Honey and Clover

I just finished Honey and Clover for the second time, the first time was about a year ago. This is a show that you immerse yourself in and just allow yourself to make parallels with the lives of these characters, and it’s especially pertinent if you’ve just graduated college (which I have).

If you haven’t seen Honey and Clover yet, then WARNING, spoilers ahead.

While the first season of Honey and Clover is much about discovery, both of yourself and your new peers, the second season is more about reconciliation. It nicely wraps up the arcs of the story without seeming too convoluted. I’ll get more into that later.

First, I want to focus on a few of my favorite characters: Takemoto and Yamada. It’s easy for anyone to pick out a favorite character, because at least one of the six main characters (and four supporting cast) will resonate with you. For me, it was Takemoto and Yamada, both of whom are going through much the same journey I am right now.

Takemoto is undoubtedly the main character of the story. He’s the focal point of the first episode, he has the longest arc, and he’s the focal point of the last episode. And he’s definitely the best main character for this story because his life is a journey from his second year of high school up until graduation as a fifth year. His journey is also the most blatant to the audience. He rides his bicycle from Tokyo to Hokkaido and, while he doesn’t call this journey one of “finding himself,” he certainly does find himself throughout it. His approximately 1,000 km (630 mile) travel takes him all over Japan, to places he never even dreamed of going. Through this, he discovered exactly what he needed to discover: How important those things are that you left behind. Takemoto realizes that, no matter how far you run away, those people will still be there waiting for you when you come back. This is further emphasized with the part-time manual laborers that he meets along the way, who welcomed him back with open arms after knowing each other for just under two weeks.

It’s Takemoto’s return to Hanamoto-sensei, Mayama, Yamada, Morita, and Hagu that make his journey all the more impactful. In a callback to some episodes back, they go to a festival again at the end of the first season. In it, Takemoto, Yamada, and Hagu all act like the immature people they sometimes are (and aren’t we all?). But when it comes time to act the big man, Mayama gives Takemoto the money to pay for the festival games to act the big man, instead of taking the reins himself or having someone like the adult-figure Nomiya do it like in the first festival. This is the literal handing off of the torch to Takemoto from Mayama that signifies that, through Takemoto’s journey, the two are now peers instead of kohai-sempai as they have been.

Takemoto’s arc rings especially true for me because I’m at that stage where he was at near the end of season one, where he doesn’t really know what he wants to do with his life and he just keeps going to school and getting denied for jobs. I think most of us have gone through that stage of our lives where we’ve just graduated and we’re at a loss of what to do since we’re now just thrust into the real world.

It wasn’t until later in the series (because I was looking too closely on a character-to-character basis) that Morita is very much a foil to Takemoto. While Takemoto is kind of a wandering soul, wondering what he’s going to do. Honey and Clover relies heavily on internal monologues at the beginnings and ends of episodes and scenes, and during one of those monologues, Takemoto says that he entered art school because he liked to build things with his hands. That’s the case for so many of us, that we just enter college because we like to do X so we major in X. But Morita seems to have his life in order, even though he seems the most out of order in the group. He’s constantly getting art commissions, leaving for weeks or months at a time as a result, and he’s firmly set in the sculpture department. Morita seems to know exactly what he wants to do, but part of that is because he’s being sort of manipulated by his brother Kaoru. But the point is that Morita, this man with natural talent and jobs ahead of him, seems the least composed while Takemoto, struggling to even get hired for a job, seems the most composed (aside from Hanamoto-sensei and Mayama).

Morita provides his own foil to Hagu as well. Both are tremendously talented, and both are naturally so. What differs is that Morita seems uninterested in using his talents for anything unless it’s one of the commissions that Kaoru sets up for him. Hagu, meanwhile, simply wants to paint. There’s an amazing scene early on when Hanamoto-sensei visits Hagu at her home when she’s in high school. In the scene, Hanamoto-sensei sees all of Hagu’s drawings of the same exact scene, throughout the seasons. This wasn’t an artistic choice on Hagu’s part to show the changing seasons. No, this was the only thing Hagu could draw that was of nature. There was nowhere for her to go, because she was so trapped in her own world by her grandmother. But even after leaving for Tokyo and going to art school, she just wants to return home and be able to paint every day. She doesn’t have to make money or feel accomplished, she just wants to paint.

There’s something really indelible about Hagu’s character in that way. She’s not like Takemoto, who just wants to find his way in life. She’s not like Morita, who wants to be able to have fun with his contemporaries. She’s not like Mayama, who wants to be able to support the one he loves. She’s not like Yamada, who is too focused on Mayama to realize her full potential (more on Yamada later). And she’s not like Hanamoto-sensei, who wants to nurture young artists into professionals. Hagu, despite her loli character and usually distracting character designs, is simply a woman who’s been emotionally stunted due to the situations surrounding her and an artist that just wants to create art.

But it’s the natural talented-ness that draws Morita to Hagu, and Hagu to Morita. And it’s unfortunately what ousts Takemoto from both of them. However, it’s Takemoto and Hanamoto-sensei—perhaps the two least naturally talented in the group—that Hagu finds herself confiding in. There’s an episode where Hagu is alone because Hanamoto-sensei is out on a research trip and Yamada has to take care of matters back home. Takemoto comes over, worried about Hagu, and finds himself staying the night. It’s sweet and emotional to see these two, Hagu simply wanting comfort and not knowing how much she’s hurting Takemoto by that little thing and Takemoto wanting only to stay by the side of the girl he loves, but always at arm’s length. It’s a tender moment that epitomizes the love in the series.

It is perhaps Mayama that most emphasizes the love in the series. He’s the object of Yamada’s affection and when she confesses to him, over and over again, he can only say, “Yeah” to her, over and over again. He doesn’t want to close her off, but he doesn’t want to say yes. It’s unnaturally cruel, but weirdly nice of Mayama to hang Yamada out on a limb like this, barely holding on to the love she has yet already beginning to fall. Mayama keeps Yamada at this distance because he loves Rika, Hanamoto-sensei’s classmate and roommate in college.

Rika’s story is only one of tragedy, where she’s ousted herself from her classmates and only warms up to others when she start to hang out with Hanamoto-sensei and her eventual husband, Harada. Rika represents the spiral you can fall down, even after being so successful after college. Harada dies and she wants only to follow after him. It’s Hanamoto-sensei, ever the nurturer, that snaps her back into reality. Once Rika feels like she’s accomplished all she can, and nearly gives up on her life again, it’s Mayama that snaps her back again. Rika believes that she only has to wrap up the loose ends of when Harada was alive and then she can follow after him. Mayama, however, has fallen in love with her (at some points stalking her, though not maliciously). It’s Rika who holds Mayama at arm’s length this time, though. But it’s only their story that ends in happy love—or appears to end in happy love. Yamada is left alone, Hagu chooses Hanamoto-sensei so she can recover, Morita moves to LA to work with Peter Lucas, and Takemoto moves to become a restorer.

This, I believe, so encompasses the college life, though. The second season didn’t just reconcile everything, as I said previously. The second season makes you watch as these characters gradually grow apart. Morita just suddenly disappears, Mayama goes on a business trip with Rika to Spain, and Takemoto has finally found his place in life. This is much more representative of life, though. It’s not like everyone’s lives wraps up nicely all the time. Some people take five years to graduate, some people take eight, and some people go to graduate school. But everyone takes diverging paths at different times, especially in college.

Moving back to Yamada…It was her arc that I sympathized the most with. I connected the most with Takemoto, but watching Yamada hurt my heart every time she was on screen. It’s like watching an alcoholic drive him/herself further and further down the rabbit hole. But with Yamada, her alcohol is her love to Mayama.

What makes her story so endearing is that she’s so devoted to her love to Mayama, even when she knows that he’s not going to give her the time of day. Throughout the first season, it’s much the same thing. It climaxes with her dressing herself up in a kimono to watch fireworks, just to have Mayama compliment her on her looks. All that work for one comment and a promise of nothing. That so encompasses her love to Mayama, because he’s only willing to give Yamada that one line. Anything more would be to committing to Mayama and it would only hurt Yamada more. But, in fact, it’s the fact that he’s leaving her hanging at the edge that hurts the most.

The second arc, so to speak, of her love begins when Nomiya is introduced. Nomiya almost makes Yamada’s arc more hurtful to herself because there’s now this guy that does like her, but she denies her. As she says, if she starts to love Nomiya, won’t that just deny her ever loving Mayama? It’s not true that it’ll deny her previous love, but I see where she’s coming from. She never got any confirmation, or any kind of affection besides that of friendship, from Mayama. Only a tender, “Yeah” whenever she tried to confess her feelings.

Honey and Clover is on the level of such josei manga like Nana and Usagi Drop in its realistic storytelling. I never once felt like these were caricatures or characters in a story. I believed that these were real people going through real problems, and that’s an issue with a lot of the middle-of-the-road anime and manga out there (and, really, a lot of the middle-of-the-road media out there). The comedy elements are hit or miss on whether I laugh at them or not, but they’re rarely misplaced. The drama is realistic and makes you care for these characters. Each of their arcs are touching in different ways, and you’ll root for both Yamada and Mayama to find their own happiness by the end.

This is a series that hits very close to home for me right now, and I hope to be able to pop this in and remember the olden days as I grow older. As the show says, we will always have the memories of those days.