A Manga by Satoru Noda

Picking up where I left off in my previous review of Dogsred, volume two throws us back onto the ice with Rou Shirakawa in the aftermath of his first and only game with Miyamori Junior High. The school is dissolved after its final year due to low enrollment, effectively ending his brief introduction to organized hockey. Despite insisting that he will not pursue the sport further, Rou briefly appears ready to return to figure skating at his sister’s urging. She pushes him to attend the Interhigh Championship to watch the performance of Masato Yaginuma, his long time rival. Masato masks a deep respect for Rou behind performative hostility, driven by the frustration of always feeling second best. Yet Rou, moved by his experience with Miyamori’s team, ultimately skips the skating event to attend Oinokami High’s historic hockey match against Sameoh High. By the end of the volume, he commits to joining Oinokami’s ice hockey team during a rebuilding year, a decision that angers several people tied to his past, including his sister. He enters training camp on his own terms and ready to make a new name for himself.

“As the school year comes to a close, it’s time for the powerhouse Oinokami High ice hockey team to win the championship once again, but have they lost their edge? Then, after one of the biggest natural disasters in Japanese history, the people of northern Japan are determined to carry on. When the new school year starts, Rou and his friends from Miyamori enter Oinokami High School. They decide to try out for the hockey team, but before they can join, they have to survive a grueling daylong trial under the eye of the eccentric Coach Nihei.”

One of the major mysteries from volume one concerned the explosive opening chapter, in which Rou won a major figure skating competition shortly after losing his mother in a car accident, only to immediately destroy the podium and set, earning himself a lifetime ban from the sport. Volume two finally provides clarity. Rou once loved figure skating, but as his talent grew, so did the expectations placed upon him. Him competing at the Olympics became his mother’s dream before her death, and after she passed, that dream lingered as a burden rather than an aspiration. His twin sister continued to push that same goal, and Rou eventually snapped under the weight of living for someone else’s ambitions. People were projecting their desires onto him, and his outburst was a rejection of that pressure. At the start of volume two, Rou is more determined than ever to forge his own path. If he still has Olympic aspirations, it may be on his own terms and perhaps through hockey instead.

Sandwiched between the Interhigh hockey game featuring Oinokami High and Sameoh High and the later chapters focused on offseason training, Dogsred makes a narrative choice that completely caught me off guard. I had taken for granted that the story was set in 2011 without really thinking about what that implied. Right as Sameoh High celebrates a hard fought Interhigh victory that ends a nineteen year dynasty, the city of Hachinohe in Aomori Prefecture is struck by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, one of Japan’s most devastating natural disasters in modern history. We see several characters react to the destruction in real time. Sameoh’s goalie ignores orders to remain on school grounds and nearly gets swept out to sea while trying to rush home and save his grandmother, who has mobility issues. Thankfully, the team survives, as their area was not hit as catastrophically as others along the coast. Even so, the region’s vital fishing and shipping industries are devastated, and many buildings are left in ruins.

The emotional shift is striking. The team talks about continuing its championship reign, but not everyone seems ready to move forward as if nothing has happened. When thousands have died, high school hockey can feel trivial. That tension adds real weight to the story. Instead of introducing a new unstoppable rival as a conventional sports manga would, the series resets both teams in a far more grounded way. Trauma, rebuilding, and perspective become the new obstacles. It is an unexpected turn that deepens the narrative and proves this series is willing to challenge genre tropes rather than simply follow them. I know as a reader I’ve been conditioned to root for Oinokami High and see Sameoh High as the villains, but this whole chapter makes me question that – I want them both to be successful.

According to a quick stroll over some damage statistics for the quake on good ol’ Wikipedia, it appears that the real world city of Hachinohe experienced significant but comparatively less catastrophic damage than areas farther south in Miyagi and Iwate. Thankfully, there was only one death and one person missing, but economic damage was widespread. Tsunami waves flooded industrial zones, damaging fishing vessels, warehouses, and seafood processing facilities central to the city’s economy. We see a lot of that sort of damage briefly in the comic, as the author took famous photos of ships on dry land and conveyed them in the chapter.

Overall, I would say this volume of Dogsred is stronger than the first. We get a great mix of pulse pounding action during the Interhigh Championship, intense drama throughout the tsunami chapters, and something close to screwball comedy in the dry land training sequences. With that range on display, it almost feels like I have now seen the full spectrum of tonal shifts this series is capable of delivering. Given how wildly Golden Kamuy could pivot between brutality, absurd comedy, and heartfelt character moments, I am confident that if Dogsred follows a similar tonal philosophy, it will never feel stagnant. Not everything will stay heavy and dark, and not everything will be light either. As before, I am thoroughly enjoying the ride and plan to keep reading. Speaking of Golden Kamuy, I recently started watching the anime for it due to this comic, and I am also enjoying that, I will have to review soon.

Stay tuned for more!