GBS: Oh, don’t worry. Like single malts, not every creator is to every person’s taste. Looking over all of his work, it is certainly a theme that binds them together. We don’t have to go through the entire collection, it’s more than enough to briefly discuss 5 Centimeters Per Second: A chain of short stories about their distance.
Most of the time, people ignore the second part of the title, but it’s key in this respect, for Shinkai is talking about the distance that opens up between the initial leads, Akari Shinohara and Takaki Tohno. It’s an unbridgeable gap in time and space that Tohno’s love is unable to traverse. Thus, he remains in love with Akari, but it’s no longer reciprocated since she has moved on in life.
Granted, Tohno never made a serious attempt to bridge the gap by trying to stay in touch with her, but the effects on him are quite harsh. By the end of the third act he seems incapable of maintaining a relationship with another woman, constantly chained to the past by his now unrequited love.
BT: Ah, okay. Well, there you go.
GBS: Well, then perhaps we can move onto more familiar ground for those who aren’t into trains, planes or shoes. When it comes to unrequited love, surprisingly one of the most touching portrayals comes from a rather unexpected source, Shimoku Kio’s Genshiken. A story about anime/manga/game fans in college taking an at times loving, at times critical look at what the fandom is made of.
BT: In the pantheon of Anime’s Great Unrequited Love Affairs, the tale of Harunobu Madarame and Saki Kasukabe stands, as far as I’m concerned, at top. Madarame is the awkward otaku whom anime and manga fans at once pity, sympathize, hold in awe, and fear becoming. At the start of Genshiken’s story, he believes—and as much declares—that he has disavowed real women for the 2-dimensional. Saki Kasukabe, attractive and stylish, somewhat vain, would have nothing to do with otaku culture at all, if the (also attractive) childhood friend she’s in love with, Kousaka, were not a major-league one.
GBS: You almost wonder what it is that Madarame sees in her.
BT: She is a forbidden fruit. And part of the relationship’s appeal comes from its classic roots: Madarame despises the club-crashing Saki; she thinks no better of him, even while she warms to the others. Despite himself he falls in love with her, almost from the beginning. His loyalty to Kousaka, and his own low self-esteem, prevent him from expressing it to anybody, and hardly himself. The pain worsens as the two ultimately become friends. Even loyal and supportive. The story never clearly shows Saki’s own, inner, view—it is a true one-sided affair—but nor does it shut the door.
GBS: Of course, just about everyone else in the club figures it out, though they choose to stand aside and not interfere. A good decision.
BT: This relationship is so compelling because it runs as the central current in the multi-part story of Genshiken, and it expresses its major theme: how non-sociable, insular otaku must for better or for worse interact with the larger world that also sees them as outcasts. It’s entwined from two strains: one, otaku who seek, with varying success, to be comfortable with their status, in their skins, ignoring outside approval; two, otaku who seek the outside’s recognition, but fear to consummate a connection lest they lose their identity, or are rejected and proved once and for all marginal. Madarame is in tension between these two forces, when he would have believed himself firmly in the first, and Saki is the reason.
GBS: Part of its success certainly lies in its mirroring the audience’s own real life experiences. I have little doubt that a good number of those expressing their love for their fictional “waifu” are doing that partially to retreat from a real world crush that went nowhere.
