Two People Who Don't Fall in Love, and the Honesty of a Provisional Family

A supermarket chain is running a promotion about falling in love. Kodama Sakuko, who works in sales strategy at the chain’s head office, goes to one of its stores to look at the display a junior colleague has planned, and a man who works in the vegetable section tells her that some people do not fall in love. She is brought up short. That is almost the first thing that happens in Two People Who Don't Fall in Love, and it holds the whole series in small: a world so sure of romance that it uses romance to sell groceries, and one sentence, from a stranger among the vegetables, that opens a gap in it.

Sakuko is warm and good with her juniors, and she is tired, in a quiet way she has no name for, of a world that assumes everyone wants romance. Her family is waiting for her to marry. A colleague she once went out with never understood why she felt nothing. When her closest friend cancels their plan to share a flat, Sakuko goes looking for words for herself and finds them on a stranger’s blog: aromantic and asexual, a person who feels neither romantic nor sexual attraction to anyone. The blog is written by the man from the vegetable section, Takahashi Satoru. She proposes that the two of them become a family without romance. He agrees to try it. They call it a provisional family, and she moves into the old house where he lived with his grandmother until her death.

Written by Yoshida Erika for NHK, the series is usually described as a gentle comedy about acceptance, and it is one. This essay argues that it is also something sharper. It takes the devices a romantic drama runs on and runs each of them with the fuel taken out: the kindness mistaken for interest, the new man brought home to the parents, the jealous former boyfriend, the struggle on the steps, the old marriage prospect who comes back, the ending across a distance. One after another they fail, often comically. What gets built in the space they leave is a household whose defining word is provisional.

Provisional is usually the weak word in a sentence. It means not yet, not properly, until the real thing arrives. The series turns it round. A family with no script to follow cannot run on assumption; it has to be made by asking, and kept by being asked again. That is what provisional comes to mean here, and it is this essay’s claim that it is not the lesser word. It is the honest one.

Neither of them is waiting to be fixed, and the series never asks them to be.

The facts, once. Two People Who Don't Fall in Love, Koisenu Futari in Japanese, went out on NHK’s main channel in a late-evening drama slot on Monday nights: eight half-hour episodes, from 10 January to 21 March 2022. Kishii Yukino plays Sakuko and Takahashi Issei plays Takahashi. NHK billed it as a comedy that is not a love comedy. The script won Yoshida the 40th Mukoda Kuniko Award, and the selection committee’s citation praised it for telling its story in an extremely low voice, and yet in a bright tone. The translation is ours, and the phrase is worth keeping, because it describes the series’ method exactly.

It was made with aromantic and asexual people, not only about them. The series’ planner wrote on NHK’s site before the broadcast of meeting an aromantic asexual person while reporting, and of being brought up short. Three consultants are credited for aromantic and asexual accuracy, all members of a group called As Loop, which describes one of them as aromantic and asexual, one as a researcher of aromantic and asexual people, and one as the head of a non-profit that has run meetings for aromantic and asexual people since 2016. By the group’s own account, the consultants checked definitions, supplied material, advised on the script and the characters wherever they touched aromantic and asexual lives, and attended some of the filming and rehearsals. They took no part in deciding the story, the characters or the casting. The head of the production wrote that the series was finding its shape by relying on the words of the three consultants and of the aromantic and asexual people the team had interviewed.

A note on words, since the series is partly about them. Aromantic describes a person who does not feel romantic attraction to others; asexual, a person who does not feel sexual attraction to others. Someone to whom both apply may call themselves aromantic asexual, which the series and its characters shorten to aroma-ace. The group that advised the series is careful to add that these words have several definitions and that no single one is the correct version, that a person’s sexuality and the words they choose for it are not always the same thing, and so that nobody should be labelled from outside. This essay uses the words as the series uses them, for its two central characters, and for no one else.

One disclosure, because it governs every scene described below. This essay was written from the published record of the series, NHK’s own pages, the award citation and the consultants’ accounts, not from a fresh viewing, and scenes are described as those sources describe them. What characters say is given in outline, apart from one line NHK itself quoted in its synopsis and a few published words from the people who made the series.

This essay discusses the whole series, including how it ends. The ending is where the argument is sharpest, and it cannot be discussed honestly from outside. A reader who would rather meet the ending on screen first may want to stop here and come back.

A viewer who comes to the series with a romantic drama’s expectations can feel the machinery engage, scene after scene, and then fail to catch.

It starts at work, where a junior colleague mistakes Sakuko’s kindness for interest. It is the oldest misunderstanding in the genre, the one that usually leads somewhere. Here it leads nowhere, because there was never anywhere for it to lead. Then the meeting with the parents. Sakuko’s mother discovers that her daughter is living with a man, and the family is overjoyed: the daughter who never seemed interested has found someone at last. The two of them go along with it at first and visit as a couple. What ends the performance is not a slip but a feeling. Irritated by her family’s delight in an ordinary happiness that is not hers, Sakuko tells them what the two of them are. The celebration stops. Her family is lost.

Then the jealous former boyfriend. Matsuoka Kazu, a colleague she once went out with, still believes the two of them are together. He follows her home, takes Takahashi for a rival, and the two men struggle on the steps outside the house. In a romance this is the fight over the woman. Here the man who falls is Takahashi, and he falls shielding Kazu. He is badly hurt, and the former boyfriend moves in to look after him.

So the love triangle becomes a household of three. Kazu asks every tactless question the two of them have ever been asked, reads every ordinary exchange between them as romance, and is corrected by the man he injured. Slowly he learns. When he has learned enough, he makes an offer: if what Sakuko wants is a family without romance or sex, why not with him? Takahashi, fairly, calls it not a bad idea. Sakuko turns Kazu down, and her reason is one of the kindest things anyone says in the series. She will not have him give up, for her sake, the romance he would want.

Then the old marriage prospect. Inozuka Haruka, who runs a farming company, was once expected to marry Takahashi; his grandmother wanted the match, and he could not go through with it. In a romance she would come back as the rival. Here she comes back to ask whether he should not start living his own life rather than his grandmother’s, and she brings a practical offer: a scheme that sets people up as farmers in the countryside. And the ending, which comes later in this essay, takes the device a love story fears most, the distance that separates a couple, and makes it the answer.

The comedy lives in this machinery, and so does the argument. A love story is a machine for turning situations into romance: a misunderstanding, a jealousy, a rival, a separation, each one a step toward the kiss. Put two people inside it who do not run on romance and the machine goes on turning, loudly, converting nothing. By failing, it shows how much of ordinary life was built to run on that one fuel: the promotion in the supermarket, the questions at the family table, the assumption behind every friend’s smile.

It is worth setting beside a story that starts in almost the same place and lets the machine work. In the Korean series Because This Is My First Life, from 2017, a woman who has nowhere to live, and a man who needs a tenant and has no intention of marrying, agree to a contract marriage that also keeps his parents off his back. Living as landlord and tenant, they grow close, and the arrangement becomes a love story, as the form always meant it to. Takahashi, for his part, agrees to the provisional family partly because a housemate will keep the neighbours from meddling. The premise is nearly the same. The difference is that in Two People Who Don't Fall in Love the arrangement is not a disguise for the romance to come. The arrangement is the story.

Before the family there is a word, and the series is careful about the order. Sakuko does not become someone new when she finds the blog. She finds out that what she already was has a name, that other people share it, and that one of them has been writing about it, anonymously, all along.

It is easy to overstate what a word does, and easy to misdescribe it. A word does not create an identity. It changes what a person can say, to others and to herself. Before it, the only language Sakuko had been given for her experience was the language of absence, a failure to feel what she was supposed to feel. This Library has described what usually happens to an absence said aloud, in “Convenience Store Woman and the Pressure to Be Fixed”: the listener decides either that something must be wrong, or that the speaker simply has not met the right person yet, and not wanting is almost never heard as a complete answer. The series gives the second response a scene. In the third episode, friends from her school years tell her one after another, as if in chorus, that someday she will meet someone she likes and understand what love is.

The philosopher Elizabeth Brake coined an English word for the assumption behind that chorus. In her 2012 book on marriage and the law she called it amatonormativity, which she defines as “the widespread assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive, romantic, long-term coupled relationship, and that everyone is seeking such a relationship.” Among her examples of the assumption at work is a sentence Sakuko’s friends might have said: she hasn’t found the one yet. Yoshida’s own phrase for it, in Japanese, translates roughly as the supremacy of romance. Someday is how that supremacy answers everyone it cannot account for.

The word replaces someday with now. It also lets her read her own past differently. In the same episode, filling in a questionnaire Takahashi has given her, Sakuko remembers her time with Kazu: going along with kissing and with sex without understanding what they were meant to mean to her, and feeling nothing the script had promised. NHK opened that episode with a caption warning that it contained a depiction of sexual contact, a notice widely read as a courtesy to viewers for whom such scenes are hard, and Yoshida said publicly that she thought it a wonderful thing and hoped to see more notices like it.

The memory is not offered as the cause of who Sakuko is, and it would be a misreading to take it as one. It is evidence she already had. She had done what the story said a relationship contains, and it had told her nothing about wanting. Nobody in the memory is a villain; two people did what they understood relationships to be for. But going along is not the same as wanting, and the difference becomes visible only when somebody asks. That is where the series goes next.

Sakuko’s proposal is practical and a little funny, and the series lets it be both. She wants a family. She does not want romance or sex. She has found someone who wants neither. Why not try? Takahashi’s reasons for agreeing to a trial are ordinary ones. He has lived alone in his grandmother’s house since she died six months before, and a housemate will keep the neighbours from meddling. Nobody calls it destiny. They call it kazoku kakko kari, family followed by the character for provisional in brackets, the way a Japanese working title is marked as not yet final, and she moves in.

Then the series does its most quietly radical thing. In the third episode, so that the two of them can live together well, Takahashi gives Sakuko a questionnaire on asexuality. The questionnaire, which the consultants later published, asks whether she thinks she has romantic feelings; whether she has ever found anyone sexually attractive; whether she feels an aversion to touching other people, to being asked about her own romantic or sexual life, or to hearing about other people’s; whether she wants a partner, and whether she wants to live with anyone at all. At the top is a line saying that she need only answer the questions she can.

A couple in a love story learns each other by assumption: the script says what comes next, and both people follow it. A household with no script cannot do that. The questionnaire is the provisional family’s answer to the script, and the note at the top is its most important line. Nothing is assumed, everything is asked, and nobody has to answer what they cannot.

This Library has argued, in “What Intimacy Actually Is, What Long Partnerships Practise, and Whether Any of It Is a Need”, that being accurately known by at least one person is close to a human need, while partnered romantic or sexual intimacy is a preference of very wide distribution, not a universal requirement. The questionnaire is that distinction made into a household object: an instrument for being accurately known, with the romance and the sex left out. In the series, it works.

The series is exact about what the arrangement gives them. After the hardest stretch of the story, when Chizuru has told Sakuko why she disappeared and Sakuko has ended things with Kazu, she comes home and eats the meal Takahashi has made, crying, and he watches over her in silence and asks nothing. There is no romance in the scene and a great deal of care. The care is not a consolation prize for romance. It is what they built the household for.

Kishii Yukino described Sakuko before the broadcast in terms the series bears out: she likes people, being alone is lonely, and so she tries hard to make a family without romance. Aromantic does not mean cold. In a 2020 survey of people on or near the aromantic and asexual spectrum, run by the three people who later advised the series, most respondents named friends (73.6 per cent) and family (69.9 per cent) among those for whom they feel an affection with nothing romantic or sexual in it. The attachment is real. It is simply not shaped like a love story.

It would be easy to make the people around Sakuko and Takahashi into the joke. The series refuses, and the refusal is where its warmth comes from. Everyone who fails to understand the two of them has a reason, and most of them move.

Take her mother. Kodama Sakura tries hard not to press her daughter about marriage, and the hope comes through anyway; the series’ own synopsis calls her the mother who hurries Sakuko to marry, and calls the family home a place Sakuko found hard to stay in. When she thinks her daughter has brought a man home, her joy is not a trap. It is love in the only shape she was ever given to recognise it in. When that shape is taken away she is lost, and the series lets her stay lost for a long time. Sakuko’s father says little and worries. Neither of them is punished for not understanding. They are shown trying.

This Library has looked at this kind of pressure before, in “Late Spring, and the Marriage She Is Talked Into”: pressure with no single author, delivered as concern, which works precisely because it is gentle, since force produces a grievance and kindness produces a debt. Seventy-odd years on, the mechanism in Sakuko’s family is recognisably the same. What has changed is that Sakuko has a word. A word lets her answer concern without either giving in or starting a quarrel. She does not have to argue that she will be happy someday. She can say what she is now.

Then her sister. Minori’s marriage is the ordinary happiness the family hoped for, and in the second half of the series it fails her: her husband has an affair while she is pregnant with their second child. She turns up at the provisional family’s house, takes it out on her sister, and goes into labour there. Sakuko tells her she will be on her side whichever way she chooses, and the family, which could not make sense of Sakuko’s household, stands by Minori and turns the husband away, politely. The series does not underline the irony, and does not need to. The loyalty that pushed one daughter toward the script is the same loyalty that holds the other when the script breaks.

The heaviest reason belongs to Kadowaki Chizuru, Sakuko’s best friend since high school, a hairdresser, the friend who cancelled the flat share. The reason she gave at the time was an old boyfriend. Then she moved to another branch of her salon, in Odawara, and changed her number without a word. When Sakuko finds her there, Chizuru gives a different reason: she realised that what she felt for Sakuko was love, and she could not live beside someone who would never return it. She says they cannot go back to being friends. The series gives her pain exactly the seriousness it gives Sakuko’s. Two people can both be right about what they need, and still not be able to share a flat.

And Kazu. He is the series’ model of the person who asks every wrong question, and also its model of someone who changes. He stays a friend after the household of three breaks up, keeps the spare key and lets himself in, and in the last episode it is his encouragement that sends Sakuko back to talk things through with Takahashi. The man who began by refusing to accept what she told him ends by helping her say it.

Even the house has a script in it. Takahashi’s grandmother, whose house he will not leave, had wanted him to marry Haruka. The person who loved him most had hoped for the ordinary thing. The series does not make her wrong for hoping, and does not make him wrong for being unable to do it.

What follows is the ending. In the last episodes Takahashi is promoted to acting manager of his store, which takes him further than ever from the vegetables he loves. Haruka offers him a way into farming. He turns it down: he will not leave his grandmother’s house, and he does not want to give up the provisional family and be alone again. Sakuko cannot accept his refusal. Encouraged by Kazu, and by her mother, who tells her she hopes she will find her happiness as an aromantic asexual woman, she talks it through with him and finds an answer. She will stay and keep the house; he will go and grow vegetables. They do not need to live together to be a family, and they need not settle the relationship into anything final. The word provisional can stay. He accepts, in tears.

At the end he farms, far away; she lives in the house; they keep in touch. Sakuko calls her days thoroughly satisfying, expects that people will go on objecting, and says that her happiness is hers to decide. The last words are hers.

A love story ends by fixing its form. The wedding, the moving in, the promise of forever: the last scene tells the audience what shape the relationship will have from now on, and the shape is meant to be permanent. This ending does the opposite, on purpose. It changes the form, so that two people who lived together now live apart, and it keeps the relationship, and it declines to promote the relationship to a finished word. Provisional, which began as a trial, is kept as a principle.

That is this essay’s claim about the word. Provisional is honest in a way that permanent cannot be. A family that calls itself provisional has admitted that it will have to be decided again, and has committed itself to the deciding. That is what the questionnaire was, and it is what the conversation at the end is: the same act, asking instead of assuming, done at a larger scale. The promise here is not forever. It is that they will keep asking each other what shape this should take, and keep answering.

The house matters for the same reason. It is neither of their parents’ houses. It belonged to a woman who loved Takahashi and hoped he would marry, and it becomes the home of a family quite unlike the one she hoped for. Sakuko keeping it is not presented as a sacrifice; it is her answer, offered so that he can go. The distance matters too. In a love story, distance is the obstacle the story exists to overcome. Here it is simply part of the arrangement. The family is the attention they keep paying, not the address they share.

Before the broadcast, the series’ key image showed the two of them standing halfway up a flight of steps, and NHK said the picture was meant to hold, within a single world, the many unclear boundaries between friend, lover, family and colleague. Halfway up is where the series leaves them. It is not a failure to arrive.

The provisional family has no legal form. Nobody in the series files anything, and the series never asks the law to recognise them; it asks the people around them. That is a choice worth noticing, because the gap it leaves is real.

This Library set out that gap in “Shoplifters, and the Family That Chose Each Other and Was Not Recognised”: a relationship can be real, daily and costly and load-bearing, and still invisible to every institution that might have to act on it, because real and recognised are two different properties that usually travel together. The family in that film was real and unregistered in the most dangerous circumstances. Sakuko and Takahashi’s is real and unregistered in the gentlest: two adults, no crime, nothing anyone could object to except that it does not look like a family.

What the series asks for instead is recognition from the people who matter, and it gets some: a mother’s hope spoken aloud, an old boyfriend who keeps the key, a sister who comes to their door when her own marriage fails. That is a great deal, and it is not everything. A household with no legal standing has less protection when something goes wrong, and praising its openness can make a lack sound like a choice. The series does not pretend otherwise. It simply declines to make the law its subject, and this essay leaves the gap where the series leaves it, noted and unresolved.

One more thing belongs to this series as a story about a woman on screen. In a romantic drama, a heroine’s story is usually measured by a man’s arrival. Here the man arrives in the first episode and is not the point. The women around Sakuko each stand in a different relation to the script: a mother who keeps it, a sister it fails, a friend whose love it cannot make happy, and a woman who runs her own company and tells the man she was once meant to marry to go and live his own life. The story itself is measured by Sakuko’s words: the word she finds, the word she refuses to give up, and the last words of the series, which are hers.

The series went out when the words were new to most of its audience. One of the consultants said afterwards that it mattered simply that it was broadcast while so few people knew them, and thought many viewers had learned the words from the drama itself.

What figures exist come from careful, recent work. In January and February 2019, a research team led by Kamano Saori of the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research surveyed residents of Osaka aged 18 to 59, drawn at random from the city’s resident register. Of the 4,285 people who responded, 0.8 per cent, thirty-three people, chose the answer asexual, which the form glossed as a person with no seiai feelings toward anyone, seiai being a Japanese word that holds romantic and sexual love together. Another 7.5 per cent said they did not understand the question. The researchers describe a random-sample estimate of this kind as having almost no precedent in Japan, and they warn that it cannot be generalised beyond the city’s 18- to 59-year-olds. It is a small number, and a real one.

That single word is worth pausing on, because the series spends eight episodes pulling it apart. The consultants note that in Japan asexual was long used to mean having neither romantic feelings nor sexual attraction, and that the habit of naming the romantic and the sexual separately settled first in English-speaking communities and has been taken up in Japan more recently. Two People Who Don't Fall in Love taught the separated vocabulary on national television on Monday nights, and it did so with characters who need both halves: the two at its centre are aromantic and asexual, Chizuru’s love is romantic, and at a meetup in the sixth episode there is a man who is romantic and asexual and thinks he may have met the perfect partner.

None of this is a Japanese peculiarity. Brake’s word was coined in English, in a book about marriage and the law, and the pressure it names is familiar in many places. What is specific to the series is the texture. The assumption arrives through a supermarket promotion, a family dinner, a colleague’s misreading and the neighbours’ curiosity, the ordinary institutions of one particular life rather than any national character. A reader who lives between languages may have met the English words first and the Japanese ones later. The series is a reminder that the Japanese words exist too, and that they were made with care, by people who needed them.

There are several ways this essay could be wrong, and the first two come from the people the series is about.

First, the ending can be read as putting the family back at the centre. For an aromantic or asexual person who wants no household at all, a story that ends with the two of them still a family can look like the romance script with the romance removed: still a pair, still the unit everything else is measured against. The series half-answers this. At the meetup in the sixth episode, one woman says she has never thought about living with anyone because she is happy and satisfied on her own, and another describes a partnership in which the two of them do not live together. The consultants say they asked for as wide a range as possible to be shown: people who enjoy living alone, people unsure of their own label, romantic asexual people, partners who live apart, partners of the same sex. Six aromantic or asexual people, mainly people who had agreed to be interviewed beforehand, appeared on screen as the meetup’s participants.

The survey those consultants ran in 2020, of 1,685 people who identify with or wonder about the aromantic and asexual spectrum, asked whether they would like a partner in a relationship that is neither romantic nor sexual. About half said they would like one such partner. Nearly a quarter said they wanted none. It was a self-selected online survey and cannot say how common any answer is. But it says plainly that the provisional family is one answer among several, and one scene at a meetup cannot carry all the others.

Second, the series places a man and a woman at its centre, the pairing everyone around them reads as a couple, and its comedy depends on that misreading. Two women, or one person alone, would have needed other machinery. The consultants themselves said after the broadcast that the series could not show everything about aromantic and asexual lives, that parts of it felt insufficient, and that there were things in it to criticise as well as to praise. That is a fair review, and it came from inside.

Third, the series is gentle, and gentleness has a cost. Its family comes round; its jealous ex learns; its hardest rejection, Chizuru’s, is delivered with grace. Many families do not come round, and a story in which understanding arrives over eight episodes can make it look easier than it is. The low voice the award committee praised is also a voice that never has to shout. A viewer whose own family has not moved is entitled to find the series kinder than her life.

Fourth, and aimed at this essay: calling provisional the honest word may be flattery of a limit. The provisional family is provisional partly because nothing in law or custom would let it be anything else, and turning a lack into a virtue is exactly what a comfortable reader does. The narrower claim survives. The series chose to keep the word when it could have promoted the relationship to something grander, and that choice deserves to be taken seriously. Whether provisional would be the right word for anyone else is theirs to say, not this essay’s.

This Library’s position, stated plainly. Being aromantic or asexual is a way of being a person, not a symptom, a wound, a phase, or a problem waiting for the right partner to solve it. A life not built on romance or sex is not a lesser life, and the family someone builds without them is not a lesser family. The Library has argued before that partnered romantic or sexual intimacy is a preference of very wide distribution rather than a universal need. This series is the most complete dramatisation of that argument this Library knows, and it adds what the argument lacked: a picture of what gets built in the space. A household made by asking.

What it teaches reaches beyond the two of them, without making their lives a lesson for anybody else. Every relationship runs partly on assumption. Couples assume they want what the script says they want, and families and friends assume it for them. The questionnaire at the centre of this series shows what it looks like to stop assuming, and the line at its top, answer only what you can, is a better account of consent than most relationships ever write down.

If you are aromantic or asexual, or think you might be, or are not sure the words fit: the series does not ask you to be Sakuko or Takahashi. At its meetup some of the name tags were left blank, and that was allowed too. What would you write on the questionnaire, if someone handed it to you? And to whom would you want to hand it?

If you are the mother at the table, or the friend who promised someday, or the former partner who still has a key: what would it take to ask a question you do not already know the answer to? Is there someone in your life you have been waiting for, kindly, to become someone else?

And if you have been asked, at a wedding or a family dinner or a leaving party, whether there is anyone yet: which of your relationships run on assumption, and which on asking? Is there one you would like to make provisional in the series’ sense, not less real, but open to being decided again? The last words of the series belong to a woman who expects people to go on objecting and has decided that her happiness is hers to decide. You are allowed the same sentence.