NISEKOI (2014-2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

I am but a recent convert to the joys of Naoshi Komi’s 25-volume manga series NISEKOI. Having taken pleasure in all the intricacies of Komi’s apparently simple teen humor series, I thought it was unlikely that an animated television series would be able to duplicate Komi’s most significant talent: that of layering numerous major and minor plot-points throughout an episodic narrative that, on the surface, seems to be about nothing more complex than teen angst and wild slapstick violence.

It’s not that an animated show would not have the storytelling capacity to translate Komi’s masterpiece. Rather, because animation is so expensive, it’s often tough for such shows to stay on commercial television long enough to execute long narratives. For that reason, DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND, one of the most intricate manga-serials of the 21^st century, only received one season, adapting just a handful of stories from the serial’s first year. And that was the ideal outcome of such an adaptation, in comparison to how the long-running ROSARIO + VAMPIRE manga fared. Though the original ROSARIO manga had its share of silly humor and sexploitation hijinks, the series offered a number of other attractions as well—though a viewer could never have guessed that from the two-season ROSARIO anime, which was nothing but silliness and sexploitation. By the time I started reading NISEKOI in 2020, the anime teleseries—consisting of thirty-two regular episodes and four OVA—had long been completed, so it was a given that it couldn’t possibly recapitulate all the involved plots of Komi’s narrative. Nevertheless, I purchased a Season 1 Japanese DVD that included almost all of the animated material, excepting only the last-produced of the four OVAs.

It’s with considerable relief that I can say that the NISEKOI anime was not bowdlerized after the fashion of ROSARIO. There’s no great surprise that the animators did a fine job of emulating Komi’s art; almost all commercial animation houses in Japan make a point of such fidelity. But getting the stories right is a more complex undertaking. The people producing the adaptation scripts must have known that they might not get a chance to execute the full Komi narrative. Komi’s overarching plot for the whole series involves high-schooler Raku Ichijo trying to learn the identity of his “first love,” a little girl he met when both of them were about five years old. This A-plot takes a dozen twists and turns before being concluded in Volume 25, but Komi staggers the A-plot by introducing numerous episodic stand-alone stories not strictly necessary to the main story. An animation house might have been justified in adapting only those stories that stood apart from the central plot. But then, that could have alienated fans of the manga, who would be expecting to see Raku encounter all the girls in his accidental harem—four of whom are candidates to be identified as his almost forgotten “first love”—precisely as he did in the comics.

It's probably fortunate that the teleseries ended where it did, before it could have got into the really tortuous developments of the later manga volumes. As it stands, the teleseries and OVAs serve as something of a primer for the manga’s virtues. Raku, the embodiment of the mostly passive boy-hero in such teen humor productions, spends most of junior high pining after a girl named Kosaki, who shares his feelings, though both of them are too timid to confess to one another. This reticence lays the groundwork for Raku to justify the manga’s title (“Nisekoi” = “fake love”) when his gangster-father talks him into pretending to date the daughter of a rival gang: half-American Chitoge Kirisaki. The two teens initially can’t stand one another, and the athletic Chitoge often shows off her prowess by slugging Raku whenever he ticks her off. Yet the theme of “opposites attracting” has never had a better exemplar than Komi’s NISEKOI, and the anime successfully captures the slow growth of the Raku-Chitoge romance, even if said romance doesn’t get much past the events of the teens’ first year in high school.

The only running plot-point with which the TV scripters tinkered relates to the density of both Raku and Kosaki, who are both psychologically incapable of seeing themselves as being attractive to the other. Other characters in the manga are aware of their mutual attraction, and Kosaki’s BFF Ruri even tries to directly tell Raku the truth. Yet Komi always finds ways to keep the duo ignorant, the better to push Raku closer to Chitoge. In a couple of adaptations, the writers violate this stricture, but then both Raku and Kosaki conveniently forget those revelations. To be sure, Komi has his own lapses, in that Chitoge notices Raku’s attentions to Kosaki a couple of times, and then she too gets convenience amnesia.

The manga only made occasional usage of marvelous metaphenomena, and the only marvelous story adapted here is “Shrine Maiden,” in which a Shinto priestess tells the girls that Raku is under a curse, and that they must do all sorts of crazy things to exorcise him. (There’s also an adaptation of a “side story” in which the series females transform into “magical girls” a la Sailor Moon, but this is pretty clearly “out of continuity.”) One marvelous phenomenon is not quite enough to make me label the series as dominantly marvelous. However, Chitoge’s guardian Seichiro consistently displays “superlative skills” in that she can leap long distances and shatter stone with a kick, so I can regard the teleseries as dominantly uncanny for that reason.

Ostensibly there’s been one live-action movie adaptation of NISEKOI. But the scope of Naoshi Komi’s work really needs the venue of a live action teleseries, wherein producers aren’t constantly faced with mounting animation expenses. Whether or not anything of the kind will surface depends entirely on the fortunes of the Japanese TV industry. (I for one hope that no one from any other country gets the idea of doing the same, since NISEKOI is IMO an idea too characteristically Japanese for anyone else to get right.)