ハイキュー!!のネタバレ解説Haikyu!!: the story explained

Synopsis

Shoyo Hinata started playing volleyball after seeing a small player on television - the Karasuno High ace who would later be known as the Little Giant. In junior high he could never get enough players together, and only made it onto a court once, in his final tournament as a third-year. His opponent there was Tobio Kageyama, the prodigy setter from Kitagawa Daiichi. Hinata's team was crushed, and he left saying he would win next time. The following spring he enrolls at Karasuno, the school he has idolised - and finds Kageyama standing in the same gym, a first-year too. The two argue constantly, and out of that friction they build an absurd quick attack: Kageyama sets to a spot where Hinata, eyes closed, has already jumped. Karasuno's volleyball club, once a national contender and now nicknamed the flightless crows, includes captain Daichi Sawamura, the anxious ace Asahi Azumane, the sharp-tongued first-year Kei Tsukishima, and the libero Yu Nishinoya. Ahead of them are Tooru Oikawa's Aoba Johsai, the wall of Date Tech, and Shiratorizawa with Wakatoshi Ushijima, one of the best spikers in the country. In Tokyo, Nekoma High is waiting, a school with a long history against Karasuno. The question is what a player who is too short can use to stay on the court - across three years of high school, and beyond them.

How the story is built

1. Setup

   Building the freak quick

   Roughly volumes 1-8, joining the club through losing in the Inter-High qualifiers

   It opens on pure antagonism. Hinata ends up on the same team as the boy who beat him in his last junior-high match, and they bicker through practice. But under adviser Ittetsu Takeda and coach Keishin Ukai, the role Hinata is handed is not ace - it is middle blocker, and decoy. The quick attack they build, with Hinata jumping blind and Kageyama placing the ball where he will be, buys accuracy at the price of Hinata seeing nothing at all. Practice games against Aoba Johsai and Date Tech give that weakness a concrete opponent. In the Inter-High qualifiers Karasuno loses to Oikawa's Aoba Johsai, and the two first-years learn that before any national stage there is a prefecture in the way. The comedy runs heavy here, but almost every problem the series will spend years solving is already on the table.

2. Development

   Getting past the prefecture

   Roughly volumes 9-20, the Tokyo training camp through the Spring Tournament qualifier final

   The story shifts from two players' trick to rebuilding a team. At a joint training camp in Tokyo, Karasuno faces Nekoma and Fukurodani, and a player like Tsukishima - who had never cared much about winning - finds a way into the sport through blocking. In the Miyagi qualifiers for the Spring Tournament, Karasuno beats Date Tech, wins the rematch against the Aoba Johsai team that eliminated them earlier, and reaches the final against Ushijima's Shiratorizawa. They survive Ushijima's spikes long enough to win and take the prefecture's national berth. Over this stretch Karasuno stops being a team built around one quick attack and becomes six players with six jobs. It is also where the series settles into giving losing opponents the same weight of history and conviction as its heroes.

3. Turn

   How wide the national stage is

   Roughly volumes 21-37, the first round of the Spring Tournament through the Nekoma game

   The setting moves from Miyagi to Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, where Karasuno arrives as a school nobody knows. After a first round against Tsubakihara, the second round is Inarizaki of Hyogo, with Atsumu Miya and captain Shinsuke Kita. Here Hinata's quick is stopped head-on for the first time, and jumping with his eyes shut stops working. Mid-match, he begins switching to something far harder: watching Kageyama's set and hitting it. The third round is Nekoma, the school Karasuno has scrimmaged for years and never met in an official game - the match the series has called the Battle at the Garbage Dump since early on, and the one where Kenma Kozume, who never cared about winning, says out loud that volleyball is fun. The technical detail thickens, and single matches start taking whole volumes.

4. Resolution

   A story that continues off the court

   Volumes 38-45, the Kamomedai game through the final chapter

   The quarter-final opponent is Kamomedai, whose ace Korai Hoshiumi is as short as Hinata. Hoshiumi is placed as a player who already reached what Hinata is aiming for, and the match forces Hinata to see exactly where he stands. That game closes the high-school portion. The third-years retire, the rest graduate, and the story jumps years ahead. The remaining volumes follow, in order, Hinata's two years playing beach volleyball in Brazil, his return to the Japanese V.League, and the national team. Rather than stopping once three years of high school have been drawn, the series pulls what happened after into the main text. The later lives of players from every school that appeared are laid out across this stretch as well.

The ending

Notes