festival Grateful Sound 5, where they put on the most talked about show of the whole festival. (The live-action film adaptation ends here.) However, circumstances cause them to part ways, making it their last performance.

Finding life tedious without being in Beck, Koyuki slowly gets the members back together, except Ryusuke, whose whereabouts are unknown. They perform a few shows as a quartet, before getting an offer to tour the US based on their Grateful Sound 5 performance. After Koyuki and Saku drop out of high school (they were in twelfth grade at this point) to do the tour, Beck heads to America. But after several bad performances, they are about to get kicked off the tour before reuniting with Ryusuke in Seattle. (The anime adaptation ends here.) The rest of the tour is a hit and they end up appearing on national TV before heading back to Japan.

After releasing two singles, Beck goes on a nationwide tour of Japan and earn a spot at Grateful Sound 7. However, they are later cut from the lineup. They slowly bounce back after forming a tour with several similar-sounding bands, get signed to a popular British indie record label, and start recording their first full album. The now-famous director who created the concert documentary Koyuki once appeared in ends up directing their first music video. Their album and music video do well both in Japan and England, earning them numerous magazine articles in both countries. After another nationwide tour of Japan, they do a short tour of England, including a spot at the relaunch of the legendary Avalon Festival. The band then signs to a major international record label and records their major debut album in New York. With the album hugely successful worldwide, they tour Japan and America extensively, and the series then ends with Beck headlining the main stage at Grateful Sound 9.

Characters

Yukio "Koyuki" Tanaka (田中幸雄, Tanaka Yukio)

Voiced by: Daisuke Namikawa, Kazuya Hirabayashi (singing voice) (Japanese); Greg Ayres (English)

Portrayed by: Takeru Satoh

The series follows his rapid development from living a boring average life to becoming an outstanding guitarist and singer. Before meeting Ryusuke, he only listened to Japanese pop music, having never heard a foreign band before. He is the last member recruited into Beck (along with Saku), playing rhythm guitar and singing slower songs. Throughout the series, Koyuki plays a Fender Telecaster, Gibson SG, Fender Mustang and Gretsch White Falcon at various points.

Ryusuke "Ray" Minami (南竜介, Minami Ryūsuke)

Voiced by: Yuuma Ueno (Japanese); Eric Vale (English)

Portrayed by: Hiro Mizushima

A slacker, but talented guitarist, who inspires Koyuki to pick up the instrument. Ryusuke speaks better English than Japanese, having lived in New York for eight years. He is the lead guitarist of Beck as well as its founding member. A large part of the story revolves around him and his bullet-hole ridden Gibson Les Paul guitar, named Lucille.

Maho Minami (南真帆, Minami Maho)

Voiced by: Miho Saiki, Sowelu (singing voice) (Japanese); Brina Palencia (English)

Portrayed by: Shioli Kutsuna

Maho is Ryusuke's younger half-sister and a talented singer. She is brash but emotionally fragile, and gradually builds a romantic relationship with Koyuki. As Maho is beautiful and fairly popular, Koyuki often has a hard time approaching her romantically. While she is obviously a gifted singer, Maho confides in Koyuki that she would actually like to be a film maker. She is also an amateur model.

Tsunemi Chiba (千葉恒美, Chiba Tsunemi)

Voiced by: Shintaro Ohata, Tatsuzo (singing voice) (Japanese); Justin Cook (English)

Portrayed by: Kenta Kiritani

The main vocalist of Beck, Chiba's vocals are more punk and rap-oriented than Koyuki's and thus more fitting for the majority of Beck's songs. He is easily the most volatile member of Beck, never shying away from a fight or hiding his feelings during dire situations. He is also very good at karate, which he uses in his performances. He originally took up karate because he was bullied severely in his younger days. When not busy with the band, he helps manage his family's ramen shop; he says that if Beck doesn't work out, he would open up a chain of ramen shops. Towards the end of the series, Ryusuke tells him that he should leave the band because he thinks he is not as passionate about music as the rest of the band. He complies, but quickly returns to play with the band.

Yoshiyuki Taira (平義行, Taira Yoshiyuki)

Voiced by: Kenji Nojima (Japanese); Jerry Jewell (English)

Portrayed by: Osamu Mukai

Beck's bassist, Taira is the second member recruited by Ryusuke. Although he can sometimes seem uncaring or apathetic, he is actually the most mature of the band members and often offers helpful advice. He usually performs shirtless, and his main bass is a white Music Man Stingray.

Kenichi Saito (斉藤研一, Saitō Ken'ichi)

Voiced by: Porsche Okite (Japanese); R Bruce Elliott (English)

Portrayed by: Takanori Takeyama

Saito is a perverted middle-aged man and former Olympic swimmer who teaches Koyuki both guitar and swimming in exchange for Koyuki working for his business. Though he can be a demanding instructor, he opens up to Koyuki, even asking him for relationship advice on occasion.

Yuji "Saku" Sakurai (桜井裕志, Sakurai Yūji)

Voiced by: Tōru Nara (Japanese); Johnny Yong Bosch (English)

Portrayed by: Aoi Nakamura

Saku is Beck's drummer and the last member to join (along with Koyuki). He first becomes good friends with Koyuki at school, being the only person to talk to him while bully Hyodo instigated the entire class not to do so. He is closer to Koyuki than the other members of the band, and Koyuki often confides in him during moments of self-doubt. Towards the end of the series, he moves away to attend high school, but promises that he will return on the condition that Beck reunites. As Koyuki does reform Beck, he returns, telling the band that he essentially ran away from home to do so.

Togo (持ち帰り, Togo)

Voiced by: Yoshiharu Taka (Japanese); Orion Pitts (English)

Portrayed by: Naoki Kawano

He is the original drummer of Ryusuke's band Beck. Togo and Ryusuke's were friends later he leaves the band due to some personal reasons; however, he is proud of Ryusuke.

Production

Just as Harold Sakuishi realized there were so few manga about music, his editor told him, "you love music, why not do a manga about music?" The artist joked that he had to take the chance because if it failed, he could then blame it on the editor. Describing Beck, he said, "I really like music because I believe that in ordinary life it's something not ordinary to express a thing that is not fitted to our usual life. So actually music is an approach to some kind of truth and this manga is about those people who challenge and look for the truth." He also noted that he was inspired by American culture when creating the series. Discussing the difficulty of expressing music in manga, Yohei Takami, Sakuishi's editor at Kodansha, noted how in the early volumes of Beck, they included the scores in the art, but for the later volumes, they realized they did not need to do that as "the story was synchronized in the reader's mind". Sakuishi believes he was careful to leave room for the reader to imagine what the sound was like as he did not want to push his view of it onto them. He utilized his own experiences attending concerts, including the Fuji Rock Festival, for the concert and festival scenes in the manga. In 2006, the artist said his work schedule was to draw about five pages a day.

Sakuishi reportedly named the manga after both Jeff Beck and Beck. He used other famous musicians as models for aspects of the characters. The way Koyuki holds his guitar was based on that of Tom Morello, Ryusuke and his guitar playing were inspired by Jimmy Page, while Chiba's attitude and style were based on Zack de la Rocha. Sakuishi said that Chiba and Koyuki show different sides of his own personality, Chiba the evil side and Koyuki the good, while Saito was based on his swimming mentor. Chiba is also modeled after Daisuke Chiba, Sakuishi's friend and vocalist of the band Buckingham Q-Den. Buckingham Q-Den's guitarist is named Ryusuke Minami, and is therefore believed by Beck fans to be the name source of the manga's character with the same name.

Shunsuke Saga of the pop culture website Real Sound pointed out further references and inspirations. Taira's choice of bass, funky bass lines and shirtlessness all point to Flea, while the way Koyuki sings with his hands behind his back when without a guitar is taken from Liam Gallagher. Saga noted that theories on the model for Saku include Kazushi Sakuraba, as Sakuishi is a professional wrestling fan, and Dragon Ash drummer Makoto Sakurai, while the band Beck itself seems to be inspired by alternative rock acts from the 1980s and 1990s, such as Rage Against the Machine and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Manga reception

Beck won the 2002 Kodansha Manga Award in the shōnen category. The series sold 12 million copies by April 2008, and over 15 million by 2014. Manga artist Naoshi Arakawa, best known for his music-themed series Your Lie in April, cited Beck as the reason he got into manga. According to Keisuke Okutsu of Hon no Hikidashi, Beck had a large impact on the music scene and inspired many Japanese musicians' interest in Western music.

Real Sound's Kazushi Shimada wrote that the manga's clever connections to real-world music trends of the time, such as the boom in outdoor festivals and the rise of loud rock and mixture rock bands, helped make it a huge hit that overturned the conventional wisdom that band manga did not sell. He also pointed out that while To-y was a hit in the 1980s, it features idol elements and the main character abandons his band members in his quest to reach the top, so it lacks the cathartic feeling of a band manga, and that Nana, which was serialized at the same time as Beck, is largely a romance series with few scenes that show the "magic of a band" like Beck does.

Voice actor and musician Soma Saito named Beck as the best music or band-related manga series, citing how it is able to depict music in a world without sound as his favorite part; "when I close my eyes, I feel like I can hear songs that shouldn't be audible. Koyuki's transparent singing. The one-of-a-kind music played by BECK." Having first read it as he discovered his own love for music while playing in a middle school band, Saito said he empathized with the realistic portrayal of Koyuki, specifically mentioning his crush on a senior and timid first experience at a live music venue, but noted the series has many unique characters that add depth to the story.

Reviewing the first volume of Beck, IGN called it a "must read" and one of the truest examples of life as a teenager. They wrote that Sakuishi's weaving of the story with the unique aspects of growing up in Japan show that he knows the subject matter well, but criticized Tokyopop's large amount of explanatory notes. Danica Davidson of Otaku USA wrote that despite having to set up the story, the first volume remains fast-paced and amusing throughout, with each character standing on their own. She noted that the many references to real-life musicians add extra fun for music fans, but that one does not need to be "musically minded" to enjoy the series.