series review: One Week Friends

Summary

Yuki Hase has notice that a girl in his class, Kaori Fujimiya, spends a lot of time alone and has no friends, so he decides to try to become friends with her, and with a little persistence after an initial refusal, a bit of a friendship develops between them. But as the school week ends, Kaori tells him the reason why she doesn't really want to be friends with anyone. She suffers from a strange form of amnesia. For a past few years, every Monday morning when she wakes up she has lost all memories from the week before of her friends and any time she has spent with them. Hase isn't sure if this is true, until he meets her at school on Monday and sees that she really has no idea of who he is, and he has to start over again in winning her friendship.

A few weeks go by, and with the help of a couple of other friends, Kaori begins to open up around others in the class, making new friends, and her memory seem to be improving. Then someone who knew her when they were children shows up again, and seems to be angry with her for some strange reason. Meeting him causes her memory problems to relapse, and she again forgets who Hase and her other friends are. Fighting discouragement, Hase continues to try to help Kaori, and he eventually finally learns what really happened on the day that Kaori's memory problems began.

Friends of Friends

A special mention should be made of the two friends of the main characters, Shogo Kiryu and Sagi Yamagishi, whom I respectively and affectionately think of as The Vulcan and The Space Cadet. Shogo is a friend of Hase's when the series begin, and his serious and logical demeanor provides some support for Hase's more up-and-down temperament. Sagi is a girl who shows up a few episodes in, and her own more conventional forgetfulness, laid-back personality, and occasional ignoring of other's personal space does give the anime some light-hearted moments.

Love is...

I don't want to go too far in comparing Hase's concern for Kaori to what the Bible says about love in I Corinthians 13, but a bit of a look might be good. And just to be clear, I'm not using “love” here in the strictly romantic sense, but more for a concern for another person's good.

For example, let's take “love is patient and kind”. There are times when Hase displays these things very well. He tries to be very understand of Kaori's difficulties, both with her memories and with the problems that can cause other people. He is the one who suggests that she start keeping a diary that she can read to remind herself of what she's forgotten, and even spend considerable time and effort trying to find it for her when she has lost it and forgotten about it.

On the other hand, he has bouts of jealousy, too. He wants Kaori to be like a normal student with lots of other friends, but as she begins to make these new friends, he begins to fear that his friendship with her is becoming less special. This jealousy causes a bit of conflict early on between them.

Or look at where I Corinthians 13 says that love bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things, and then look at the last couple of episodes, where they learn what happened to Kaori as a child that caused her memory to be bonkers. At this point, Hase stumbles a little, as he gives in to a fear that somehow him being close to Kaori might hurt her and lead to a return of her memory problems. This does get corrected, and the series ends on a nice, satisfying note.

Conclusion

Anime doesn't have the best of reputations when it comes to hot it handles these kind of stories, and to be fair, the problems are often too real. Gratuitous fan service, hyper-sexualizing characters who are little more then children, annoying harems, and other tropes are far too common and far too distasteful.

So, it's good to say that such things are absent from this series. Instead of relying on those things, this series has a solid story with believable and sympathetic characters. True, Kaori's amnesia does seem contrived, though I know mental problems can be very tricky so I can't say this kind of thing has never happened, but if you can suspend you disbelief concerning her memory problems, then I think you'll have few other problems.

I give this series a very strong recommendation.

a bit of music: Grandpa Voted Democrat by Ray Stevens

Save The Snowflakes!

What is the Gospel? by Michael Horton

a bit of music: Solar Fields, Cobalt 2.5

Don't know if I'm ready to say this is better than the original Cobalt, which I like a lot, but it's still good. Enjoy.

Lunacy in Writing: Stop telling a story, you storyteller

If you've tried to write a story and have let be evaluated, you've likely been hit with the chestnut of advice, “Show, don't tell”. The use of this bit of advice can become so extreme that you might need to fight back the temptation to tell the people saying this to you that, if they really want to be shown the story, they should put down the book and go watch the movie.

Now, I've no doubt there is a time and place for this advice. There are times when “Tom watched a scary movie” needs something more, like “Tom sat on the couch, his eyes wide and fixed on the television, as the movie monster stalked its next victim through the dark, fog-filled forest.”

But I also think this advice can be given wrongly, too.

One way is by insisting on needless physical descriptions when something plain and basic could work just as well. For example, take the phrase “She felt nervous”. Maybe not a great sentence, but functional, and even appropriate in some situations. But “show, don't tell” people would insist on being shown her nervousness, by having writers tell about sweating palms, twitching eyes, stammering speech, or any of the other many manifestations of nervousness a person might have.

And there will be times when such descriptions are good, too, when they actually do add something to the story. Maybe when she is nervous, she starts lisping, and that lisp plays a part in the story. Or maybe her eyes do start twitching, and that affects her vision when she gets nervous, and that's important to the story.

But to just go into such physical descriptions, without any good reason relevant to the story, simply doesn't seem smart. Why insist on mentioning sweating palms or some other nervous twitches when they are not important? If saying “She felt nervous” will tell us all we need to know, then it seems like that should be enough.

Another way gets back to the bit of sarcasm in the first paragraph, the one about those who want to be shown a story should watch the movie. That was facetious, yes, but it does point to the idea that it seems like “show, don't tell” insists that all the elements and events in the story should involve only how character's act or say, with some room for scene descriptions thrown in.

But that's not how good story writing works. Reading a story is not the same as watching one, either on TV or in a movie. Each has it's own strengths and weaknesses, and one of the big strengths of writing is that it allows the reader to get into the heads of the characters, to see their thoughts and motivations.

Again, let's take “She was nervous”. While going into physical descriptions might be helpful, there may be other information that would be good to know, too, that can't be conveyed by physical actions alone. “She stood five feet from the cliff's edge, too nervous to walk any closer, feeling dizzy even this close to the long fall”. “She knew it was silly and childish, but she still felt nervous when she saw him him walking over to her table, hoping he would remember it was her birthday”. We start to understand her a little better this way.

A few months ago, I got the CD discs for the series Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon, from Great Courses, and I think listening to that series has helped me understand better what might really be behind “show, don't tell”. It's the idea that we should be more descriptive in our writing, going into greater details, skillfully adding necessary information to our stories and writing. Landon would likely put it differently then I have here, and goes more into methods and mechanics and I would greatly recommend his lectures as being very helpful. While I'm not so sure that longer sentences are always is needed, especially some of the rambling ones Landon mentions at times, it does seem like that notion of making longer sentences to give the reader more information is pointing in the right direction.

a bit of humorous music: Yoda doesn't like seagulls