Spring 2021 First Impressions – Koikimo

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Manga

Story Summary: Ryo Amakusa is an attractive businessman (and a known womanizer), but he finds most of the women around him to be tiresome and annoying. One morning he nearly falls down a staircase on his way to work, but is snagged by his collar at the last moment by a high school girl. Later that day Ryo discovers that this girl, Ichika, is his younger sister Rio’s friend when he meets her again at their apartment. That’s when the “fun” begins. Ryo becomes infatuated with Ichika, because she doesn’t fawn over him like the adult women he encounters at work and on the street. “By chance” the two keep encountering one-another and Ryo’s persistence doesn’t seem as though it will wane, much to Ichika’s distress. In Ryo’s case, “no” means “keep bothering her until she changes her mind.”

Impressions: So, I don’t know how many of you out there enjoy cooking, but one thing I enjoy making from time-to-time are home-made hamburgers. There’s just something nice about being able to season the meat the way you want it and to cook it to perfection (whatever that means to you). But one thing about cooking, especially with raw, somewhat fatty meat, is that the act of searing in the deliciousness results in some less-than-tasty by-products. The grease left on your pan is something you have to deal with but which you generally wipe up and throw in the garbage, leaving behind nothing but a delicious meal. Perhaps some of you might have seen 2018’s After the Rain, a story that begins with a high school student harboring a crush on her much older boss. There are moments of discomfort before you realize that the story isn’t meant to be an age-gap romance, but rather a parallel story of two different people taking inspiration from one-another in their effort to move on from hardship. If After the Rain is the hamburger, then Koikimo is the grease, the inedible garbage leftover from something well-cooked; something that if you consume it, it’s bound to make you throw up.

I can only guess how many people reading this review may have found themselves in a situation where they were romantically pursued, seemingly out of the blue, by someone to whom they weren’t also attracted. It happened to me many years ago, so let me try to convey through a story just how uncomfortable it is. A fellow student of mine at my high school got my phone number from someone and started calling me after school on the daily. I thought he just wanted to be friends because we both liked video games and it wasn’t like we’d never spoken in person, so I would talk with him to be nice. It was after that where things started to become really uncomfortable. He bought me flowers and some small piece of jewelry; I didn’t know what to do with them and felt completely cornered and vulnerable by that point. “Consent” was not the known concept that it is now, and I felt trapped into “being nice” and “giving him a chance” because he’d spent money on me, even though (at least in my eyes) the chemistry clearly wasn’t there. I was afraid to tell him to buzz off because I was afraid of prompting a violent response, even though at that time I don’t think I could have directly articulated that and just simply felt nervous about what could happen. I went out on one date with him, and it was one of the more memorably uncomfortable moments of my life. I’d been working at my cashier job all day and spent the evening trying to summon the energy to deal with this one date while my throat was dry and all I could do was cough and cough while choking on the conversation. Thinking about it still makes me cringe. I was lucky that it seemed to finally come to an end after that.

Watching this episode, watching Ichika struggle with unwanted attention from a grown adult man, brought those tense, nauseating feelings rushing back to me. Because while I’ve been in the position of dealing with unwanted attention and gifts as I’ve mentioned, I’ve also been in the position of being victimized by an adult man many years my senior. And in this show, that seems to be a joke worth telling, again and again and again. I don’t know why, in this day and age, this story of a man stalking and harassing a girl is being framed as a comedy, but I suppose there’s just no explanation for some things.

Also, Rio, Ryo’s younger sister and “friend” to Ichika, is an enabler. Gross.

Pros: You know, I almost always try to find something positive about the things that I watch, but I’m having a really difficult time with this one.

Cons: This cutely-portrayed story of an adult stalking a teenage child just feels gross all-around. I often lament the fact that there are storytellers who seem completely oblivious to the kind of pain people have to deal with when living their lives. While I strongly believe in people’s right to tell the stories they want to tell, I also believe in my right to criticize them for missing the mark, and this is one of those times. It just sucks when your personal pain gets trivialized, and I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way toward this story.

Content Warnings: Mild sexual imagery. Stalking. Harassment through giving unwanted gifts and making unwanted phone calls. Age-gap relationship. Grooming behavior (and adults failing to identify it).

Would I Watch More? – No, I find this concept pretty vile, and I don’t feel the need to upset myself on a weekly basis.