I hate having to view every series through the lens of “how long will this one last?”, but that’s the reality we’re living in.  As to Nami yo Kiite Kure, I really have no idea.  This show is so far under the radar that the sites which speculate on which series might survive postponement for a while never even mention it.  Sunrise doesn’t seem to have a whole lot on the docket at the moment, so it’s possible their production calendar for Nami yo Kiite Kure isn’t too frantic.  But I guess we’ll find out when we find out.

That matters only because I’m bought into Wave, Listen to Me! – this is one of the more engaging series of the season to me.  Minare is an interesting protagonist of course, and hardly a standard issue anime girl.  But the surrounding cast is made up of characters who have their own stories and motivations, and aren’t just devices to further her story.  And while he’s mostly been a mid-manager type up to now, director Minamikawa Tatsuma is clearly someone with real talent.  This show has style, as expressed by moments which could be forgettable with no one complaining about it being interesting in their own right.

I don’t know what the story with Minare’s neighbor Oki Shinji (Uchiyama Kouki) is, but there’s clearly some weird shit going down with him.  I also don’t know he ties in with the story going forward, as Minare moves out of her apartment after being let go by Takarada-san (as promised).  In terms of Minare-san, Oki seems on the up-and-up – apparently she regularly passes out at his doorstep (believing him to be Mitsuo) and bangs on his door every time she’s drunk.  Oki doesn’t do anything proper that we see – indeed, he bodily carries her home every time – but there’s surely more to this story than we know.

While Nakahara-san does invite Minare to live with him (which I suppose counts as a confession), she refuses after the simulation she runs (ROFL) turns out badly.  Nakahara seems like a very decent guy and his infatuation with Minari is clearly genuine, but I don’t see her ever taking him seriously as boyfriend material.  Still, she does need a place to live, which leads to her calling Matou (I’m actually not convinced an age-gap romance is out of the question there) to plead for the radio gig and a place to sleep.  He agrees to the storage room.  But since that’s unheated (in Hokkaido!) she ends up going home with the nubile assistant director Nanba Mizuho (Iwami Manaka).

Minare-san’s gig is hardly a glamorous one.  It’s a 3:30 AM slot, part of the long-running white noise music show “Sound High Tide”.  And Matou-san is very evasive when the subject of salary is broached.  Even so, for a man in his position to take a chance on someone like her is a big leap.  Apparently she resembles Sissel Komei visually as well as vocally, and it’s clear that this woman meant a lot to Matou (I’m guessing personally as well as professionally).  Minare may end up being an impact player in radio for the same reason why Matou is drawn to it in the first place – it’s easy to make a big splash in a small pond.

What really strikes me about Nami yo Kiite Kure is the sense that there’s more to everything and everyone we see – even in that small pond we’re only getting the tip of the iceberg.  Minare is fun because she’s a person with no filter, basically never having an unexpressed thought.  But she’s smart – and I think most of the people in this cast are pretty smart.  They’re also complicated, and so is life as an adult.  It’s much easier to make a mess of it than sail smoothly through it, and that’s more interesting to watch too.  It’s a good formula for both drama and comedy, and even if this series gets almost no attention from Western audiences it’s certainly captured mine.