Nana – episode 11

July 11, 2006 on 4:23 pm | In Nana | 2 Comments

Hachi finds herself right out of luck, but anonymous kindness finds her. It’s the right sort of episode for sweetness and triumph of something.

Hachi has spent all of her money on frivolous things and is therefore screwed. The issue compounds itself when Mizukoshi decides to close down the store.
On the other end of things, Shouji and Sachiko look sufficiently dodgy enough to make Kyosuke worry.

Nana’s month of luck is up, and so this means that the scenes between Shouji and Sachiko are due to become more “meaningful”. Whenever Sachiko is shown, she is portrayed as a girl very clearly infatuated, rather than simply exuberant in her friendliness. One might be inclined to feel angry at Sachiko, but then the important revelation comes up: Sachiko does not know about Nana, and therefore would have seen no harm at all in flirting.
The one to blame for what is inevitably the descent to the ruin of Hachi and Shouji is, at this point in the story, Shouji. Now that Sachiko knows better, though, it’s become a two player game.

As the story has progressed, however, Shouji has become clearly less instrumental in the life of Hachi: she found a job and a cheap house with the ultimately good hearted Nana, both without his assistance. Yet the fact that Shouji has become a peripheral image does not mean that he is unimportant to her. The Great King of Terror is clearly now acting against Hachi, because Shouji had a year in which he could have fooled around, and he chooses to do it now, when it would be so easy to find out. The fact that Hachi has had her heart broken before should not be a buffer for Shouji to cause him less worry about the betrayal going on here.
The bright patch of the Komatsu parents’ anonymous generosity is going to be blotched out all too soon: I say full lesbians ahead!

Ahem. As for Nana, she’s cool. Yasu comes to Tokyo to join Blast (one of the best Japanese English portmanteux I’ve seen: the band is BLAck STones). Friends that care for each other and a community of acceptance make for sweet scenes from the character who is “supposed” to be “hardcore”. You need Nana to keep Hachi in check, because Junko, Kyosuke and Shouji clearly can’t do that. The emotion runs high in several of the Nana scenes, and that’s the way it should be. I like the frenetic energy of Hachi, sure, but I really appreciate the depth of feeling waiting to be eked from Nana.

So, while I dread Shouji’s affair, I should mention the biggest, stupidest issue of this episode: Mizukoshi’s “confession”. I hate it when, in anime and manga, a scene is set up to be a confession, and one character is convinced that it is, and the issue that needs discussion turns out to be something entirely different. It’s lazy and it isn’t funny at all. It was funny that Nana felt betrayed because Mizukoshi was leaving to get married, but these scenes can be telegraphed a mile away and the world can do without them.

All up, though, good Nana. I suspected there were rumblings of Shouji hatred, and now I can see where they’re going to come from. Break Hachi’s heart and die, punk!

2 Comments

  1. Suicide with soma….

    Soma online sales. Soma. Buy domain onlinevcvpl soma. Ashes of soma lyrics….

    Trackback by Soma intimates. — May 25, 2007 #

  2. Nn solo quella di Nana,ma anche la patria di Hachi penso si trovi intorno a quel tavolo….

    Comment by Hachico — July 4, 2007 #

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