Disclaimer: I will not be anywhere near as outraged as I was writing my blog from last week! That show just ingites a pure rage and hatred in my bones, but this show… is just, fantastic!!

This week I will be reviewing the anime known as Nana.

The anime Nana is set in Tokyo, Japan around winter time in 2006. The two main characters Nana Komatsu and Nana Osaki meet by pure coincidence when they are on a train to Tokyo. When their train is delayed because of the snow, they get to know each other, quickly getting comfortable and sharing about themselves as they are stuck in a five hour delay.

When the train finally gets to Tokyo, they depart ways abruptly, Nana Komatsu hoping to meet the beautiful stranger on the train once more. The episodes after their meeting detail the backstories of both Nana’s, letting us in on their personalities, passions, and reasons for moving to Tokyo.

Nana Komatsu, the woman with honey blonde hair in the poster, is 20 years old and has finally decided to move to Tokyo so that she and her boyfriend can live together and quit being long distance. From the beginning of high school, she has always easily fallen in love with the men around her, ranging from her art teacher, to the man at the book store, another teacher of hers, a pizza delivery man, and finally, a married man she meets at the movies. While she never held a deep connection to most of them, the man at the movies holds a particularly strong hold over her. When she collapsed from light heatedness, he took care of her, told her she was beautiful and disappeared. They met once again and started having sex with each other once a month, Nana was a senior in high school at the time. In every one of these situations, Nana was looking for affirmation or a form of validation from the men she pursued. She felt particularly crushed by the last man, because she was very aware of the fact that he was married and could never love her in the way that she desired, yet she craved the intimacy he would give her on occasion. In the end, she never learned his name and he got moved to Tokyo for work. After that, she went to college, took a break from men, and eventually fell in love and created a healthy relationship with her boyfriend, the one she planned to move to Tokyo for.

Nana Osaki, the woman with black hair, is also 20 years old and has decided to take the next step in her musical career and move to Tokyo so that she can sign a label and make it big. With no real parental figure in her life, Nana was left in the care of her strict grandmother, who created restrictions so that Nana could not become a “temptress” like her mother. In Nana’s rebellious streak, she gets kicked out of high school based on false allegations and joins a band with Ren Honjo, Yasushi Takagi, and her friend Nobu. Her vocal talent is raw and as she gets more gigs with the band, Black Stones, her fans are confident that with the right coaching and progress, she can make it big. She fell in love with the guitarist, Ren, started dating him and living with him when she was 18. Ren wears a lock on his necklace, the key belonging to Nana. This necklace is an accurate representation of how attached the two are to each other, despite their differences and their on again off again dynamic. Ren moves to Tokyo after being asked to famous band and a year later, Nana decides to start the Black Stones again in Tokyo with a new guitarist.

This show is fantastic. The writing is incredible, the fashion and aesthetics of each character is so amazing. The show has an early 2000’s grunge style that is incredibly pleasing to the eye and only contributes to the alluring qualities of every character that is introduced.

My all time favorite aspect of this show is the dynamic between Nana Komatsu and Nana Osaki. Time and time again, they are hit with hard decisions, disappointment, hardship, and conflict, but the one thing that for the most part remains constant is their love for one another. Every episode begins with an excerpt from their letters to one another in the future, expressing how deeply they love one another and expressing their regrets about how they were too scated to express how they felt towards each other among other things. Though Nana Komatsu found herself having many boyfriends and love interests, she continually expresses how loving Nana Osaki is the strongest emotion she has ever felt and will ever feel throughout the entirety of her life. One time she expresses this jokingly to Nana Osaki, and Osaki says, “I don’t want you seeing me in that way.” While this could be interpreted as her rejecting her advances, it is clear that Nana Osaki feels the saw way that Komatsu does, but has a lot of insecurities that stop her from ever fully expressing how she feels. I think that in that moment, Osaki feared that Komatsu’s feelings would be fleeting in the same way that her connections to her male love interests come and go. From the beginning to the end, their relationship is deemed as special and more important than any drama or relationship that they may involve themselves in as they learn how to live life on their own in the bustling city of Tokyo.

(THIS IS UNNECESSARILY LONG IM REALLY SORRY BUT THIS IS LITERALLY ONE OF MY FAVORITE SHOWS IN THE WORLD I COULD GO ON FOR HOURS, I HIGHLY RECCOMEND IT OKAY THANK YOU FOR READING IF YOU GOT THIS FAR!!)