What a strange and difficult piece this is for me to write, and what a surreal moment.  There are so many reasons why, most simply that Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu is one of my favorite manga ever.  I adore it unreservedly, I’ve pitched it in podcasts, I’ve made videos about it.  I love it.  As such it’s a weird place to be emotionally, trying to reflect on the first episode of an adaptation I’ve been impatiently pining for.  I can’t be impartial, obviously, but it goes much deeper than that.  It’s hard to know what to say when you want to say so much about something that means so much to you.

As if that weren’t enough, this is a pretty unique series in the sense of how it – and the character arcs – develop.  When you’re covering an adaptation of a manga you know it’s often a challenge trying to decide what you should say and what you shouldn’t.  But that’s the case even more so with BokuYaba (which is what pretty much everyone calls it).  I’ve religiously mentioned this every time I discuss this series, but you can’t judge the characters (or the plot for that matter) from the early chapters.  Still, I see that some viewers are, which I know was inevitable.  Should I unpack why that’s a mistake – and if so, how much detail do you go into?

Damned if I know.  So I’m going to try and finesse that the best I can, while still making the case for why BokuYaba is for me the best romcom manga of the past decade.  Let’s start with Sakurai Norio, the mangaka.  She’s best known for Mitsudomoe, a very funny ecchi comedy that got two (albeit one truncated) anime seasons.  It had a niche audience of hardcore fans, but BokuYaba has taken her to another level commercially.  It’s already a decent hit, and the anime will likely make it a bigger one.  Sakurai-san is a woman, but Boku no Kokoro is a very autobiographical series, and Ichikawa Kyoutarou (Horie Shun) the embodiment of her adolescent neuroses.

It’s interesting that Sakurai chose to relive her middle school life through a boy (she’s been clear that she is).  Some have compared Kyoutarou to Tomoko from Watamote, but he’s a very different sort of kid.  Ichikawa is a neurotic – if you are one, you understand.  And make no mistake, Norio-sensei pulls no punches in her depiction of the middle school experience.  It’s messy, it’s often terrifying, frequently horrifyingly embarrassing (especially for someone like Ichi).  It’s obsessed with sex, an obsession that often manifests in very crude fashion.  It’s a time when the world is changing at a blistering pace, when the excitement of pure possibility is intermingled with abject terror and seemingly everything you see and do has the potential for disaster.

Kyoutarou is the nexus point of BokuYaba.  His worldview is everything – as this premiere very cleverly highlighted in the scene where we see the world through the bangs perpetually covering his right eye.  But there’s another utterly crucial figure here, the one who becomes the obsessive focus of that worldview – Yamada Anna (Yomiya Hina).  For Sakurai, Anna was the embodiment of everything that seemed glamorous and out of reach in junior high school.  And that’s how Anna appears to Kyoutarou at first.  She’s everything he’s not – tall, glamorous, popular, sociable.  Hell, she’s even a literal fashion model.  You cannot get farther apart on the middle school social ladder than Yamada Anna and Ichikawa Kyoutarou.

And this is where the writing gets tricky.  I think it’s obvious in the premiere that there’s more to this dynamic than it seems.  But I do know this – in 2023, in an era when light novels and their adaptations have deeply influenced the way viewers consume anime, snap judgments reign supreme,  Many viewers expect characters to appear fully-formed, and the details of a premise to be explained (often literally) in the first episode.  They want things to be clear from the beginning so they know exactly what they’re getting.  And, well…  BokuYaba doesn’t do that.  I actually wondered if the adaptation would explain more, hurry more, soften the characters up.  But it didn’t – not a bit of it.

To be honest, I even wondered whether I hoped those changes might happen.  I saw a lot of hate and “dropped” at the first few chapters of the manga because of snap judgments about what the series and characters (especially Kyou-chan) were like.  My worry is that manga is inherently a medium where patience is more ingrained than anime.  In the end I’m glad director Akagi Hiroaki and writer Hanada Jukki left things as Norio wrote them.  But know this – even the title is more and different than it appears to be at first.  How many of you were the same person at 13 that you were at 14 – never mind when you became a young adult?

As to the adaptation itself, I can only say I’m thrilled – yes, that the prologue was left basically intact, because that indicates that the staff understands the material.  But also because the casting seems spot-on, the music was superb, and the overall look of the series largely matched the Platonic ideal I had in my mind.  I was very pleased when Akagi-sensei and Shin-Ei were announced – I flat-out predicted that might happen, in fact.  They took another middle school romcom, Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san, and delivered an anime that amplified everything good about the manga and molded it into an anime that exceeded the source material in every way.  Akagi has a much better series to work with here, and I see nothing to make me temper my expectations.

I’ve barely talked about the plot here at all, but maybe that’s not a bad thing.  If you watched the premiere you don’t need me to summarize it for you.  Kyoutarou is a bit of a chuunibyou boy, obviously.  But it’s meeting Anna – who he’s always been aware of, but doesn’t know – that starts to change his world in the seismic way that never feels more powerful than in the throes of puberty.  Anna is so much more than how she’s perceived – which is much closer to the 2-D image on the glossy page than the actual person.  Nanjou Haruya (Shimazaki Nobunaga) is interested in the former.  Kyoutarou is starting to take notice of the latter.  And that’s basically the foundation of all the wondrous brilliance to come.

There are a few minor changes here.  Ichi is taller (I suspect the physical gulf as depicted at the start of the manga was considered iffy, given how raunchy this series is).  The anime seems to have ditched his legendary barber pole pajama pants.  And there’s still the question of how the manga’s beloved extra chapters – which are both plot-critical and frequently very ecchi – are going to be incorporated into the anime.  But basically, this is a faithful adaptation, and given how phenomenal the manga is that’s what it needs to succeed.  I couldn’t have asked for more, really – I just hope the unvarnished presentation doesn’t limit the commercial appeal too much.  Just know that the best is very much still to come, and as “bests” go, they don’t get much better.