Wandering Son - Production

Production

In an interview in August 2003, Takako Shimura stated that the theme of Wandering Son is similar to the second half of her previous manga series Shikii no Jūnin. Shimura took the junior high school teacher Kentarō Kaneda from Shikii no Jūnin and inserted him into Wandering Son, where he teaches at Shuichi's junior high school, because she really liked his character. Shimura originally planned to use a female high school student who wants to become a boy as the main character. However, she realized that a boy who wants to become a girl before entering into puberty would have many worries related to growing up, and changed the story accordingly. Shimura used her realization that the boy would go through significant changes as he grew up to deepen the development of the story and characters. The Japanese title, Hōrō Musuko, is a pun on hōtō musuko (放蕩息子?), meaning "prodigal son".

Shimura mainly found her characters' names by looking through name dictionaries, although she also took the names of acquaintances and slightly changed them, and even used train station names for side characters appearing only once. Out of all the characters, Shimura is most pleased with Kanako Sasa. For the designs of clothes for the female characters, Shimura consulted various fashion magazines for girls in their early teens, especially Nicola. Shimura commented self-deprecatingly in the afterword of volume one that, like her other series, her characters do not look very different from each other, her panels are too white, and there is much pathos.