Girl Meets Rock!

is a Japanese web manga series created by Kuwahali. It tells the story of first year high school student Chihiro Hatono, who begins playing guitar and joins her school's light music club. Kuwahali published the original work on Shueisha's digital platform ''Jump Rookie!'' from January to September 2023. A remake, written by Kuwahali and illustrated by Tetsuo Ideuchi, has been serialized on ''Shōnen Jump+'' since January 2024. The remake is published digitally in English on ''Manga Plus''.

The series has been well-received, winning the 10th Next Manga Award in the web category and being nominated for the 18th Manga Taishō.

Plot summary

New high school student Chihiro Hatono buys her first electric guitar and joins the light music club at Tanikyu High School. There, she and bassist Rin Koyama form the band . Not very good, they quickly break up, as do other club bands. After having heard Hatono sing, Rin sets out scheming to form the perfect band with Hatono on vocals. They quickly recruit drummer Momo Uchida, whose own band broke up after their bassist was dumped by fellow club member Koki Takami, a skilled guitarist and singer who is popular with girls. In order to play a concert in July, Hatono's band temporary recruits third year Tamaki Nitta as a support guitarist. Hatono's lackluster performance there spurs her to practice playing and singing in Nagai Park every day of summer vacation. When the second semester begins, Hatono's band recruits guitarist Ayame Fuji, who was about to quit the club after also being dumped by Takami. They also decide to name their group , which Hatono suggested after a Zazen Boys song. Despite the performing acts for the September cultural festival already being decided, Rin's scheming earns Heartbreak a slot. There, Hatono impresses the club members with her improvements, including Takami, who begins to view her and Heartbreak as rivals to his band Protocol. Takami makes a bet with Hatono where the members of whichever band puts on a better show at the Halloween concert, as judged by three of their senpai, get to ask the losing band's members any question they want.

Characters

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:A 15-year-old first year high school student who is a self-described introvert. After her parents divorced, she moved from Kawasaki to Osaka Prefecture for her first year of middle school. Despite being a complete beginner on guitar, she borrows money from her mother to buy a red Fender Telecaster. She has dreamed of being the guitarist and vocalist in a rock band since she was a child, but has suppressed the latter ever since her voice was made fun of in middle school.
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:A tall first year student with short hair. She is a bassist who asks Hatono, whom she calls , to form a band, La Cittadella. After secretly watching her sing, Rin becomes obsessed with Hatono's vocals, to the point of worshiping her as her "god". She pulls numerous schemes in order to form a new band with the perfect members and Hatono as frontwoman. She uses a sunburst Fender Jazz Bass.
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:An outgoing first year student with two braids in her hair. She is a drummer who befriends Hatono, whom she calls , on their first day of high school. She initially forms a trio named Sound Sleep, but they disband in June when a member quits the club after being dumped by Koki Takami. After hearing Hatono sing at a karaoke session arranged by Rin, Momo joins their band. The other three members elect her to be bandleader.
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:A guitarist with a wolf cut who is always seen wearing a pink hoodie jacket. She is a former elementary school classmate of Momo. Ayame was the guitarist in the band Protocol until leaving it after being dumped in August by its vocalist Koki Takami. Although she was planning to quit the music club, she agrees to join Hatono's band after seeing her perform solo following her summer training. Her former surname was "Morita". She uses an orange Fender Jazzmaster.
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:A skilled guitarist and singer who is popular with girls. He is the vocalist and a guitarist of the band Protocol. Days after breaking up with the bassist of Sound Sleep, Takami begins dating his bandmate Ayame. He breaks up with her a couple months later. He has an older brother who was in a band, but whose current whereabouts he does not know. He uses a blue Fender Telecaster.
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:The laid-back and unemotional guitarist who replaces Ayame in Protocol. He attended the same middle school as Hatono, and is her co-worker at a Chinese restaurant. He uses a yellow Gibson Les Paul Special.
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:The bassist of Protocol and Rin's cousin. He is aware of Rin's scheming and manipulations, and went to middle school with Takami. Taguchi is also the support bassist of Friday Nights. He uses a white Fender Jazz Bass
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:The bespectacled drummer of Protocol who has a crush on Momo. He is very knowledgeable about the drums, which he has been playing since elementary school, and has disdain for those who do not take their instruments seriously. He is the bandleader of Protocol.
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:A member of the light music club who is nicknamed . He is the singer and a guitarist of Hatono's first band, La Cittadella, until quitting the club after being romantically rejected by Rin. However, after he continued to message her, Rin realized she can use Yonsu in her schemes. He rejoins the music club to sing in after their vocalist quits, and renames the band to .
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:A member of Shichido High School's light music club that works as a model. She went to middle school with Hatono and Mizuo, where she was briefly the latter's girlfriend. She is nice to Hatono on the surface, but Reiha looks down on her and Hatono can sense it. Hatono envies how bold and unrestrained Reiha is as a performer.

Production

Origins

Wanting to try something new during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kuwahali bought an iPad and started practicing drawing before eventually deciding to try his hand at manga, which he has liked since childhood. Insecure in his skills, his first work was an essay manga about his high school life that he published in serialized form on Twitter. He then conceived ''Girl Meets Rock!'' as he wanted to create fiction with more ups and downs in the story. The light music club setting was chosen because he has personal experience in one and felt that focusing on a large number of the club members would differentiate it from other works featuring the same setting. Kuwahali formed a band in college where he was the bassist, and he also plays drums as a hobby. After publishing the first three chapters on Twitter, Kuwahali began uploading to ''Jump Rookie!''—a part of Shueisha's digital platform ''Shōnen Jump+''—with 22 chapters published from January 7 to September 18, 2023. Believing there was no way he would become a professional manga artist due to his lack of drawing skills, he said it was the response from his gradually increasing readers that motivated him to continue, rather than any personal desire to create.

Kuwahali said that at first, ''Girl Meets Rock!'' was like an essay manga when he started it. But this changed when Hatono became depressed over making mistakes at her first live and picked herself up and started to practice; "I started to feel that Hatono was like the protagonist of a manga. With that development, I felt like the character's attributes became clear again. The excitement of the work rose, and it felt like it was not as relaxed as it was at the beginning, and it had a rather hot-blooded, sports-spirited element to it." It was around this point that Kuwahali was approached by an editor at ''Shōnen Jump+'' to have a meeting about turning ''Girl Meets Rock!'' into a proper serialized manga. He was hesitant because of his lack of skills and because he already had a full-time job, but agreed once it was decided that he would focus on writing the story and Tetsuo Ideuchi would be in charge of illustrating it. The editor chose Ideuchi because his previous work, ''Yakyū-ba de Itadakimasu'', also featured cute girls and everyday scenes. Additionally, while Ideuchi had no experience in bands, the editor knew he had traveled to various places to do research for his manga, so he thought the artist would be good at absorbing new things and incorporating them into the series.

Process and characters

When serialization was decided, Kuwahali used the chapters published on ''Rookie!'' as a base and reworked their pacing. With an increase in page count from 8 to 19, he said he enjoyed going back and rearranging the storyboards to show parts he previously had to skip. Kuwahali does not plan the story in advance. Although there are times when he thinks of developments he wants to do in the future, he does not decide on how to get there and just focuses on the immediate developments as he draws the storyboards. For example, he never thought about having Yonsu return to the club. Knowing that chapter 30 would be the end of the third volume, he felt ending on Hatono's discussion with her dad would be weak, thus he brought in an unexpected character with Yonsu. Kuwahali said the only thing in his writing that had changed since the shift to ''Shōnen Jump+'' was that he now thinks more about adding a hook to the end of each chapter.

Although he is often told that his characters are realistic, Kuwahali said he is not conscious of that at all when writing, but suggested it might be due to the influence of the essay manga by his two favorite manga artists; Saho Yamamoto and Shigeyuki Fukumitsu. There are no clear models for his characters, and although he thinks they are mixed with the essences of people he has met and characters from other works, the author largely believes he is projecting his own thoughts, personality, and experiences. For example, he embarrassingly admitted that Yonsu's "slightly creepy" way of asking someone out is something he actually did in the past. The main character of Hatono is largely a projection of Kuwahali himself, and the other characters were created based on their connection to her. Each one was conceived based on a rough first impression, such as "cheerful" or "cool", and the author then wrote chapters that gave them more dimension. For example, Momo is introduced as a cheerful and energetic girl, but is later shown to have trauma and a complex surrounding love. Another example is Rin, who began as the "cool" character, but as Kuwahali wrote, he came to want a "powerful" character who can move the story forward and selected her for the role.

When deciding which songs to include in the manga, Kuwahali chooses from those that he listens to personally. He noted that although Hatono was initially portrayed as a rather stubborn fan of Japanese rock who made fun of major label bands, he decided this was not a good message to readers. So he consciously selected major bands that Hatono would listen to. Kuwahali said the reason there have not been any original songs in the manga yet, is simply because he wants to introduce some of his favorites, but said original songs may appear as it goes on.

Publication

Written by Kuwahali and illustrated by Tetsuo Ideuchi, ''Girl Meets Rock!'' started on Shueisha's digital platform ''Shōnen Jump+'' on January 14, 2024. Shueisha has collected its chapters into individual volumes, with the first one released on April 4, 2024. As of June 4, 2025, seven volumes have been released.

The series is published digitally in English on ''Manga Plus''. On June 29, 2024, it was announced that it would be "temporarily suspended" from the platform; it returned on November 23 of the same year.

Volumes

Chapters not yet in ''tankōbon'' format

These chapters have yet to be published in a volume.
* 67.
* 68.
* 69.
* 70.
* 71.
* 72.
* 73.
* 74.

Other media

, a reference book for beginner's learning to play guitar that utilizes songs featured in the manga, was released on April 19, 2025.

Reception

By November 2024, ''Girl Meets Rock!'' had over 36 million views on ''Shōnen Jump+''. Its sixth collected volume was the best-selling manga at stores for the week of March 31 – April 6, 2025. The series won the 10th Next Manga Award in the web category in 2024. It also ranked tenth at the third Late Night Manga Awards in 2024 hosted by Bungeishunjū's ''Crea'' magazine. The series ranked second on both Takarajimasha's ''Kono Manga ga Sugoi!'' list of the best manga of 2025 for male readers and ''Freestyle'' magazine's list of the best manga of 2025. The series was ranked fifth in the Nationwide Bookstore Employees' Recommended Comics list of 2025. It was nominated for the 18th Manga Taishō in 2025 and ranked third with 75 points.

Satoru Shoji of Japan Anime News wrote that unlike most works centered around school music clubs, such as ''K-On!'' and ''Bocchi the Rock!'', ''Girl Meets Rock!'' takes a different approach by portraying the realistic emotions and actions of ordinary high school students, but called the manga itself "far from ordinary" due to subverting readers' expectations on upcoming plot developments and for depicting the struggles of characters without becoming too heavy in tone. He cited Chihiro's internal monologues as one of the highlights of the series, and believes readers will enjoy "being at the mercy" of master strategist Rin. Shoji expressed frustration that the English release changed the manga's title from "Ordinary Light Music Club"; a title that he described as "so profound that I could write an entire article just explaining it".

In ''Brutus'', Kenta Terunuma concurred with Shoji, writing that despite many manga being set in light music clubs, the distinctive feature of ''Girl Meets Rock!'' is that the characters do not aim to make their professional debut or win a contest, and no dramatic events occur. However, he explained it is not simply a heartwarming work, as the ensemble story focuses on the human drama hidden in the small events of high school life.

The song "Riyū Naki Hankō (The Rebel Age)" by A Flood of Circle went viral after being included in ''Girl Meets Rock!''. Frontman Ryosuke Sasaki credited this with helping sell tickets to the band's August 2024 concert at Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall. Other recording acts who are admitted fans of the series include Acidman, Ado, Kana-Boon, Kyuso Nekokami and Hump Back, all of whom lent their names to a November 2024 poster promoting the manga.

References

Further reading

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External links

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Official page at ''Manga Plus''
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{{Next Manga Award

Anime and manga set in Japan
Anime and manga set in schools
Coming-of-age anime and manga
Japanese webcomics
Music in anime and manga
Osaka Prefecture in fiction
Shueisha manga
Shōnen manga
Slice of life anime and manga
Webcomics in print
Works about rock music