Kaze ga tsuyoku fuite iru

Ten students live together in a rundown apartment in danger of collapsing at any time. One day they decide to start running, hoping to enter the Hakone Ekiden, a long-distance university relay race held every New Year between Tokyo and Hakone. The problem is that only a few of them have any athletic experience at all; the rest are a motley collection, including an otaku geek who spends his life immersed in manga comics and a theoretically minded academic. This is hardly the stuff from which a crack team of distance runners is made, but they do not let this put them off.

    The ekiden is an athletic event with a long tradition in Japan, and the Hakone Ekiden is the one most closely followed. Dreaming of one day entering this hallowed race, the students give it their all. The story is based on a wildly improbable premise, and yet readers find themselves desperately urging these unlikely heroes on—maybe because just under half of the book is devoted to the climax of the Hakone Ekiden itself. Miura goes into fascinating detail of the ekiden that the 10 athletes must complete together, giving an exhaustive account of the runners’ tactics at each stage of the race and of all the work of the athletes and their supporters. Just as the course of the ekiden goes up mountain passes and down into valleys, the runners have their own ups and downs in life. As each runner slogs along his section of the course, Miura gives flashbacks of his past and the people around him. The way 10 such disparate people gradually come to think and feel as one is depicted compellingly in this book. (MT)