Minor spoilers for Hinamatsuri!

Back in 2018, I watched the anime for Hinamatsuri when it came out. I imagine my reactions were very similar to other viewers’:

  1. WTF?
  2. Agh, my heartstrings!

Recently, HumbleBundle began offering 18 volumes of the manga for a mere $18, so I took the opportunity to enjoy the story once more and to find out a bit more of what happened to Hina, Nitta, and the rest past the end of the anime.

Like the anime, the manga drops us right into the action with young yakuza member (and ardent expensive vase collector) Nitta enjoying an evening at home when a giant metal egg with a human face falls onto the floor of his living room. Nitta decides he’s hallucinating and goes to bed, but the egg is still there the next morning. He figures out how to open it, and out pops a young girl named Hina. Who turns out to have telekinesis (she can move stuff with her thoughts). She threatens to smash all of Nitta’s vases unless he takes her in—a rather inauspicious start to their relationship, but surprisingly they develop a pretty warm father-daughter dynamic. With a healthy dose of chaos.

"Let us pray that the placebo might aid us." "Pray to the gods of placebos! Praaaaay!" (A window and wall of a building smash in an explosion of some sort.)

But it’s when Hina’s compatriot Anzu shows up to retrieve her that the series really comes into its own. Through bad luck, Anzu gets stranded and ends up living on the streets…where she meets a sympathetic community of houseless men who show her how to make ends meet and live with dignity. In a series that’s allegedly all about the funnies, this arc deals some massive damage right in the feels. Especially when the government shuts down the houseless community, who are forced to go their separate ways. This is literally the only sort of family Anzu’s ever known, and she does not take it well. There’s no powering through on the strength of friendship here; there’s only dealing with loss as best one can.

That was pretty heavy, so let’s have a lighter interlude in the form of the inner monologue of one of Hina’s teachers:

Teacher's inner monologue: "You've got three types of students here. Lemme break it down. There's the cocky morons. That's 50%. And the regular morons: 30%. The quiet morons. That's 20%. Point is, they're all morons. So you never know which'll be the one to explode."

Review: The Anzu houseless arc stands out to me as one of the best in anime, period; that alone is worth the price of admission for the series. Happily, the manga did justice to this part of the story as well. I cried once again. (Cue Kotaro from Zombieland Saga Revenge: “I’m a grown-ass man, and I’m crying!”)

But what about the rest of the manga? How does it stack up against the anime—or stand on its own, for that matter? Very early on, I was a bit worried about the art of the manga. The anime’s visuals are a treat for the eyes, while the first pages of the manga seem kind of rough, with the panels a bit cramped and the events transpiring a bit obscure. Fortunately, that issue vanishes very quickly, in time for the reader to enjoy several story arcs that were omitted from the anime but which take place during the same time period.

And it’s a pleasure to see how the characters continue to develop (yes, even Hina shows some growth!) over several years past the anime’s end. One example of many: Anzu, who after living on the streets had been taken in by an older couple and had helped them run their small restaurant, has a falling out with them and ends up on her own once more—again, basically losing her family (they’d even been talking about adopting her). They do achieve a kind of reconciliation, but it’s not perfect, which is honestly kind of realistic. But there’s a kind of bittersweet coda, when Anzu encounters two of her old houseless friends once more. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

And what of the other characters? This isn’t Anzu’s series, after all. It’s fun to watch Hina slowly acquire some slight degree of social awareness. She still remains pretty clueless when the most popular boy in high school tries to hit on her, which causes her classmates no end of chagrin and/or amusement.

Boy: "I'm afraid if I don't do something, I'll be in the friend zone forever." Girl (thinking to herself): "Ahhh. Nothing more delightful than a pretty boy in despair."

It’s a character-driven story, at the end of the day. The wacky premise and plot are as thin as tissue paper, but the personalities and relationships turn those tissues into elegant origami. There’s a lot of funny moments, and a few heart-wrenching ones, but it’s the warm and tender moments—and the feeling that they leave behind—that keep me coming back.

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