Wandering Son

Wandering Son (放浪息子, Hōrō Musuko?) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Takako Shimura. It began serialization in the December 2002 issue of the monthly seinen manga magazine Comic Beam, and will conclude in the August 2013 issue. The first tankōbon volume was released by Enterbrain in July 2003 in Japan; as of February 2013, 14 volumes have been released. The series is licensed in English by Fantagraphics Books, which is scheduled to release the first volume in North America in July 2011. A 12-episode anime adaptation produced by AIC Classic and directed by Ei Aoki aired in Japan between January and April 2011. Eleven episodes aired on TV, with episodes 10 and 11 edited into a single episode, and were released individually on their respective BD/DVD volumes.

The story depicts a young student named Shuichi Nitori, described by the author as a boy who wants to be a girl, and his friend Yoshino Takatsuki, described as a girl who wants to be a boy. The series deals with issues such as transsexualism, gender identity, and the beginning of puberty. Shimura was originally going to write the story about a girl in high school who wants to be a boy, but she realized that a boy who wants to become a girl before entering into puberty would have a lot of worries related to growing up, and changed the story to fit this model. Wandering Son was selected as a recommended work by the awards jury of the tenth Japan Media Arts Festival in 2006. The series has been lauded for its use of gender reversal as the core of the story, though the emotional realism of the young characters has been called into question.