398 thoughts, as always this will mainly focus on visuals and techniques:

1) A link to the past:

Throughout this match, we‘ve seen many callbacks for each player, be it to reintroduce a concept or to highlight their growth. 398 makes no exception and has an interesting way of using callbacks in subtle or obvious ways alternatively.

Here this scene is a clear callback to the last spike from Ushijima during the 2012 prefectural finals, we have the aura Ushijima emanates and the smile from Kageyama who looks really similar to the setter from that scene.

But Furudate decides to emphasise even more on this callback by putting Shirabu, the very player who set to Ushijima at the time.

This makes the situation very clear, even though Kageyama has 4 options as shown with all the players making an approach for a synchro attack, he has only one real option: giving it to the ace as he demands the toss.

Another really obvious callback is this one: same as in 397, we have frames from the shiratorizawa game even though the « I want to crush you » made the callback pretty obvious already. It is once again a way to emphasize.

But there are more subtle callbacks: the crumbling court looking like a cliff, which was used during match points to show the pressure Sawamura had. It shows how much this point, and every point, is important for Hinata. It’s a match with his daily life on the line.

The other time this contrast is used is at the end of the chapter: we have frames of Hinata training in Brasil, showing how he learnt from Takeda’s speech and from his losses, every one of his losses (shown in a greyer tone here).

And then as we see the chapter title, Hinata’s leg gets over the 365 frame, while the other is on the court right now. « A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step »: this was Hinata’s first step and now he’s at the conclusion of this journey.

2) A proper receive:

The main action in this chapter is the dual between Ushijima and Hinata as the latter tries to receive the former’s spikes.

At first, he makes a shoddy receive and isn’t satisfied with it, even though a libero like Sakunami agrees that it is good enough to lift the ball. But then he finally makes a proper receive, getting the ball up cleanly. The composition here is really interesting.

In manga, the author uses multiple techniques to make the reader’s experience more enjoyable. The main idea is to make the flow of the page implicitly obvious. I already talked about this notion previously here: https://twitter.com/justahaikyuufan/status/1273303427284680707

I must introduce a notion before analysing the action: the use of white background and forms. A great example of this is Dragon Ball with the use of the aura.

Here we have Zarbon flying, the white aura forms a guiding line for the reader to follow. As we read from right to left, the first that we see is the impacy from where he was, but as it is linked to him by the aura, we follow it to find Zarbon, the second thing to focus on here.

Because Zarbon is small in this panel it could be easy to lose his track or not focus on him, but Toriyama avoids this problem with this technique.

Another technique is the use of white background. As you can obviously see here, from the pov of the 2nd panel we should see the other characters behind Vegeta, but we see a white bg. This helps the reader focus on Vegeta as we already get spacial information with the 1st panel.

Back to Haikyuu now, we can see those techniques used here to help the focus by making the audience disappear and with the white « aura-like » contours around the spiker. The bottom panel gives spacial info so we aren’t lost when the focus is on Heiwajima’s receive.

But the most interesting part here is with the receive. Furudate creates a visual contrast with these techniques as they help the flow of the page or break it.

As we read from right to left, the first thing we see is Hinata, and instantly after this we have a growing cone making the audience disappear, and our eye is attracted to the sfx and then in a direct line to the ball, which would have been hard to see with a normal background.

And this fluid composition contrasts with the first receive, here the white cone is really small and the direction it indicates us is opposed to the sfx who is also opposed to the ball, making it confused and hard to read. It makes the difference between the two receives obvious.

3) Bonus thoughts:

It’s interesting to see that here, Hinata sees only the blockers and the spiker and no one else, as those are the only valuable info on the court. It also contrasts with Ushijima’s frightening appearance in the previous spread as he is now really small from this angle.

This one might be a stretch but it reminded me of the moment where Hinata tossed to Oikawa, he learned how to focus on this in Brasil.

As always a brilliant chapter this week, Furudate gives us wonderful content and we can only appreciate and try to understand the greatness.