What’s important in a relationship? I think most people would answer something like “communication” or “shared interests,” and I think we can all agree that those are at least some of the basic things that make for a successful partnership. I might be tempted to ask a different question, however – what moments are important to a relationship? That’s a much more difficult question to answer, because as a rule our brains don’t always keep track of memories that, at the time, might seem insignificant.
Personally, there are certain things I remember about meeting my husband. The first time I talked about him was September of 2009, when he joined the anime club. I didn’t know his name at the time, but I know he and the other guy he was chatting with sat in front of my friend and I and I found them both kind of disruptive (ha!). I remember that we became friends when he started coming out with us to have Chinese food after anime club, although if you asked me to pinpoint the exact date or time period when that started happening, I could only shrug my shoulders. I remember helping him move into a new apartment many months before we started dating. I recall the first time we kissed. These are big points on the timeline my brain has kept; major turning points or indicators of progress. But in between all those integers are fractional moments that helped build up to the whole, and even though they were important building blocks in their own way, I doubt I could point to any one of them in particular and define them.
I enjoy many genres of anime, but often wrestle with anime romance stories because I feel like it’s difficult to capture the essence of a relationship between people in a way that’s both entertaining and well-paced. Real relationships are often filled with false starts and intimate moments that, while meaningful to the people involved, are probably boring (or annoying) to anyone attempting to watch from the outside.
Horimiya is romantic comedy, an adaptation of a long-running manga, and a recent favorite of mine from this past anime season. One thing I really like about it is that, because of the amount of story contained in its brief 13 episodes, it doesn’t have a lot of time to beat around the bush; Hori and Miyamura briefly struggle with what their feelings for each-other mean, but ultimately those struggles are resolved in short order and, for the most part, to the point. Miyamura confesses his feelings in a way that would be difficult to misinterpret. Hori is forced to confirm her feelings when her father asks. It’s a set of truths that are evident to the audience early on, and we’re not forced into endless frustration waiting and hoping for the characters to realize that the emotions they’re experiencing are actually sexual tension.
This style of storytelling serves the arc of the main characters’ relationship well, allowing us insight into their personalities and the ways that they interact with each-other without dwelling too long on any one romantic speed bump; it takes us on this ride all the way through their final year of high school. As Miyamura’s world expands and he starts to make friends beyond Hori, though, the choice to move along at such a clip might start to feel as though it’s developing a few cracks. It’s not as if the other characters are uninteresting or unlikeable; I think the entire cast is worthy of having their stories told. It’s more that, as they become a larger part of the picture, they might start to seem more like side quests in the game. I love side quests! Ask me about how many times I’ve put more than 200 hours into a game of Skyrim. But sometimes the main story is so good that you’d rather stick with that and fill in the gaps later on. I got very invested in Hori’s and Miyamura’s messy, but ultimately positive and fulfilling, love-life, and started to feel like the other characters’ storylines were photobombing a wedding album. It might make for an amusing aside, but also distracts from the point of the event.
But that may just be a consequence of trying to adapt a story differently that how it was originally told. Adapting something from one medium to another is kind of like curating family photos to hang on a wall. You want to include the things that reflect the best on the source, but there might be that candid photo of Grandpa you love and that always makes you laugh, even if it’s not the prettiest of posed portraits and doesn’t immediately make sense to the narrative. There’s a charm to the extraneous moments, those in-between reprieves, in Horimiya, because they’re focused on the mundanity of being in high school and, even more so, having friends, something that Miyamura can’t take for granted.
I think there’s an artfulness in this series during those moments where we’re reminded of what Miyamura’s life once was, and what it might have been. They’re cinematic in a way that the majority of the series tends to shy away from, and they also feel very intimate. But there’s a straightforwardness to the rest of the series, a bluntness, that I think I’ll remember the most. “This is who we are – a couple of charming, flawed kids in love” I feel like it’s saying, as we peek in at them every once-in-a-while to see how they’re handling life. They’re the friends we’d like to get to know better, but it never seems to work out and we’re left to fill in the blanks to some extent. I think the adage that fits this best is “always leave them wanting more.” I would love to have had more of Horimiya, but I’m happy with the snapshots of what we got.
Horimiya is licensed by Funimation and available streaming in the US.
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[…] Horimiya – Snapshots of a Relationship – This seems to be around the time of year when I started to feel a bit better about what I was doing, as I remember having some decent ideas of how to frame my thoughts on some anime I’d been finishing. This review of Horimiya focuses on its presentation, which is paced much more quickly than a lot of anime romance series. […]