Loneliness and a lifetime; an exploration on a turn of phrase in Honey and Clover

honey and clover shuuji hanamoto dreadful loneliness

During Takemoto’s defining journey in the narrative, Hagu wonders if Takemoto is lonely. Shuu-sensei says he probably is.

Loneliness comes suddenly like waves, one after the other, and recedes just as fast. That continues on forever. It’s the same for everyone.

I hit the pause button and light a cigarette. It wasn’t enough. I take a shower. It wasn’t enough. I felt so… bothered by what he said. It shouldn’t apply to me, at least not anymore. Shuu-sensei and I are around the same age (slightly over 30). He has remained single, I’ve been married for a few years and am to be a father soon. Why am I bothered? Could it be that I’m actually… lonely?

There was something about watching this show alone that produced a feeling of acute loneliness, something I didn’t know what to do with. It felt very odd, given how unreasonable it seemed in my own personal life.

I gave it some thought, and bring up memories of loneliness. I didn’t pay too much attention to those when I was actually younger and alone, broke and with no prospects. That’s easy to get over. I realize that the most awful feelings of loneliness I had (perhaps outside of big fights with my wife, where I feel both of us become the loneliest people in the world) was when I was among people I knew well. It’s easy to be lonely among strangers, and it’s easy to get over it too. When I feel lonely among friends, the waves come; my feet get wet on the loose sand, the water pushes at my knees. Never strong enough to topple me. It’s in my head where I feel thrown about.

honey and clover group image

How can one be lonely among friends?

It actually happened a lot. After college, my friends would get together. Many of them were starting to get ahead. They were getting employed, starting to have money to spend. They were headed places and started hanging out in trendy places. This would dominate conversation. I would feel so left behind. They’d be polite enough not to ask me, as they knew I was teaching part-time at our alma-mater, made little money, and spent it on grad-school related things. I was lucky just to be able to be with them. They knew it. I knew it.

So they would talk about the people they met in some club, and what this certain office mate’s hobbies were like (I’d hear about snorkeling, fashion, travel, cars, gadgets). Nobody was really interested in discussing Eastern European novels anymore, now that they don’t have homework. And no, there wasn’t a lot of anime around that time (the time before torrents) and these people are hip and worldly.

But they loved me. We were friends. I didn’t hold their interests against them. I was still banging my head on the wall trying to win writing fellowships and contests, to no avail. At some point during the gathering one of them would be genuinely interested and ask about how my writing is going. Given my results, I didn’t really want to talk about it myself. Before long I would long to leave, while nursing a drink in the middle of a circle of people who are genuinely having a fun time, people who are oblivious to the frightening loneliness I was feeling.

honey and clover 2 ayu mayama rika katsudon

Good thing alcohol can be a great equalizer. Everyone ends up sharing the same old stories. The waves recede, even if only because in these old stories they tell, I was still living in them.

This was period that began over a decade ago, when I was a little more like Takemoto and less like Shuuji. Takemoto was seeing his talented friends start going places, getting jobs, making money. He felt left behind, because even Hagumi who was younger than him was going places (even if she didn’t really want to, she was being pressured to). I reflect on this more and see that Shuuji himself felt this way. After all, I was a teacher like him — knowing so much about art (literature in my case), to know that I wasn’t good enough to aspire for greatness. His best friends were immediately successful. So were mine. Honey and Clover uses characters as refrains of themes.

Mayama and Nomiya who are plays on the same character at different times in their life (to drive home the point, they are both named Takumi, are entangled with Ayu even if for different reasons, and yes both deal with unreturned affection). Ayu and Mayama are plays on the inability of romance to emerge from the intimacy of friends; Ayu’s epiphany comes when she has to turn down so many suitors at once, all of them friends from childhood. Morita and Takemoto are plays on conflict avoidance; Takemoto runs away when they happen, Morita weirds it up to avoid causing the kind of conflict he doesn’t want to deal with (he hides as well).

And loneliness comes in waves upon these characters, in different times, as intensely as shuuji says they do, and recedes just as fast; distinct from the overall melancholy that sits upon their brows, the sadness that hangs over their shoulders throughout the course of the narrative. Hagumi who was isolated by her giftedness, Morita by his disappearances and the needs that caused them, Mayama by Rika, Ayu by Mayama, Takemoto by his initial cowardice and ultimately like many of the characters here by unreturned love.

Morita made money, that’s his thing. Ayu got drunk and made vases. Mayama smoked while stalking. Hagumi would freeze and not paint or sculpt. Takemoto found out that human beings couldn’t sleep unless they were near a tree or beside a wall.

I played video games, mostly. I did find out that gratification from playing was frightfully useless.

honey and clover ayu hagu bubbles

I look back into Honey and Clover. Ayu’s pottery teacher told her that there are things or feelings that one couldn’t do anything about. In these cases it’s best to moves one’s hands. Given I have no craft in comparison to the characters of Honey and Clover, I did my best to write this essay.

Further Reading

(Honey and Clover Circle Jerk 2009)

A Thematic Analysis of Honey and Clover (Eternal 2009/07/28)

A critique of ‘A Thematic Analysis of Honey and Clover‘ (lolikitsune 2009/08/02)

A shameful otaku learns to let go through watching this show (otou-san 2009/08/08)

Honey and Clover inspires personal reflection (usagijen 2009/08/09)

About ghostlightning

I entered the anime blogging sphere as a lurker around Spring 2008. We Remember Love is my first anime blog. Click here if this is your first time to visit WRL.
This entry was posted in analysis, Diary of an Anime Lived and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

48 Responses to Loneliness and a lifetime; an exploration on a turn of phrase in Honey and Clover

  1. 2DT says:

    The difference between western and eastern philosophy, a friend once told me, was that the east concerned itself with feeling the universe, while the west took the task of trying to explain it in words. So it’s funny that you write this essay to try and work through what Shuuji expresses in just a few words about nature.

    Which isn’t to say that one is necessarily better than the other. With Shuuji’s statement, I can sit back and feel that “Yes, this matches my experience.” With what you’ve written, there’s a greater capacity for me to write this comment and say to you, “I am going through what you have been through.”

    • ghostlightning says:

      I am from Southeast Asia (the Philippines), but my education is thoroughly Western-American, only European by way of Catholicism. A concept like “feeling the universe” is as foreign to me as it would be to you. Personally, I like words – the fact that I can’t satisfactorily into words how exactly I feel about words and language is some kind of indicator, I feel.

      Since you say you are going through this feeling in your life, please tell me: is it really as rough as I remember it? I can only say that being unable to put it into writing compounds a feeling of uselessness that is altogether unpleasant. A memory sometimes feels like an inferior copy, like a bad fansub with a glitchy encode.

  2. animekritik says:

    They say when it comes down to it we’re all alone. Then again, Liverpool FC says you’re never alone. I think it’s kind of both, and the wave concept really expresses well how our awareness of one or the other factor hits us at random times.

    BTW money is a curse, having it and lacking it both.

    • ghostlightning says:

      The feeling of loneliness occurs despite the presence of not just people, but people you actually want to be with. The loneliness is compounded by feelings of accountability for one’s own circumstances. I’m broke? Why? I haven’t found a job yet. Why? Because I wanted to major in literature and minor in philosophy. This is useless for people who are looking for men to sell condominiums. Where are my friends? Doing what they can to survive themselves. Who can I rely on? Whose fault is this?

      When I get that it’s all on me, yes. When it comes down to it, we are alone. But even so during these times I can feel connected and share an experience, a milieu with others. Even if it is merely a delusion that they too think of me in such times of difficulty, the loneliness is kept from the experience of being alone.

      Conversely, I can be with my best friends as I wrote above, and feel the loneliest of feelings in my life.

  3. RyanA says:

    weirds it up rofl phrasing!

    Could it be that I’m actually… lonely?

    It’s a solid identification point pretty much every human will face. I tend to feel it, but it spawns out of questioning “what am I doing? why am I not around my friends more often?”

    Comes and goes. What’s nice is that lonely can last for just a second or go on for months, but the best case is the former, imo. Like so many other things, it’s temporal and allows self-exploration … kinda like doing drugs I guess D: … D:

    Sweet post, and right after I finished a drama themed about friends, truth, and loneliness. Haha.

    • ghostlightning says:

      Some friends tell me, that doing some kinds of drugs can bring about similar experiences. Trips like this are possible (so I’ve been told).

      A friend of mine once told me after he did metamphetamines he got so jacked and had an upbeat conversation with himself entirely about being alone in the world. He ended up shaving his pubes.

  4. lolikitsune says:

    I’m holding off on reading this too deeply as I haven’t yet finished my current rewatch of the show, but I definitely feel loneliness even when I’m with the people with whom I want to be.

    • ghostlightning says:

      I think this happens when the people you want to be with, while they’re in the same room with you… aren’t with you.

      My wife used to complain, how even when we’re spending time together she’d feel so lonely because my mind was elsewhere… writing a post in my mind, considering an idea, or just pensiveness — even if it is about her.

      She told me that it’s different, that it takes an active ‘being’ with someone to not create that loneliness. Maybe it’s just a call for attention, but I’m definitely mindful of it.

  5. Kambei says:

    Once again anything written about H&C makes me happy/sad/melancholy.

    I certainly feel lonely at times, but I think for me it tends to manifest itself more in a lack of meaning/significance. H&C brought all of those to the surface for me – thanks Takemoto!

    • ghostlightning says:

      But you are insignificant. There is no essential meaning to you, and to Honey and Clover. Any meaning you want to be, you must create yourself. Honey and Clover can mean anything to anyone, if they see how to do so, and choose to do so.

      Significance, you must create that with your own hands. Takemoto’s first tower, hell, his second tower are utterly meaningless and insignificant. Who makes the significance and meaning? The two judges. With some manipulation by Shuuji, the two judges on their own make up this powerful and preposterous meaning — that the tower signifies youth itself.

      Any further phenomena in relation to Takemoto’s work, they contextualize to the narrative of ‘youth’ that is ultimately their own fiction.

      Takemoto intends to make his skill meaningful by applying himself to the restoration of shrines and temples. He’s creating his significance with his own hands. What is the meaning of a failed love? He asks. He ate his answer, almost choking himself with tears.

  6. sadakups says:

    I haven’t seen this show, but when it comes to loneliness, I have some stuff to say about it.

    I think that it’s my own doing that I’m lonely right now. I’m no shut-in, but I find it bothersome to go out of the house when I know there’s nothing worthwhile doing. I don’t like spending money, and I don’t like going out even if some people ask me to join them. Heck, I did not even joined my company’s last outing for the reason of I’m not interested (I needed the one day break from work), and hence the reason why I never had a girlfriend in years is because of all the reasons above.

    I have a few friends, but I can relate to the part when you said about them getting ahead of you. I remember being the last few among my high school friends to graduate, and whenever we meet, they talk about their careers, hobbies and stuff that I don’t have yet at the time since I was still studying (I was delayed by two years in college, BTW). Before, I enjoy being with them, but now, it’s hard to strike a conversation, especially now that our interests are so different than before. And yes, alcohol is definitely the great equalizer.

    And then I ask myself sometimes, why the hell am I lonely? 😛

    • ghostlightning says:

      I recommend that you view this show. It’s rather powerful.

      I’m very familiar with your experience. Company outings can make me feel very lonely. Especially early on as a salaryman. You never really cut loose anyway during that time, until everyone’s drunk. I’m quite social — for a loner. I enjoy my solitude despite being very accommodating. It’s almost as Sartre said: “Hell is other people.”

      But despite all that I’ve said, make friends. Friends are awesome.

      • sadakups says:

        I definitely will. You’ve been recommending good stuff to me and I thank you for that.

      • sadakups says:

        I FINALLY got to watch both seasons of HachiKuro, and I once again thank you for recommending me this. I immensely enjoyed this show considering that I can relate to most of the characters. It’s rare to find shows like these where characters are part of the workforce. And I loved everyone in that show. The last two weeks that I’ve been watching the whole series is probably the best anime experience that I had for this year.

        The only thing that made me feel a bit lonely while watching this is I never had a company that is similar to the one in the anime. It’s not too late, yet, this show made me realize how important having friends are, and I’m quite motivated to look for past friends and build new ones at least in my office.

        Again, thanks for the recommendation.

        • You’re welcome! I’m very happy you enjoyed it.

          Re friends, no need to force things beyond being friendly. Just let it come to you. It will make working at a firm a lot more interesting.

          • sadakups says:

            You know what, I just came from my high school reunion. True that I’m not forcing things, but it feels actually good to see old faces despite that I wasn’t that close to most of them and some of them actually wanted to keep in touch. This could be a start.

            I guess I was living like a very old man at age 25 (just doing the home-office-home cycle every day for years), and my social life suffered, and I always thought that I was lonely. Yeah, this will take some time. It’s really best for them to come to me rather than desperately clinging for some company. Either that or I’m naturally suplado.

            Oh yeah, I’m watching another Kenichi Kasai directed anime. Have you seen Nodame Cantabile?

            For some reason, I’ve been looking for anime titles whose characters are either college students or part of the workforce. If you can recommend me some more, please do.

          • Matthias says:

            Nodame Cantabile is the best. I love that show. The manga, and especially the last 10 episodes are amazing.

          • sadakups says:

            I’ve seen the first five episodes of the first season and it has the same HachiKuro feeling. Yeah, I’m going to enjoy Nodame as well.

  7. gaguri says:

    Perhaps you felt lonely (even if you have your lovely wife…) at that time because you were so immersed into the way character’s state of emotions? Someone once said emotional context is the most important thing when watching anime but I think anime has the power to also cut your ties from real world, the way you would think and behave, let your mind open and enter through how the characters are feeling instead. Maybe that is a mark of an excellent anime? or not haha…

    Anyway, thank you for sharing lot of personal things about your life, it was interesting. Honey and Clover is very personal to me too but I am bit too uncomfortable and insecure about talking about anything too personal ^_^b

    • ghostlightning says:

      It’s a plausible theory, and could very well apply to many moments watching anime… except the moment relevant to this post. Shuuji stated this to Hagu when he wasn’t really lonely himself (he was with Hagu lol!), though he was reflecting upon his own past to consider Takemoto at the time.

      So the moment is speculative, and any symmetry between my emotions will be with a character’s that I have to create an emotional state with less assistance from the show itself. Too much work.

      [SPOILER]

      However, it does apply when there is a direct display of emotions by the characters. The finale is a great example. It’s so easy to feel all my romantic defeats all at once (there are more than just a few lol!) as he bites down into those sandwiches.

      [/SPOILER]

      Thank you for your appreciation. I think that if you’ve been humiliated and destroyed by real life enough times, there’s very little to fear from the internet. If someone spat at me re this post, how could it ever compare to rejection notices from publishers, harsh words by writing peers and teachers during workshops, and failure to get results from competitions and writing fellowship applications… all when there’s so much more at stake? If I could get over these, as well as every instance when I failed to get a job I applied for (there are many, many rejections), every instance I failed to sell and idea, a product, or service (way too many to mention) when all of these had so much more at stake… it’s really just a post on Honey and Clover, no special significance unless I make it so.

      • gaguri says:

        Thanks for your words of wisdom and experience. I do have my fair share of failures (i.e. job rejection gf breakup that could’ve been avoidedblablabla something average confused young adults get in haha…), although it does sound like the reality has been lot harsher to you and your ambition for writing 😦 (but glad to hear you’re over it).

        I suppose there’s nothing really wrong about revealing too much about yourself to strangers of internet, but I guess I’m yet still not mature enough to openly talk about myself (especially those that you’d rather forget), which probably explains why I closed down all comments for my youtube clip I’ve posted before x_X (didn’t want some anonymous youtroller to drop and give me technical advises). Ah well…that’ll change…someday.

        • ghostlightning says:

          Well, it’s easy for me to talk about these things because I’m past a lot of them. (Other than blogging, I have been writing in my medium again, after a decade of inactivity). I would certainly feel far more anxious and vulnerable if I were ‘in the moment’ so to speak. Even this post is at least a week old from when I finished writing it.

          Trolls are best ignored. Comments can be deleted. Trolls either shame themselves due to their desperation for attention, or are actually good natured that their output is really not malicious. Either way, it is meaningless and inconsequential. Any real consequence is only in how you take it. Trust your own judgment.

  8. digitalboy says:

    I found this post quite beautiful, and I always love to see the more personal interactions fans have with anime

    I know what it’s like to be lonely among friends, because through most of high school I was never myself to my friends. I never bothered to be deep around them like I was in my mind or to the people online, because none of them really related to me or wanted to hear it. In school, interaction was never meant to be more than lighthearted, and it never really did anything for me. It wasn’t until I met No Name and Funeral that I really felt like I had anyone to talk to.

    And of course, the three of us share an unbreakable bond, and you can throw Zerodyme into the equation as well. But none of my other friends meant anything to me. In 12th grade, I pretty much gave up on all of my shallow friends and stopped paying any attention to them. I just couldn’t care to be around them or be reminded of how we would never be able to get closer as long as we couldn’t understand each-other.

    If I do a pretty good job of not being lonely now, it’s because I’ve pulled all of my friends towards me. Zerodyme and Funeral live with me, and No Name and I are in as close to ‘constant contact’ as anyone can get. I thwart my loneliness by surrounding myself with people who are in the exact same shoes as me.

    But of course, I don’t think there is a way to escape the occasional loneliness, because everyone has certain demons that only belong to them that no one else will really be able to understand. I know when dark figures of the past have surfaced in my friends, and I can see their loneliness. Funeral has a disheveled family, Zerodyme has a falling out with most of his old friends, and I am often reminded of the fact that I can’t seem to control myself. None of us really know how to help each other with these problems, and it can lead to times of loneliness, but having people you love and trust around you always pulls you back.

    When you feel lonely, cry it out hard, pull yourself together, and then start thinking about how beautiful your child is going to be in your arms and let that feeling take the reigns again.

    • ghostlightning says:

      Thanks man, that was really touching!

      I hope you appreciate your awesome parents, who made it possible for you to pull all these guys together with you. It’s quite awesome, really. And I think you’re really cool for doing so, despite knowing how a bunch of dudes are fapping in the same place is more than totally gay.

      ( ^_^)o自自o(^_^ )

      Perhaps loneliness isn’t something to escape from. Following Shuuji’s metaphor… it comes in waves, and you could be the ship that stays afloat rather than the man overboard who drowns. Usagijen asked me in the comments section of her lovely post if the painful feelings ever go away? I told her no, only that they will seem to weigh less when you become stronger.

      Re the loneliness, the waves recede just as fast. It’s not so much a problem when I get past the idea that I shouldn’t be able to feel lonely. Thanks again dude.

  9. Pingback: 2DT on Feeling and Putting things into words « The Ghosts of Discussions

  10. gloval says:

    Whoa, strange that there’s this kind of discussion going on here while I feel that I’m at the lowest point in my career (short of getting fired, knock on wood). It’s got me thinking on what I’m doing with my life right now, that maybe I’m not meant to be in the corporate world, that I should just start a business so that I have more freedom in doing my stuff. Whatever shortcomings I have in my job is of course my own fault, but could it also be because I’m not doing what I want? The pay’s good and all, but there’s that nagging feeling that I ought to be doing something else. It’s just that financial obligations and pride, among other things, are trying to suppress those feelings.

    I got this feeling of loneliness at work. Partly it’s because half of those that I knew when I started have already left the company. Even with those that remained, the relationship dynamics aren’t the same anymore.

    It’s strange too that I’ve encountered the “move your hands” “just do it” advise for the second straight day. I guess something’s being hammered to me.

    Thanks for having this entry, by the way, at least I have a venue to vent out somehow.

    • ghostlightning says:

      I’m reading Solanin manga right now, where the lead characters quit their jobs to be more themselves. It’s rather painful to read, since I’ve had these urges too… like yourself.

      I’m switching jobs myself, though the circumstances are quite different from perhaps yours, or the last time I left a corporation. I’ve also been building my business.

      Let me tell you. Someone always owns you.

      If you run your own business, the bank, your investors, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, your suppliers, and your customers own you. You just stopped having a supervisor looking over your shoulder. You can be even more trapped working more hours than you’ve ever worked. And when your investors, and partners include your family and friends… you can get very lonely very very fast.

  11. Shinmaru says:

    Though I love just about every character in Honey and Clover, I identify most strongly with Takemoto (as it seems a lot of people do!). That sense of clearly seeing your limits while also not being able to find what you really want to make of yourself hit home with me in just about every way possible. I loved seeing all my friends happy and really knowing what they wanted to do with their lives, but at the same time, it made me feel very … small, for lack of a better word. People always assume that when you have graduated college, you are supposed to have figured it all out, but after the elation of graduation faded away, and I got out into the “real world”, it really hit me that I hadn’t figured out ANYTHING. That is a pretty lonely realization — I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, but at the same time, it’s a bit difficult to not think like that.

    But, on the good side, this is also why Takemoto is so inspiring to me: The pain of everything he could not have really hurts him, and he stumbles around with nothing in mind for a LONG time, but he keeps grasping for that something that will make everything (or at least most things) click for him. He never stops trying to figure things out. And so it is with everyone else. We all have our own niche to fill. Sometimes we just need the courage to dig a bit deeper to find it.

    Anyway, I enjoyed this post. ^_^ It makes me want to watch Honey and Clover again!

    • ghostlightning says:

      Thank you for your kind words and for sharing what you did.

      I think people do experience the same thing when the elation of graduation subsides.

      In my case though, it didn’t for a while, since a few months after graduation I started teaching at my alma-matter (part time lecturer in the literature department), not long after I started graduate school. It was when I saw little meaning in the studies I’m doing, and how little money I was making… I quit grad school 32 units in (I was in a ladderized Ph.D program).

      What followed is some 4 odd years of being lost. It wasn’t until I met my wife that I started doing concrete things. It’s not so much that she was ‘the answer,’ only that knowing I wanted to be with her meant I had choices to make and I’m glad I made them.

      Watch the show again, discover new things.

  12. maAkusutipen says:

    Well sir to boost your ego, You have inspired me to write a blog, in fact. Im just too anal about the technology to use. I come from an IT background and really want to tinker with the technical stuff first and make it like google mail with the fancy ajax implementation… I will get it up working in a year’s time I hope. Wahahah..

    I know I am not a writer but I will try my best to prattle and make my views known because I think blogging too is my way to cope with bouts of loneliness.

    H & C is such a good show. But it is hard to make it a starter/gateway anime. I usually recommend it strongly to my acquaintances but they end up not watching because its not flashy or whatever enough. Too bad they are missing on a lot. I think viewing it needs to

    Also, who brought H&C rewatching up in the animebloggers? I would like to know. Hehehe I myself am re-watching H&C for sometime now but without any stimuli from other people. I just picked up my copy and decided to watch it again. As circumstances have it, people are posting again about it! What luck! hehee

    • ghostlightning says:

      Thank you for your generous acknowledgment.

      Well, there are writers like me, and writers who are actually paid for their writing. Being a writer like me is easy, just write.

      I agree that Honey and Clover is not a gateway show. A gateway show really depends on the kind of viewer you have in mind, and their particular tastes.

      As far as the rewatching binge, I’ve always wanted to write about this show but I needed a rewatch because I saw this way back in 2007. After ETERNAL published his post, it so happened that otou-san of Shameful Otaku Secret was watching it for the first time. I started rewatching because I knew I could chat him up and vice-versa. While doing so, lolikitsune chatted me up and I linked him to ETERNAL’s post. After he wrote his response, I started writing mine – though usagijen published first.

      It was pretty much an organic thing, to use Owen_s’s term; it’s pretty serendipitous and viral.

  13. Pingback: Does Letting go mean deciding to be happy by yourself? « Babble Bam

  14. Turambar says:

    Talk about a post that hits close to home. I just graduated as of this week, a full semester later than I had originally planned. And well, I suppose that’s all that needs to be said.

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  16. TheBigN says:

    “I hit the pause button and light a cigarette. It wasn’t enough. I take a shower. It wasn’t enough. I felt so… bothered by what he said.”

    I think it’s great when something we can watch just for entertainment can make us really feel something more than just being entertained (if that makes any sense). I smiled at these sentences, because it was just more proof of that. And I feel that sense of loneliness a lot even when I’m surrounded by colleagues I know since I’ve left college. Part of it is self-imposed, and part of it just happens, and I think an important part is telling the two apart.

    • ghostlightning says:

      Yes you do make a lot of sense. I’ve been on this streak of watching and reading material that can affect me in the most visceral way possible: http://ghostlightning.tumblr.com/post/162197789

      Even if it isn’t self-imposed, I think the important thing is to be able to take responsibility for one’s circumstances. This may feel even more lonely though, but puts the power definitely back in your hands.

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  18. Paoiekins says:

    What an insightful entry. You took the words right out of my mouth.

    Honey and Clover, with all its forced attempts at humor, always manages to stir hidden emotions in one’s heart. I hope it inspires you in your writing as well.

    Thank you for this wonderful entry.

    🙂

  19. kluxorious says:

    The reason of why I’m so in love with Honey and Clover is the fact that how relate-able it is with most instances in our lives.

    • Definitely that’s part of why it’s a big deal for me as well, how uncanny it’s way of speaking directly to our experiences despite how different the characters’ circumstances are.

  20. Pingback: Being an Adult Sucks and I Never Want to Grow Up (or at least graduate from college) Solanin is PAINFUL and I love it | We Remember Love

  21. beth says:

    That was a great post. I tried to write my own experiences on the issue but i kept deleting all of them; i don’t think i can express it the way you do so i’ll only express my gratitude here. I’m looking forward to read your other posts.

    I haven’t seen that anime but i’ll totally see it all if my internet connection lets me:/

    By the way your post is the first post i’ve read here on this blog and i’ve decided to have a look at it regularly^^

    Thanks a lot!

    • Thank you very much. Have fun with Honey and Clover.

      As for the rest of WRL, you’ll find that this post isn’t quite representative of the blog. You’ll find a range of things including intense analysis of some shows, and then there’s a lot of fanboying for shows with giant robots fighting in them. That said, I’ve seen and written about a lot of different anime the past few years so maybe you’ll find something you’ll have fun with.

      Cheers!

  22. Victor Zito says:

    It’s really nice to read this text.
    I watched H&C in 2010, in my first year of college, and now I’m graduating but I can still relate to it, feel the feeling that I felt that time. Gonna rewatch when I think is the right time (yeah, I have this “feeling” about when to rewatch something).
    Thanks for your insight 🙂

  23. VZ says:

    Reading this text in 2017 again. I’m 28 now and passing trough one of these waves of loneliness again. This text is as ageless as the anime.

  24. Seren says:

    Hello there! I felt the need to let you know that this is the second time I read one of your articles. I found it last night, while looking for more info about a certain subject that has been on my mind after I finished watching Honey and Clover. So I just typed the words and click on the first title that got my attention and then it hit me. ‘We rememer love…I know this! I remember this! (this is me talking to myself)’. I was right. It was sometime at the end of last year when I read another article. So I searched on my phone. I still have a quote saved in my notes, and the name of your blog. And the article was about Takumi, from NANA.
    Anyway I just wanted to tell you this. I went to bed thinking I will wake up and do so. I see the comments were posted a few years ago, but I hope you see this. Thank you. I love the fact that you can express yourself so clearly and beautifully at the same time, which is one of the reasons I decided to follow you on tumblr (or at least I hope it’s you, I just saw the link and read the post).
    I’d like to be able to express my thoughts and feelings like you do, especially those related to the animes (and mangas) I just mentioned, but it’s like I can’t find the words. I only talk to myself about these things and maybe that’s why…That being said, great piece of writing and I hope you managed to do at least some of the things you wanted to do 🙂

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