What is Slam Dunk?

Slam Dunk is a basketball manga by Takehiko Inoue, serialized in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump from issue 42 of 1990 to issue 27 of 1996. Its hero, Hanamichi Sakuragi, is a tall, red-haired delinquent who has been rejected by fifty girls in junior high. When Haruko Akagi asks if he likes basketball, he joins the Shohoku High team on the spot, knowing nothing about the sport.

What begins as a gag premise becomes a rigorously realistic sports story. Sakuragi learns the game skill by skill across 276 chapters: rebounding first, then the layup, then the jump shot he practices twenty thousand times. Around him stands a complete team, the captain Takenori Akagi, the silent prodigy Kaede Rukawa, the returning delinquent Hisashi Mitsui, the point guard Ryota Miyagi and the sixth man Kiminobu Kogure.

The collected manga passed 100 million copies in Japan by 2004 and has kept climbing since, and the series is routinely credited with popularizing basketball in Japan. For collectors it exists in three completed Japanese editions, the 31-volume tankobon, the 24-volume kanzenban and the 20-volume 2018 shinsoban with covers Inoue drew new, and those editions are the shelf this section documents.