That premiere could never be accused of being uneventful. This is not your run of the mill historical shoujo – obviously – but in many ways less an outlier than it might seem After all DRAMA is such a big part of these things most of the time. The only difference is that Hotaru no Yomieri gives you seriously dramatic situations rather than contriving the drama when it’s not warranted (which I find to be a common occurrence). This is preposterous to be sure – or perhaps outlandish is more accurate – but in its way honest.
At first flush I found the premise of Firefly Wedding to be quite reminiscent of Marriagetoxin, but stylistically they’re pretty night and day. For what it’s worth I found this show the more engaging out of the gate, despite not having a fancy Bones production holding it up (David Production does quite well with it, actually – it looks good). We’re in the Meiji here, and no overtly fantastical elements seem to be involved. The heroine is a rich girl named Kirigaya Satoko who has a bad heart and a worse stepmother and half-sister. She does have a close relationship with her father (played by the wonderful Yamaji Kazuhiro), who wants the best for her.
Satoko’s poor health is the meaning – rather poetical, too – of the title. Fireflies epitomize the Japanese infatuation with mono no aware – they’re here for a few days in June (and harder to find in modern times even then) then gone. Satoko doesn’t want to marry a man who doesn’t know about her condition, but she wants to marry one of her father’s candidates so he won’t worry for her. Her sister resents that the beautiful Satoko keeps getting all the proposals despite her prognosis, and presumably it’s the stepmother who decides to have her assassinated as a means of clearing the decks.
The kidnappers are well-paid, and it’s a young man named Gotou who’s assigned to finish Satoko off. But not until 9 P.M., for reasons that are not immediately clear to me other than narrative convenience. He’s instructed to kill anybody who tries to rape her in the meantime, which he gets the opportunity to do. Gotou is clearly a hard-core freak, a complete psychopath. He enjoys this, but Satoko is a clear thinker and tries to figure out how she can win him over to her side. I’m not sure why she didn’t just go with “my daddy has more money than God, he’ll pay double” but she cuts straight to proposing marriage.
I like Satoko a lot – she comes off as sensible and strong-willed, and there’s a refreshing absence of damsel-in-distress behavior. As for Gotou he’s such a cartoon – for now – that it’s impossible to feel anything for him one way or the other. But it’s implied that he does genuinely want someone to accept him for who he is – good luck with that – and isn’t won over by the idea of her marrying him strictly for convenience. In her logical way of approaching crisis Satoko realizes that her life is indeed worth more than her chastity – at least as far as a kiss is concerned – and that seems to be enough to convince Gotou.
I don’t know what I make of all this yet but as I said, it was certainly eventful. A likable protagonist is certainly a good foundation, and overall I found both the setup and the execution to be pretty well-done. There are obvious logic holes here and that could be an issue going forward. And so could length. The manga is 12 volumes and the anime 12 episodes, and that’s a recipe for disaster if ever there was one. But Hotaru no Yomieri makes a good first impression, and I’m inclined to stick with it for now at least and see whether it can surmount its obvious challenges.
