Character · A Silent Voice
Shoya Ishida
The boy who pulled the hearing aids out of a classmate's ears grows up unable to look anyone in the face.
In Otakana the clue reads: Boy who bullied a classmate and later regrets it
- Type
- Character
- Series
- A Silent Voice
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
Shoya Ishida is eleven when he works out that tormenting the deaf girl in his class is a reliable way to stop being bored. It runs until the school starts asking who owes for eight sets of ruined hearing aids, at which point every classmate who laughed along points at him. He spends the rest of elementary school, and the whole of middle school, as the one nobody will sit beside.
By high school he has stopped trying to argue. He has counted out the money he owes his mother, decided how his story ends, and gone looking for Shoko to hand the notebook back before he does anything else. That errand becomes the plot. Yoshitoki Oima will not let the apology settle the account, and Shoya spends most of the story learning that being forgiven and being repaired are two different jobs.
Kyoto Animation's 2016 film draws his isolation on the screen. Large crosses cover the faces of everyone around him and fall away one at a time whenever he manages to hold someone's gaze, which makes the ordinary act of meeting an eye look like a fight. Naoko Yamada directed it after K-On!, and it is the sharpest picture of social dread the studio has put on film.
Spelling SHOYA
The tiles want SHOYA, the given name, rather than Ishida. Japanese writes it しょうや with a long first vowel, so a strict transliteration gives Shouya, and the U has nowhere to go in a five-letter row. The Y sits in fourth position, which is unusual enough to lock the word once you find it. Do not confuse it with SHOKO, the same length and the same first four letters.