Spring 2021 First Impressions – Higehiro

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 13

Source: Light Novel

Story Summary: Yoshida’s love-life is on the rocks after he’s rejected by a coworker. Drunk and unhappy, he stumbles home only to find a high school girl napping beneath a street lamp near his apartment. He tries to shoo her home, but it turns out that “home” is a place far in the North and her reasons for not wanting to return are likely complicated. Her name is Sayu, and in exchange for a place to stay she offers herself as payment. Yoshida wants nothing to do with that sort of thing and realizes that even though housing a teenage runaway without any ulterior motive makes him look bad, he can’t seem to find it in his heart to force her back out on the street. Instead, he offers her a place to stay until she gets back on her feet, and as long as Sayu helps with the chores and promises not to try to seduce him again, she can take her time there. After having dealt with a string of opportunist men, Sayu doesn’t know quite what to do with this fortunate bout of kindness other than try her best to fulfill her side of the bargain.

Impressions: One of my irrational fears is the impending, unpredictable “pop!” of those blue paper cans full of biscuit dough. Some of them burst open at the slightest touch, while others require a lot of manhandling to open. As someone with a noise sensitivity issue, this can be tortuous (though I also understand how it’s comedic and so I hope you’ll laugh along with me). Likewise, after losing my innocence to stories like Bunny Drop and its other Tale of Genji-inspired brethren, I’m always very wary of stories in which parental roles may eventually pervert themselves into some kind of inappropriate romance. At least with a biscuit can, you’re always rewarded with buttery biscuits in the end. Anime just bursts open and breaks your heart.

On paper, this story is a recipe for utter disaster. An adult (but not-too-old!) man shares living quarters with a high school girl whose boundaries have been damaged through desperation. He seems to be cool but despite his insistence that he doesn’t find her attractive, the girl has already forcefully started to push his buttons. Cue a large rock forming itself in the pit of my stomach as I wait for the other shoe to drop. That said, this is how I spent about 8 episodes watching After the Rain, only to finally discover that it wasn’t truly an age-gap romance and that I could have relaxed. The question in this case is whether or not I can let down my guard.

There are some things that this episode does really well. Yoshida repeatedly insists that he’s in no way attracted to Sayu. He calls her a kid more than once and that seems to be a hard limit on his end despite how she continues to wheedle at him. He also reminds her that he’s not somebody special for respecting her by taking his smoking outside; being courteous is a baseline expectation she should have of people, not something that ought to be lauded. I find that our perception of anime characters, especially those central figures in harem or sex-comedy anime, is extremely simplistic. It’s easy to commend a male lead in these types of series for treating the women surrounding him with some nominal amount of respect – not grabbing them without permission, not peeping (except maybe by accident, har har), being nice toward them… just because they’re not actively trying to launch themselves into the women’s only bath doesn’t mean that their behavior is something special; just because they elect not to molest girls doesn’t mean they have some godly amount of self control. Just because an adult chooses not to take advantage of a high school girl trying to jump his bones doesn’t make him anything more than a person doing his job to respect both the law and the autonomy and status of the disadvantaged person in his midst.

And that’s where I start to wonder what the point of this story is. If the idea is for the characters to grow as people through their oddball friendship with one-another, that’s fine; but then I question just why we’re shown Sayu’s panties multiple times throughout the episode. If the point is that Yoshida is a good guy and not interested in Sayu’s adolescent sexuality, then why are we, the audience, given the impression that her body is available to us? That’s just one of the many problems I have with the ways in which fanservice is often utilized in anime. It not always, but often just serves to undermine what the narrative is trying to say, especially when what’s trying to be conveyed is otherwise thoughtful or serious.

Pros: Yoshida’s stated attitude is good. One issue I had with After the Rain is that, even after the female lead confesses her inappropriate crush on her manager, he never actually tells her “no” outright. Here, even in an impaired state, Yoshida’s answer is no. Again, this is just baseline acceptable behavior, but sometimes you have to take what you can get.

Cons: Frankly, I think the biggest issue with this episode, and by extension the series, is that I don’t trust it not to go in an upsetting direction. Whether or not that’s true almost doesn’t matter, because watching this episode made me tense up the entire time, and honestly that’s no way to live, let alone a state of mind in which anyone wants to watch anime.

Content Warnings: Mild nudity (underwear and bra). A teenager making sexual overtures at an adult. An allusion to underage sex work. Drunkenness/alcohol use. Discussion of breast size.

Would I Watch More? – I don’t think I could put myself through that stress, but I’ll most likely keep my ear to the ground as far as the general story progression just to see how things unfold, because I’m still curious.