Haruichi Furudate’s Haikyu!! began in Weekly Shonen Jump on 20 February 2012 and ended on 20 July 2020 at chapter 404, collected in 45 volumes. It is among the longest volleyball series ever serialised, and it kept gathering new readers after it finished.
Shoyo Hinata loses badly to Tobio Kageyama in the only tournament match he plays in middle school, then finds himself on the same high school team as him. Hinata is decisively short for the sport, and the series never solves that. What it does instead is recalculate, match by match, how reach can be manufactured and what information a blocker gives away. The thing that sets it apart from other sports manga is that it refuses to sort teams into winners and losers: the minutes in which a defeated team’s third-years leave the court get the same attention as the point that ends the game.
Rallies are broken across many pages without ever losing track of where the ball is, and that rhythm carried into the anime and the films. Forty-five volumes is not short, but the tournament structure makes it easy to read in stages, which is why it is so often the first volleyball manga anyone is handed.
