Stretch

Stretch (ストレッチ) is a slice of life comedy, yuri-light manga disguised as a self-help manga by Higashiyama Sho.  It was published between 2013 and 2015 and has been compiled into 4 tankoubon.

    Pre-med student and halfu woman Saeki Ran ends up moving in with a sempai from her high school tennis club, Komatsu Keiko.  Keiko had a reputation for being difficult and dangerous in school but she and Ran got along well enough for her to invite her to be her roommate several years later.  The two young, single women enjoy each other’s company.  Ran teaches Keiko a variety of sports medicine stretches for health and relaxation over the course of the series.  They also support each other in the day to day struggles of life; shopping, dieting, house work, season festival observations...you know typical things.
 

    Under the fluff and 'education' there are a few things deeper going on.  One is the unspoken and steadily increasing attraction between the two women over the course of the series, but this is not a romance.  Their friendship seems to extend beyond just friends at least on a psychological level, but don't expect any sort of hardcore lesbian action going on in the series.  The other more open thing of substance is that both women have had tragedy in their lives and that tragedy is one of the things that strengthens their bond.

    I read this on recommendation from a friend and needed something light and brainless after absorbing a long and incredibly mentally draining manga.  At first I was skeptical of the quality of the story, it seeming like some pointless voyeuristic trash like Anime De Training.  A poor excuse to show girls in compromising positions to stimulate the blood flow.  On top of that the artwork was starkly low quality, especially compared to the series I read just prior to it.  A few issues in to it and I was starting to enjoy myself.  Over all the series was pleasant and went by fast.  Its comprised of about 45 or so short episodes.  But the series left me feeling cheated...as it sorts of ended and there was no development or resolution of the slowly building romance.  Boo!!!

     The series won't ever see the light of day as an official English publication, but if you want to read it you can learn some good stretches to help exercise and tone all sorts of body parts and enjoy a calming and simple friendship develop.

Your Name

Your Name (君の名は) is a super natural romantic comedy feature by Shinkai Makoto.  The film was originally released in Japan in 2016 and received a wide release in English speaking countries in 2017.

    Miyamizu Mitsuha is an average high school student in a sleepy western Japanese town.  She and her younger sister live with their grandmother and help run the family shrine.  Mitsuha wakes one day to a strange sensation which only becomes more disorientating when everyone comments on her off behavior the previous day, a day she cannot recall.  The following day she awakens to an even stranger sensation as she finds herself in the body of a boy around her age who lives in Tokyo.

    Mitsuha does her best to live normally as Tachibana Taki but is quite overwhelmed with his life in the nation’s capital, a life she has been dreaming of.  Part of her thinks she is dreaming but another part of her believes that she is inhabiting the body of this other person.  Her previous and, unknown to her, strange behavior may be the result of Taki being in her body at the same time.  To test her theory, she leaves signs for him of what is happening.

    The following day she returns to her body to find that Taki had come to a similar conclusion while in her body.  As they continue to switch bodies and slightly alter the other person’s life they try to work out a system to keep the damage at a minimum and prevent any unsightly alterations.  Instead of trying to understand the reasons behind the constant switching they both work improving the life of their host body in ways they feel are best.  When Taki realizes, he is falling in love with Mitsuha they stop switching places and are unable to communicate in any way.  He decides to find her in person to understand what is going on and to talk with her, he may not be prepared for the reality he is about to enter.

    As with pretty much everything Shinkai has directed, Your Name is a beautifully detailed love letter to life and our course through it.  But with everything he has done it is overlain with a strong sense of lost connection to people who are closest to us.  Mitsuha struggles with her rural living, her duties as a shrine maiden and her estranged father.  She doesn't know what the future holds for her but she knows she wants to leave the village and move to Tokyo, as generation after generation of youths do.  Taki is quite comfortable in his life but struggles with being brash and quick to action.  He has an idea of where he wants to end up but now his life is too hectic for him to enjoy himself.

    The story is broken into a few parts, with the first part being informative and comedic, as the two establish their cross-body rapport and the viewer is taken through their attempts at normalization.  There are several segments that made me think of the more comical scenes Mamoru Hosoda has used in his films.  The next segment is where the comedy comes to a grinding halt and harsh reality sets in, like a comet strike.  It is a more pronounced starkness than we typically see from Shinkai but brings the film to an entirely new level, a level of overwhelming dread and anxiety.  Dread and anxiety transitions into more familiar Shinkai territory in the final segment, a territory of resigned solitude and regret.  Fate is accepted and the characters bow down to its unwavering control.  The ending segment of 5cm per Second is prime example of this territory.  Yet Shinkai does something he hasn't done before and this may be part of why Your Name has become the most successful anime movie in history.  Something I will leave to people who have not seen the movie to experience on their own.

   I admit wholly that I am a Shinkai fan-boy.  I resisted watching pirated copies of this movie for a long time, wanting to experience it first in the theater when it finally came to America and I was not disappointed.  The film though is a little more simplistic than I would have liked to see.  Some of the super natural elements seemed like a last resort to keep the story moving forward in a meaningful way, but in the end, it did its job, even though I feel it was a little cheap.  Over all the story is moving and the characters are relatable in a way that helps to captivate the audience.  Shinkai builds worlds based almost solely on his character’s emotions and inner mechanisms, polished to a mesmerizing glow with stunning animation.  Some viewers looking for more of an adventure type story from the movie, demanding the characters go on a life affirming mission to understand their situation.  Instead the journey is in the characters themselves and could easily have been done in the context of a chatroom, with Taki and Mitsuha communicating over 2chan.

    The movie was licensed by Funimation in North America but there is not work yet on a disc release.  What I am really interested in is if there will be a tranlation of the novalization in English.