Mahoraba ~Heartful Days~ – Review

It’s interesting how “boarding house ensemble comedy” is such a distinct genre of Japanese media. Boarding houses, which offer cheap rent to long and short-term residents and generally provide some sort of collective living arrangement such as shared meals, tend to be depicted as similar to college dorms but available to people of all ages. If you ever lived in a dorm in college, the appeal as a setting is probably blatantly obvious, and opening up the cast to a wide range of ages and walks of life creates even more opportunities for personality clashes and other shenanigans. These series vary widely in quality, from harem comedies like Love Hina and Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs to touching character dramas like Maison Ikkoku and Honey and Clover. Of all of these, the gentle comedy Mahoraba falls somewhere in the middle, borrowing heavily from its predecessors but still offering a unique twist or two of its own.

Ryushi Shiratori moves into Narutaki-sou on the eve of his first day at art college and meets the manager, his second cousin Kozue Aoba. At a glance, Kozue seems basically perfect: cute, cheerful, and a good cook. If it were just her, things would be perfect. However, there’s a number of other residents: Tamami Chanohata, Kozue’s overprotective best friend; drunk college student Megumi Momono; the depressed Sayoko Kurosaki and her daughter Asami; and the novelist Yukio Haibara, who speaks exclusively through a dog hand puppet called “Johnny.” These big personalities come together in a number of oh-so-heartwarming misadventures while Ryushi is really just trying to get through school.

One of the first things that jump out about Mahoraba is its resemblance to a certain other highly influential romantic comedy set in a boarding house: Maison Ikkoku. Almost every one of the main characters has a clear analog to an Ikkoku-ka resident. Ryushi and Kozue are like idealized versions of Godai and Kyoko; Megumi, with her alcoholism and mischievous streak, is not unlike Akemi; and so on. The only one without an equivalent is Tamami. However, the story by and large is much gentler than Maison Ikkoku, lacking the older series’ willingness to get messy and show its characters at low points.

It’s not like there aren’t opportunities for genuine pathos! But Mahoraba usually passes on them in favor of tepid comedy and “heartwarming” conclusions in its stead. Sayoko and Asami live in such abject poverty that they don’t even have furniture; their apartment is filled with boxes of piecework both of them do to support themselves. Asami forages for food and they dilute their orange juice, while Sayoko appears to suffer from some kind of physical and mental disorder that causes her to sleep all day instead of working, which is shrugged off as laziness. The two receive no government assistance, but instead of feeling deeply concerned about the struggles of single disabled mothers and their children, it appears that the intended effect is for me to feel moved at the love the two share for each other.

There are a couple of details that set Mahoraba apart from similar other series: one is Ryushi’s aspirations of becoming a children’s book illustrator, which informs several plotlines and much of the show’s aesthetic. Nowadays, it seems like every anime protagonist older than high school age is either a drifting NEET or hot-blooded young man chasing his dream with a single-minded ferocity, so something as fiercely normal as attending college to pursue his career goals but also having a life outside class feels almost refreshing. His field of choice also fits nicely into the show’s cute aesthetic and gentle, whimsical storytelling.

The more obvious thing that makes Mahoraba stand out is Kozue’s dissociative identity disorder, as certain stimuli trigger her transformation into several other personalities, such as the aggressive Saki, the young child Nanako, and so on. The story being what it is, these transformations’ primary function is to create wacky hijinks and comic misunderstandings. The characters aren’t exactly complex to begin with, and given the short amount of screentime each personality outside her primary one has, they tend to be even more simplified; they’re not exactly written as whole people, but more as exaggerated archetypes. This is fine, since it works within the context of the series and is a major shift from most stories with characters that have multiple personalities. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know much about the reality of DID, but considering how frequently it’s presented as dangerous and scary in fiction, with one of the the personalities being psychotic or outright homicidal, this seems like a step up, regardless of clinical accuracy.

Even though most of the characters are adults, you wouldn’t guess it from the art style, which leans heavily into cuteness. The only real sign that the characters are older than elementary school age is that some of them have secondary sex characteristics, i.e. facial hair and breasts. Ryushi, who has neither, has a female voice actor and usually wears clothes that are too big for him, with the latter making him look like a ten-year-old dressed up in daddy’s clothes for a school play. It’s not a bad thing, especially considering how the characters aren’t generally sexualized and the childish look extends to the entire cast, but it’s certainly not everyone’s bag. However, the bright colors and simplicity of the art meant that the animation has aged much better than the average digipaint production, and it looks clean and crisp even on my big TV.

One of the things I most enjoyed about Mahoraba is something that’s outright unusual these days: the next episode previews, which my friend called “the most ’00’s thing [she’s] ever seen” when she came over while it was on. In them, Tamami, dressed as a fairy, and Megumi, clad in a lab coat and mortarboard, act out hyperactive little sketches that hint at the content for the next episode without describing the storyline. They’re fun and add a little pep to the end of the usually mild story content of the main episode.

As I neared the end of the series, I was all ready to write this review criticizing Mahoraba for its tepid comedy that lacked any sort of emotional weight. Then I watched the last episode and I have to admit, while I wasn’t outright weepy, it came close to making me misty. All the disparate parts of the show – the characters and their relationships, Kozue’s DID, Ryushi’s storytelling and illustrations – came together to something almost powerful. All of a sudden I felt the weight of the characters’ connections, the trauma that brought Kozue to this point, and the potential of children’s literature to tell powerful stories that touch people of all ages. It’s just too bad that it took until the last episode to find that kind of impact when there was more than enough space for it earlier in the series.

Mahoraba isn’t the kind of show I’d warn people away from, but it’s also not a show I’d recommend particularly strongly. It does very little particularly well that other in the genre haven’t done better. It is, however, cute and nice and inoffensive, with an unusually positive portrayal of multiple personalities and no fan service or harem-y vibes. It asks nothing of its audience and offers nothing challenging in return. But you know what? Sometimes that’s just what you need.