NANA
The Moonlight essay
CinemaNANA, and the Need That Was Never Only Hachi’sRead the essayStoryline
The whole story, ending included.
Two Nanas share a Tokyo apartment — punk ambition and romantic dependence in the same body of a story.
In March 2001 two twenty-year-old women called Nana meet on a train to Tokyo. Nana Komatsu, warm, impressionable and quick to fall in love, is following her boyfriend, Shoji, who has got into university there. Nana Osaki, a guarded punk singer, has come to make it with her band, Black Stones, after her boyfriend Ren left it for the famous Trapnest. The next day they meet again viewing the same flat, room 707, and decide to share it. Nana O. nicknames her roommate Hachi, after the faithful dog.
Shoji cheats on Hachi and leaves her; Nana O. and Ren find each other again. Lonely and out of work, Hachi drifts into an affair with Takumi, Trapnest's charming, womanising leader, then falls for Nobu, Black Stones' gentle guitarist, and breaks with Takumi to be with him. Then she finds she is pregnant, unsure which man is the father. Takumi says he will raise the child as his; Nobu could not support a family without giving up music. Hachi chooses Takumi and agrees to marry him. He presses her into sex she does not want, and later discourages her from seeing Nana O.; she moves out of room 707, leaving Nana O. a letter.
Nana O., abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandmother, comes apart without Hachi, with fits of hyperventilation and a jealousy that frightens her. She resolves to win Hachi back by making Black Stones a success. When a tabloid exposes her relationship with Ren, the scandal gets the band its debut; Ren, by now using drugs, asks her to marry him, and she accepts. Yasu, the band's drummer and a trainee lawyer, holds everyone together and admits that he loves her. Reira, Trapnest's twenty-two-year-old singer, who has loved Takumi since childhood, pays Shin, Black Stones' fifteen-year-old bassist, to spend the night with her; what follows is the sexual abuse of a boy, which the series presents as two lonely people finding comfort.
The last episode cuts between that autumn and a future years later. On the night of a fireworks display that autumn, Hachi loses her nerve about facing Nobu and comes to room 707 without knowing that he has stayed behind there. Years on, the members of Black Stones, Hachi and her daughter, Satsuki, gather in room 707 to watch the fireworks. Nana O. has vanished from their lives, and Hachi hopes she will come back. The forty-seven episodes adapt the manga to the start of its twelfth volume; the manga has been on indefinite hiatus since 2009.
Starring
Romi Parkas Nana Osaki
A guarded punk singer, abandoned by her mother, who comes to Tokyo to make it with her band and cannot bear to be left.
Nana Osaki’s story
Nana was abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandmother, and she has let Ren go to Trapnest so that she can make it on her own. In room 707 she names her new roommate Hachi, after a faithful dog, reforms Black Stones and takes Ren back. Then Hachi drifts to Takumi, falls pregnant and chooses him over Nobu, and Nana, who had used Nobu to keep Hachi close, learns how possessive she can be. When Hachi moves out, Nana vows to win her back by making the band famous. When a tabloid exposes her and Ren, she lets the scandal launch the band. She begins to hyperventilate and ignores advice to see a psychiatrist, is drawn to Yasu, who says he loves her, and accepts Ren's proposal. Years later she has vanished from all their lives.
Kaorias Nana 'Hachi' Komatsu
A warm, impressionable young woman who follows her boyfriend to Tokyo and whose life is decided by the men she falls for.
Nana 'Hachi' Komatsu’s story
Hachi falls in love at first sight, again and again. At eighteen, still at school, she had an affair with a married man; she comes to Tokyo for her boyfriend, Shoji, moves into room 707 with Nana, and loses her job and then Shoji, who leaves her. Lonely, she sleeps with Takumi, Trapnest's leader, then falls for Nobu, breaks with Takumi and is briefly happy. Then she is pregnant, unsure whose child it is. Nobu could not support a family without giving up music; Takumi says he will raise the child as his. She chooses Takumi and agrees to marry him. He presses her into sex she does not want, and she moves out of 707, leaving Nana a letter. Years later she brings her daughter, Satsuki, to 707 to watch the fireworks, hoping Nana will come back.
Hidenobu Kiuchias Ren Honjo
Nana O.'s great love, an orphanage-raised guitarist who left her band for fame with Trapnest and slides into drug use.
Toshiyuki Morikawaas Takumi Ichinose
Trapnest's bassist and leader, a workaholic womaniser who claims Hachi's child as his own and marries her.
Tomokazu Sekias Nobuo 'Nobu' Terashima
Black Stones' guitarist and Nana O.'s oldest friend, disowned by his family for music, who loves Hachi and loses her.
Aya Hiranoas Reira Serizawa
Trapnest's singer, in love with Takumi since childhood and desperately lonely, who pays the teenage Shin to stay with her.
Why it matters
NANA is about two young women who could hardly be less alike and who become, for a year, each other's home. It takes seriously what the romances around them do to that friendship. Hachi's life is decided by the men she falls for and a pregnancy she did not plan, and she chooses the man who can pay for a child over the one she loves; Nana, abandoned as a child, finds she cannot bear to be left. The series is frank about the music industry's appetite for scandal, about drugs, and about control dressed as care, and far less clear-eyed about an adult paying a fifteen-year-old for sex. Its late-night broadcast drew average ratings of up to 6.3 per cent in the Kanto region, unusually high for anime at that hour. It leaves open whether the friendship, not the romances, was the love story all along.