Gokinjo Monogatari
My reaction to the news, from Ojisan, that I am being pitted against some other proper anime blog in the AniBlog Tourney has left me with the above expression. WTF? This isn’t even a blog, and it’s hardly about anime anymore. A year and a half ago I guess I used to write episodic reviews, but now it’s a busy month for me on here if I post a SeraMyuu video or a screenshot for the lulz and rant about some drama only my Mum and I have seen. Hell, it’s not even good for a tumblrrrog.
But in the honour of the 20(!?!)-odd people who voted for this piece of rubbish personal website of mine, I thought I’d write something about the anime I’m currently neck-deep obsessed with. Gokinjo Monogatari is one of Ai Yazawa’s (the creator of Nana and Paradise Kiss) earlier works, and is in fact the lesser known prequel to Paradise Kiss. I wanted so badly to watch the 50 episode anime quite a few years ago when I first saw ParaKiss, but my Japanese wasn’t good enough back then and there were no fansubs. I decided to return to it recently - and luckily for anybody in the same boat nowadays, a fully subbed version is now available.
Let me call out my bias from the get-go - everything about this series is like CRACK to me. I may seem like a shounen sports junkie to those reading this not-a-blog, but my true passion has always been pure mid-90s shoujo manga adaptations. The flat cel-shaded, poor quality animation gets my heart pumping with nostalgia for my first love. Anything in the vein of Hana Yori Dango and Sailor Moon, from the era when even the romance animes had to come with Bandai merchandising affiliations, really just DOES it for me, y’know?
Gokinjo takes that 90s aesthetic I love, and kicks it into the next level with my next favourite deal-maker - mature, slice-of-life themes. Yazawa Ai has this underlying current of realism in all her works that injects a sour note into every almost-happy ending. Gokinjo Monogatari is by no means dark, or even half as tragic as Nana, but its focus on small personal tragedies (Mikako’s parents’ divorce, the troubled love-triangle between Yuusuke, Body-ko and Ayumi) is something I really appreciate. As is Yazawa’s beautiful rendering of a flawed, multi-dimensional female lead in Mikako, as always.
This is a story about a bunch of cool teenagers at a hip art school in 1995, being creative, dating each other and finding themselves. Mikako, an aspiring fashion designer, organizes a group of her friends (and enemies) into a DIY collective that makes and sells their respective crafts at local flea markets. It’s the the struggles of this collective that form the centre of the show, along with Mikako’s relationship with her childhood friend and next-door neighbour turned romantic interest, Tsutomu (above).
The fact that the clothing is absolutely dated might pose a problem to some - but I LOVE it. That plastic, neon, fuzzy, rave fashion and the feel of Gokinjo reminds me of all of those mid-90s teen dramas I adored - like Hackers, Kids, the Finnish film Freakin’ Beautiful World, the game Jet Grind Radio for Sega Dreamcast… It’s like this show was made for me - one of the members of the flea-market collective is even a video game programmer who routinely pulls all-nighters debugging on his crappy 90s PC.
But although I may be blinded by how absurdly “up my alley” this series is, I can still recommend Gokinjo on the basis of writing alone. I’m jaded as hell, and this show made me laugh OUT LOUD (something I never do watching anime, even when I say I did) and actually bawl my eyes out multiple times in just the first dozen episodes. The plot is well-wrought, the pacing is perfectly dramatic and comedic when it needs to be, the characters are fascinatingly human for the most part - and while Mikako’s seiyuu may be an awful singer, the soundtrack KILLS.
Anyway, I’m sorry to anyone who reads this as a serious anime blog - for my lack of interest, my lack of interesting content, and the fact my layout sucks and you can’t see any of my tags and shit if you don’t use Tumblr. But in exchange, I can whole-heartedly recommend you go watch Gokinjo Monogatari because it is fucking awesome.
