Part 283: Eleven on the Field: Eyeshield 21 and the Best Coincidence This Series Has Found

An American football team fields eleven players. Not ten, not twelve, and not a number that varies by league or era in any way that would let me weasel out of the claim: eleven on offence, eleven on defence, the fundamental unit of the sport.

Eyeshield 21 (アイシールド21), Riichiro Inagaki and Yusuke Murata's American football manga, serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2002, reduces to a Destiny number of 11.

Two hundred and eighty-three essays. I have been rolling this particular die since the first one, and I have accumulated a great many coincidences that required a certain amount of throat-clearing to make land. This one requires none. The manga about the eleven-man sport reduces to eleven. It proves absolutely nothing — I will get to that, at length, because this series has made a habit of dismantling its own best results — and I have rarely enjoyed anything more.

The Number That Is Also a Vibration

The 11 is a master number, and in the scheme used throughout this series its vibration is inspiration, tension, and heightened awareness. It is the Visionary: the number of the person who perceives more than the situation contains, and who is frequently torn apart by the discrepancy.

Which happens to describe the sport with some precision. American football is, more than any other team game, a sport of perception under pressure. It stops between every play. It is planned, diagrammed, called from the sideline, and then executed in four or five seconds of total chaos in which twenty-two people move simultaneously and the entire outcome depends on whether one player can read a developing pattern faster than his opponent can. Inagaki understood this, and it is why Eyeshield 21 works as manga where a straightforwardly kinetic sport might not have: the pauses are where the drama lives. Murata can spend four pages inside the half-second before a snap, drawing what the quarterback is seeing, and the pause is not a delay in the action — it is the action.

Sena, the Builder

Sena Kobayakawa reduces to a Destiny 4: the Builder and Organizer, structure, labour, and the building of lasting systems. His Heart's Desire is a 7, the Analyst.

Sena begins the manga as a professional victim. He is small, timid, and has spent his school career as an errand boy for bullies — a background that has given him, entirely by accident, a sprinter's legs and a preternatural ability to find the gap in a crowd of people trying to grab him. Hiruma, the demonic quarterback with a shotgun and no discernible conscience, spots this and conscripts him. The gimmick is the eyeshield: Sena plays as a masked, anonymous running back so that the rest of the school will not know that the fastest player in Japanese high-school football is the boy they have been sending out for bread.

The 4 is a good number for him, and better than the obvious alternative. The lazy read of Sena is that he is a natural — a hidden talent, revealed. He is not. Inagaki is careful, across the whole run, to show him working: the training, the technique, the specific mechanics of the Devil Bat Ghost, the incremental shaving of tenths of a second off a forty-yard dash. His speed is native. Everything else is constructed, painfully, in the training scenes that a lesser sports manga skips. The Builder builds himself.

The Team as the Point

But the 11 is the number over the whole thing, and eleven is a number that only means anything in aggregate. This is what the manga is actually about, and it is the reason it endures while a hundred other Jump sports series have evaporated.

American football is the least individualistic team sport in existence. A running back cannot run without a line. The line does not score, does not appear on the highlight reel, and is composed entirely of enormous men whose job is to be hit repeatedly by other enormous men so that someone smaller and faster can go past. Inagaki builds the Deimon Devil Bats out of exactly the material Jump usually discards: a fat kid, a lazy kid, three idiots, a delinquent, an over-serious captain, a boy who wanted to play baseball. Every one of them has to become genuinely good at a specific, unglamorous job, and the manga takes the unglamorous jobs seriously — there are chapters about blocking technique that carry more emotional weight than most series manage with a final boss.

The friendship-effort-victory formula that the Serialization Machine essays describe as an editorial product rather than an artistic one is, here, actually earned. It is earned because the sport does not permit the alternative. You cannot solo an offensive line. Eleven, or nothing.

The Part Where I Take It Away

Now the demolition, because this series does not get to keep a result this pretty without paying for it.

Eyeshield 21 is a title with a numeral in it, and the numerological engine treats "21" as letters-worth-of-nothing and quietly ignores it, computing only over the alphabetic characters. Had the manga been called Eyeshield, or Eyeshield 22, or had the English publisher rendered it Eye Shield 21 with a space, the sum would differ. The eleven that so delighted me is a function of an editorial decision about spacing and a scheme that cannot see digits. And the sport's eleven players is a fact about a game invented in North America in the nineteenth century, which has no causal relationship of any kind to the Pythagorean values of Latin letters in a romanized Japanese title.

Part 165 of this series took twenty titles and demonstrated that only one preserved its Destiny number between the romanized Japanese and the English. A title's number is an artefact of translation. I established that with data, I have repeated it in every essay since, and I am not going to pretend I have forgotten it merely because the die came up beautifully this time.

Why I Am Keeping It Anyway

And yet here is the case for the whole enterprise, made as plainly as I can make it, on the essay where the coincidence is at its most seductive.

A frame is not a claim. Numerology, as this series has used it, is a device for generating attention — a reason to stop on a manga you would have scrolled past and ask what it is actually doing. It has no predictive power, it survives no honest test, and every time it has been examined it has failed. But it sent me to Eyeshield 21, and having gone there, the thing I found was not the number. It was Murata drawing the four-tenths of a second before a snap; it was a fat kid learning to block; it was a sport in which the smallest man on the field cannot take a single step without ten other people deciding to make room for him.

The eleven is a joke the alphabet played. What is underneath it is a manga about the fact that nobody scores alone — and if a meaningless coincidence is what it took to get me to look, then the coincidence has done the only job it was ever capable of doing.