The View from the Top: ‘Haikyu’ and Reaching my Peak

I’ve been rewatching episodes of Haikyu lately. It’s that weird time of the year (a.k.a. the end of it) where everything seems to slow down and there’s not that much new content in circulation, so I turn to my old standbys: the shows I know by heart and by soul, the easy comforts. I would say I’m not entirely sure how an anime about a Japanese boys high school volleyball club became a vital touchstone in my life, but I actually do know. I know it very deeply, and I know this because back in 2020, I wrote about it. And at the time, it was perhaps the best thing I ever wrote. I was fresh off a week-long intensive non-fiction writing retreat, and I was inspired, emboldened. The end result was an essay that managed to effortlessly combined a deep dive media analysis of a sports anime, my own meditations on the pandemic, and a poignant reflection on the importance of human connection. 

One thing I didn’t talk about as much during that essay though was how much the vocabulary of Haikyu had become ingrained in my speech. The most obvious one was “tempo.” Maybe that’s because it’s the one term that had significant overlap with my musical theater and writing background, but in any event, I have incorporated it into conversation, whether it is matching, speeding up, slowing down.  The other phrase though? Well, that’s the title of this essay. “The View from the Top.” At the start of the series, the five words specifically means the apex o…