NANA, and the Need That Was Never Only Hachi’s

The last episode of NANA ends in a flat numbered 707, on a night with fireworks. Years have passed. The members of a band once called Black Stones have come back to the room, and so has the woman they used to call Hachi, with her daughter, Satsuki. They are waiting for the fireworks to start. They are also waiting, though nobody can do anything about it, for someone who is not there. Nana, the singer, has gone out of all their lives, and Hachi hopes she will come back. That is where the series stops.

It is worth noticing what the story is waiting for at the end. Not a husband. Not a lover. Not a man and a woman finding their way back to each other. A friend. Forty-seven episodes of bands and record deals, an engagement, a pregnancy and a scandal close on one woman hoping that another will come home.

The names are part of it. Hachi is a Nana too: her name is written differently in Japanese and sounds exactly the same, and the coincidence is how the story begins. It was the singer who renamed her, after Hachikō, the Akita dog who kept going back to Shibuya station for almost ten years to wait for a professor who had died. It began as a joke about devotion: as the story explains the name, her flatmate is like a friendly, obedient dog who takes a great deal of looking after. By the last episode the joke has become the plot. Hachi is the one who waits.

The people who love this story have been waiting too. Yazawa Ai’s manga went on hiatus in 2009, when its author fell ill, and it has not resumed. The series ends where it ends, and the manga has not ended at all. Nobody knows how the story comes out, this essay included, and nothing here pretends to.

NANA is often remembered as a story about opposites: the punk who needed nobody and the girl who could not be alone. This essay argues that the series was built to take that description apart. Both of them needed someone to stay. Hachi’s need showed, and a need that shows gets named and judged: she got a dog’s name for it. Nana’s need was built into her independence, and it became visible only as Hachi began to leave: in her breathing, and in a jealousy that frightened her. The home the two of them made in room 707 was the one relationship in the story with nothing standing behind it. No law, no money, no surname. When a child was on the way, everything the adult world had to offer pointed away from it. And the man who could give Hachi security was not a man with whom she was safe. Those are different things, and the series knows it.

The facts, once. NANA is a television anime made by the studio Madhouse, directed by Asaka Morio, with series composition by Konparu Tomoko. It ran in a late-night slot on Nippon TV from 5 April 2006 to 28 March 2007: forty-seven episodes, with three recap specials between them. Nana speaks in the voice of Park Romi and sings in the voice of Tsuchiya Anna; Hachi is voiced by Kaori. Its episodes drew average ratings of up to 6.3 per cent in the Kanto region, unusually high for anime at that hour.

It adapts Yazawa Ai’s manga, serialised by Shueisha from 2000 and collected in twenty-one volumes, which by 2019 had fifty million copies in circulation. The series follows the story to the start of the twelfth volume. The manga goes on for nearly ten volumes beyond the point where the anime stops, and then it stops as well. In 2022, in a message to readers at the first exhibition of her work, Yazawa said she felt some of her strength returning and hoped, while looking after her health, to be able to draw again, little by little. That is as much as can honestly be said about what comes next.

Two live-action films were made from the manga in the same years. The first, with Nakashima Mika as Nana and Miyazaki Aoi as Hachi, opened in September 2005 and took more than four billion yen at the Japanese box office; the second opened in December 2006, while the anime was on air. They belong to a separate conversation. This essay is about the anime.

It discusses the whole series, including the last episode and its glimpse of the future. It does not follow the manga past the point where the anime stops, and it does not invent an ending the author has not written. No dialogue is quoted. Where an episode’s title says something the essay needs, the title is given instead.

The story itself, because everything that follows stands on it. In March 2001 two women called Nana meet on a train to Tokyo. Both are twenty. Komatsu Nana, soon to be Hachi, is warm, impressionable and quick to fall in love, and she is following her boyfriend, Shoji, who has got into a university in the city. Osaki Nana is a guarded punk singer who has come to make it with her band, Black Stones, after her boyfriend, Ren, left it for the far more famous Trapnest. The next day they run into each other again, viewing the same flat. It is room 707. They decide to share it and split the rent.

Their reasons are not the ones their reputations would suggest. Hachi could have lived with Shoji; he offers. She says no, because she wants to stop relying on him. Nana had meant to take the flat on her own. So the one who is supposed to be dependent arrives trying to learn not to be, and the one who is supposed to need nobody ends up with a flatmate.

What follows, for one spring and one summer, is a household. Among the first things they buy for the flat is a pair of glasses patterned with strawberries. Nana gives her flatmate the dog’s name. Hachi turns Shoji down one night so that she can bring food home for Nana. When Nana’s oldest friend, Nobu, turns up wanting to bring the band back to life, it is Hachi who asks Nana to sing, and Nana sings. When Shoji leaves Hachi for a new colleague at the diner where he works, it is Nana who stays with her through the evening. And when the two of them go back to Hachi’s home town for a Trapnest concert, Nana, sitting in Hachi’s family house, talks about her own childhood for the first time. Her mother left her. Her grandmother brought her up.

It helps to set the two families side by side. At one point Hachi is down to 2,200 yen, and her mother puts 30,000 into her account. Nana has no mother to do that. The series never says so in as many words. It does not need to.

Names do a great deal of work in this story, beginning with the one the two women share. But the name that carries the most is the one Nana chooses. She could have called her flatmate anything. She named her after one of the best-known stories of loyalty in the country: a dog who kept coming back to a station for a man who was never going to step off the train.

A nickname is a description, and it is also a request. By describing Hachi as friendly, obedient and in need of a great deal of looking after, Nana casts herself as the one who looks after. The arrangement suits her in a way she never examines. Looking after someone is one of the few ways a person who has been left can hold on to somebody without admitting that she is holding on. The need runs through the other person. She is not needy. She is needed.

Her history makes the strategy legible, though what follows is a reading and not a diagnosis. Her mother left. When Ren was offered his place in Trapnest, Nana did not follow him to Tokyo; she ended it, because she wanted to succeed on her own and not as somebody’s girlfriend. When the band saw him off at the station, the parting was hers. That is real pride. It is also a way of never again being the one who is left behind. A woman who has decided not to follow cannot be abandoned on the platform.

Yazawa had drawn a version of this before. In Paradise Kiss, which the same studio adapted the year before NANA, the young designer at its centre has no patience for women who cannot stand on their own, and the story traces that to his mother. NANA turns the idea around. It is less interested in the impatience than in what it costs the one who carries it, and in what happens when the person she has been looking after walks out of the door.

Hachi falls in love at first sight, again and again, and the series does not hide where that goes. Her jobs do not last: the shop where she works closes, and the publishing company that takes her on lets her go. Shoji leaves. Nana warns her that Takumi, Trapnest’s leader, is a womaniser, and Hachi knows the warning is right. When he rings on the day she is fired, she goes to him anyway, because she wants, badly, to feel loved. Afterwards she is ashamed, and lies to Nana about where she spent the night.

It is easy to be unkind to her for this. A heroine who cannot bear an empty evening and fills it with the nearest man is easy to look down on. Before doing that, it is worth looking at the evenings themselves. Twice in the series she cooks for people who do not come. The first time it is Trapnest, who never said they would. The second time it is the band, on the night she has made them a celebration dinner; they have been taken out by a record label, and she tells them she has not cooked. Left in the flat with the food, she turns to Takumi. That same night Nana comes home early to see her, and finds her gone. They miss each other by an evening, and the episode’s title says exactly that: Hachi and Nana missing each other.

Nothing in this deserves the word weakness. It is loneliness at twenty, in a city where the one person who is usually home has a band, a lover and a record deal beginning to happen. It is a need doing what needs do when nobody is holding them. What makes Hachi’s need look worse than other people’s is mostly that it can be seen. It goes to men, in public, and it has consequences anyone can count.

Jealousy, too, runs in both directions. Later it will be Nana who is frightened by her own possessiveness. Early on, when Misato, a devoted fan from Nana’s home town, turns up and is close to Nana, it is Hachi who is jealous and takes it out on both of them. What separates the two women is not whether they need people. It is how the need shows.

Then Hachi begins to go, and the series shows what Nana’s independence had been holding up.

It begins before the pregnancy. On the night Nana finds out about Hachi and Takumi, she walks out of the flat and cannot face going back. Later, when Hachi has turned from Takumi to Nobu, Nana admits to Nobu that she used him to keep Hachi close. He is shaken, and so, in her way, is she. Spending a night at Ren’s, she discovers how possessive she can be about the people she loves, and the discovery frightens her.

Then the engagement. Nana comes home to find Hachi and Takumi waiting to tell her that they are getting married and that Hachi is moving out. Nana knocks one of the two strawberry glasses off by accident, and then breaks the other herself, as if half a pair were worse than none. When she next comes back to the flat, for the first time in nine days, Hachi has gone. There is a letter.

What surrounds that letter is the most revealing stretch of the series. Just before she finds it, after a quarrel with Shin, Nana has declared that she will stop relying on other people, which is a way of admitting that she had been. Afterwards she buys a new pair of strawberry glasses, takes them to Hachi’s new home, and is not let in. When a tabloid exposes her relationship with Ren, she stands in front of the cameras and sends Hachi a message through them: the band is going to be famous. The episode’s title calls Hachi by the dog’s full name, Hachikō, and tells her to watch. Television is the only channel Nana has left.

Her plan for winning Hachi back is to make Black Stones a success, and when the scandal gets the band its debut, she puts her pride aside and lets it. Nobu is uneasy about a debut built on a scandal. Nana is past minding. The first time her breathing fails her is the moment Nobu tells her he has given up on getting Hachi back. Someone suggests she see a psychiatrist; she does not go, and throws herself into the band instead. Breathing that fails like that is something to take to a doctor, and the series is right to have someone say so, even though Nana will not listen. Before the autumn is out, Yasu, the band’s drummer, has told her he loves her, she has found herself drawn to him, and she has accepted a proposal from Ren, who by now is using drugs. Her life is full of people. What she cannot bear is the one who left.

There is a vocabulary for this in attachment research, and it is tempting to reach for it. This Library has argued before, in “Reading Attached Without Turning Attachment Styles Into Destiny”, that such words work better as lenses than as labels, and that a pattern lives in a relationship as much as in a person. NANA comes close to demonstrating the point. Nana is self-sufficient with the world and frightened with Hachi. Hachi is unsteady with men and steady with Nana. Neither woman is one thing. Nana’s independence was never the absence of need. It was the shape the need had taken, and when the person holding the other end let go, nothing was left to hold the shape up.

Hachi finds out she is pregnant that summer, after she has broken with Takumi and begun, happily, with Nobu. She does not know which of them is the father. The doctor tells her there is a decision to make about whether to continue the pregnancy, and the series lets us see a little of what she weighs: she knows by now that Nana and Shin, the band’s teenage bassist, were both left by their parents.

Then the two men. Takumi, who guesses, says he will raise the child as his. Nobu, who loves her and whom she loves, cannot support a family without giving up the music he walked out on his family’s inn to play. Hachi goes to her old friends for advice, comes home to find Takumi there, lets him look after her through the night, and in the morning tells him she will have the baby and raise it as his. He says they should marry.

It is easy to call this the wrong choice, and some of the people who watched it at twenty may have. It is worth slowing down. She is twenty. She has no steady job. The year is 2001, inside what Japan calls the employment ice age, the years when work for new school-leavers was hard to find; a government white paper defines the generation it hit as people who left school between 1993 and 2004. One man can pay for a child, has said he will claim it, and will lose nothing by doing so. The other could keep the child only by giving up the thing that makes him himself. Whatever else was on the scale, that was.

And the road she takes was wide and well worn. In a special report published in 2002, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare estimated that 26.3 per cent of the first children born to married parents in 2000, about one in four, had been conceived before the couple held a wedding or began living together. Where the mother was between twenty and twenty-four, the estimate was 58.3 per cent. Across the OECD in 2023, forty-three per cent of births were outside marriage; in Japan, as in Korea and Türkiye, the figure is between two and four per cent. None of this says why any couple married, or what became of pregnancies that did not end in a marriage, and none of it is about Hachi, who is fictional. What the figures describe is the shape of the road. Where this story is set, a young woman who went ahead with a pregnancy very often married before the birth, and a child was very rarely born outside marriage. The question the world puts to Hachi is not whether to marry. It is whom.

The choice also leaves something out. When Nana hears about the pregnancy, what she urges is that Nobu be the father. Even the person who loves Hachi most, and least wants her to go, can only imagine keeping her through a man. The two women share a first name and nothing the world counts: no surname, no contract, no claim. The choice the series stages is between two men. The flat was not beaten by a better love. It never had the standing to be considered.

If anything here deserves anger, it is not Hachi, and it is not Takumi. It is an arrangement of the world in which the person who loved her most could think of no way to keep her that did not run through a man.

A year after the series ended, a prime-time drama imagined the other road. In Last Friends, broadcast in 2008, a young woman’s daughter is raised by her and the friends she shared a house with, as a family of their own making. But that story made its heroine pass through something first: a partner who watched, controlled and beat her. NANA has no catastrophe of that kind to clear the way. So the road goes where roads go.

Takumi is not a villain, and the series never lets him become a simple one. He claims a child who may not be his and does not waver. He moves Hachi into a penthouse in Shirokane, buys her an engagement ring, and turns up at her parents’ house with presents for the baby. What he offers is real: money, a home, a surname for the child, a future that can be planned. That is security, and for a pregnant twenty-year-old in 2001 it is not a small thing.

What comes with it matters as much. On the night they tell Nana about the engagement, in Hachi’s room, he presses her into sex she does not want. Later he discourages her from seeing Nana. When Shin rings her, she has to hang up because Takumi has come in. And when his band’s image needs protecting, it is his wedding to Hachi that is postponed. None of this is presented as monstrous, which is part of what makes it accurate. It is presented as how things are, with him.

Two things need saying plainly. Agreeing to marry a man is not agreeing to sex with him on any given night, and being provided for is not agreement either. Her reluctance is an answer. And a man who pays for a woman’s life holds a great deal of power over her days, which is exactly why her freedom to say no matters most when the money is on his side.

This is the distinction the series draws without ever stating it. Security is what can be provided: a flat, an income, a name. Safety is whether she can say no to the person providing it, and keep her friends while she does. This Library has looked before at what happens “When Safety and Attraction Point to Different People”. NANA gives that problem another turn. The man who could provide was not a man with whom Hachi was safe. The man she loved could not provide. And the one relationship in which she had both a home and the freedom to be herself, the flat she shared with Nana, was the one with no standing at all.

Nana, turned away from Hachi’s new home with a new pair of glasses in her hands, is the picture of it. The best friend has no standing at the door of a marriage.

In Japan, NANA was not a niche enthusiasm. It was a phenomenon: fifty million copies of the manga, two films, a late-night anime with ratings unusual for its hour. It has also been read seriously. Writing in 2022 for the Japanese culture site CINRA, the critic Tatsumi Junk argued that NANA overturned the Cinderella story, leaving behind the promised happy endings of Yazawa’s own earlier work to put on the page what young women’s lives actually contained: careers that go sideways, an unplanned pregnancy, a marriage hurried along, rent that keeps coming due. That is the right frame for Hachi’s move to Shirokane. A Cinderella story would end in the penthouse. NANA keeps going.

Many of the people who first met the two Nanas in the mid-2000s were probably about their age. They are around forty now, twice the age the Nanas were, and NANA at forty is a different story from NANA at twenty. A choice that can look like betrayal to a twenty-year-old can look like arithmetic to someone who has since paid rent alone and added up what a child costs.

Outside Japan, the series reached English-speaking viewers after Viz Media licensed it for North America in 2007. Two things may read differently from there. One is the road described above. A viewer from a country where a large share of children are born to parents who are not married may wonder why Hachi’s choices narrow so quickly to two men. The figures are the answer, and they describe institutions and habits, not anybody’s character. The other is the friendship itself. For a woman who has moved to Japan from abroad, far from family and working in her second language, a flatmate who becomes family is not a small thing; it can be most of what holds a life up. Both Nanas are newcomers to Tokyo, one with a family far away and the other with none, and in a city that is not yet home, the woman across the kitchen can be the one who keeps a life standing.

It is worth saying, too, what kind of friendship story this is not. Many of the great stories about two women are stories of rivalry. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend makes envy its engine, because its two girls want the same scarce thing. The Nanas never want the same thing. One wants to sing; the other wants to be loved. They do not compete. What comes between them is not rivalry. It is the shape adult life is allowed to take.

There are several ways this essay could be wrong, and one of them is about the series rather than the essay.

First, calling the friendship the real love story can quietly demote everything else. Nana’s love for Ren is enormous, and the series gives it full weight, as it does Hachi’s love for Nobu. And the move itself is suspect. To make a friendship count by calling it a love story repeats the ranking it claims to question, as if friendship only matters once it has been promoted into romance. The more accurate claim is smaller. In NANA, both women are most themselves in the life they share, and the series ends by waiting for it.

Second, room 707 was not innocent. Nana used Nobu to keep Hachi close, and said so. Hachi lied to Nana more than once. The possessiveness that frightens Nana did not seep into the friendship from the romances; it lived in the friendship from the start. An essay that praised the flat as a safe place would be leaving out the parts of it that were not.

The third is about the series, and it should not be softened. Reira, Trapnest’s twenty-two-year-old singer, pays Shin, Black Stones’ fifteen-year-old bassist, to spend the night with her. What follows is the sexual abuse of a boy, and the series presents it as two lonely people finding comfort in each other. The same work that sees control dressed as care inside Takumi’s engagement does not see it here. And the lens this essay has been using, loneliness and the need for someone to stay, is exactly the lens through which the series softens it. That is a warning about the lens. Loneliness can explain what a person does. It never excuses harm to a child, and a reading built on sympathy for need has to say so out loud, or it becomes part of the softening.

Fourth, it is not this essay’s place to decide what Hachi should have done. Plenty of viewers would call her choice the adult one, and she might too: a child needed a home, and she found it one. The series shows the coercion, and this essay has named it. But naming what happened inside a marriage is not the same as knowing better than the woman in it.

And last, the plainest limit. This is a reading of a story without an ending. The anime stops where it stops; the manga goes further and then stops as well. Readers of the manga know things the series does not show, and any reading of what it all means is provisional in the most literal sense. The author has not finished.

Here is where this Library stands. A friendship between women can be the central attachment of a life, and it deserves the seriousness usually kept for romance. Losing a friend to a marriage is a real loss, even though nobody holds a ceremony for it and the person grieving may not feel entitled to call it grief. A need that shows is not a weakness. And an admired independence may be the shape a need has taken: no reason to admire it less, but a reason to ask what it is carrying.

Here is the part that runs against us. This house sells private companionship: bounded, scheduled, paid for. Nothing in NANA argues for it. What room 707 was, a home two people made without a clock and without a price over one spring and one summer, cannot be bought, and an evening booked here is a different thing that ends on time. An essay that honours bonds nobody recognises is also convenient for a business that sells a relation nobody registers, and a reader is entitled to discount it for that.

Whose need shows in your life, and whose is hidden inside competence, or independence, or being the one who looks after everyone? When a friend left for a marriage, or when you did, did anyone treat it as a loss? Did you? Is what you have now security, or safety, or both, and how would you know without having to lose it? And who, if it came to it, would you wait for?

If you met the Nanas at twenty, you probably chose one; a story with two heroines asks you to. It may be kinder, now, to stop choosing. If you were Hachi, and you went where the money and the name were because there was a child and you were twenty and the road ran that way, nobody who understands the road has any right to call it weakness. If you were Nana, and independence was how you survived being left, needing someone was never a failure. It was the most ordinary thing about you. The story ends with one woman waiting for another to come home, and it does not call her foolish for waiting.