High banks become valleys; deep valleys become hills.1
In my view, Takehiko Inoue’s Slam Dunk is undoubtedly an “ugly” manga, with “ugly” bodies: Miyagi’s short body, Hisashi Mitsui’s fatigued body, Akagi’s injured body, and Sakuragi’s unskilled body. These pathological bodies take to the basketball court to compete alongside Kaede Rukawa’s nearly perfect body, and must endure pain, injury, and fatigue. Yet, to put it in Coach Anzai’s terms, even Rukawa’s body is still only a “Japanese” body. In basketball, being born Japanese means bearing “original sin”: from the very beginning, you can have only an imperfect body.
Therefore, whatever is most hot-blooded must also be most iron-blooded and cold-blooded.2 Inoue’s manga never ceases to humiliate, mock, and torment the body. The greatest “kindness” Shohoku can show a teammate is to keep him on the court until he passes out: if your body can no longer run or jump, you must at least keep moving to stretch the defense; if your eyes can still barely make out the basket, you must make the next three-pointer. So when Mitsui says, “I’m Hisashi Mitsui, a man who never gives up,” he is undoubtedly ridiculous, because a second later he will pass out on the court; but at the same time he is great, because a second later he will pass out on the court. He looks like a “superman”; in fact, he is nothing but “scum.”
Such a character is, in fact, like Icarus: that “ugly” man with the deluded dream of flying up to the sun. For wax wings, this moment of flight is enough—as in Sakuragi’s remark about Anzai’s “days on Japan’s national team” near the end of the game against Sannoh.3 Yet for this “ugly,” mortal body, even this moment is impossible. The instant he comes closest to the most hot-blooded sun is the very instant of his most iron-blooded, most cold-blooded fall. If the man who falls has any life left to live, he may, like Mitsui, be filled with endless regret. Just as Mitsui keeps regretting the time he has lost, he too will keep examining his every mistake, until he finally discovers that his greatest mistake is simply being “human,” a creature like “scum.” No matter how much effort and sweat he puts in, he can never become a “perfect” basketball machine. He will still get injured, still grow tired; he must endure pain as he chases bodies that run faster and jump higher. And even those bodies are surpassed by others, and still endure pain, injury, and fatigue.
In the end, the pursuit of basketball can lead only to nothingness: he loses, and he is in pain; he wins, and he is still in pain. Occasional victories break the monotony of prolonged, chronic pain. To escape it is to escape basketball, returning, like Uozumi, to the life of an “ordinary person.” As long as he stays on the court, he can never find the peace of being “human,” but can exist only in some imperfect form: when he glues on his wings, he looks like a “superman,” but when the wax melts, what is laid bare is nothing but “scum.” Hot-bloodedness comes from the breaking of “human” limits. He can only wander forever between excess and insufficiency, enduring the pull from both ends. Every night that tears at him, he does not fall asleep like a human being, but wanders and shrieks like a ghost—iron-blooded and cold-blooded.
Yet even in this life as “scum,” he is the most hot-blooded of all, just as a slave who has lost his freedom understands freedom better than his master does. Yet such a fate is undoubtedly the most iron-blooded and cold-blooded, too. He is iron-blooded, hot-blooded, cold-blooded.