Elementary School Bullying

The opening section recounts the past: how Shoya Ishida led the bullying of Shoko Nishimiya, a deaf transfer student, and how the situation collapsed onto him.

The series opens by establishing the events that shape everything that follows. Shoko Nishimiya, a deaf girl, transfers into Shoya Ishida's sixth-grade class and tries to connect with classmates through a notebook she carries to exchange written messages. Shoya, a restless and easily bored boy, treats her difference as entertainment and escalates into cruel, persistent bullying, repeatedly damaging her hearing aids and mocking her attempts to communicate. The class largely tolerates or quietly participates, with classmates like Naoka Ueno and Miki Kawai joining the mockery or looking away. When the costs of the destroyed hearing aids and the bullying become impossible to ignore, the teacher and other students turn on Shoya, scapegoating him entirely. Shoko transfers out of the school, and Shoya is abruptly isolated, abandoned by the very classmates who had laughed alongside him. This opening section is deliberately uncomfortable, refusing to soften the harm done, and it frames the rest of the manga not as a story of an innocent protagonist but of a perpetrator forced to live with the consequences of his actions and the loneliness that follows.