‘After The Rain’ Is Not About Love. It Is About Helping.
Given that Jun Mayuzuki’s final volumes have yet to be released, this article will exclusively be about the events occurred in the anime adaptation.
Anime Adaptation. Through ‘After The Rain’, Mayuzuki genuinely focuses on how two seemingly different characters unconsciously help each other to get back on the right tracks of life.
I’m sure it’ll stop raining soon. Masami Kondo
Have you ever come across a book whose summary did not fully represent the story? I have, and After The Rain is certainly one of them. Summing up the latter without being cheesy is far from being easy — an aspect that might be observed through After The Rain’s Wikipedia page:
After the Rain tells the story of Akira Tachibana, a high school student working part-time at a family restaurant, who starts falling in love with the manager, a forty five year old divorcee with a young son. Akira struggles to determine why she is falling for Masami, and whether or not to reveal her feelings to him.
At first glance, it might be tempting to argue that After The Rain is all about simple love. A young girl falling in love with a man older than her is not what we could call an original story. It has been surely done a countless time — in every imaginable as well as possible mediums — and it will be surely done again in the future.
This is the kind of statement that you may have by only paying attention to the summary. Though important, the aspect of love only appears to be secondary in the eyes of Jun Mayuzuki who instead prefers focusing his full attention on how crucial interactions are in the reconstruction of his two main characters — Masami Kondo and Akira Tachibana.
At first appearing as a nice and clumsy fellow, Masami Kondo quickly appears to be a character living constantly in the regret — unable to forgive himself for what he has done in the past — and the What-ifs.
If forgiveness was a coin, being forgiven would surely be one of its sides. Making a mistake and seeking forgiveness for the latter is surely a common situation happened to anyone that Mr Kondo knows pretty well. During his youth, The Garden’s manager used to write a lot and had even sworn to dedicate his life to literature. However, being obnubilated by this activity made him lose sight of the most important and, as said by Mr Kondo himself, ultimately ‘hurt the people around him’.
Nonetheless, few people seem to hold any grudge of what Mr Kondo has done in the past or — it has never been clearly demonstrated in the anime. In this case, is there really anything to forgive if the people that he has hurt do not blame him for what he has done?
The problem encountered with forgiveness is its two-dimensional concept. Being forgiven is often combined with forgiving oneself. The latter notion might be complicated to deal with because it is purely an individual problem. In other words, a given person often has to take care of this problem all alone. Thus, even if an individual has already been forgiven, it does not mean that he left the cycle of forgiveness — he has yet to forgive himself to definitely quit it.
And if you don’t quit, consequences might impact the way you’re acting with others.
People-pleaser. The actions committed by Mr Kondo in the past have made him become a people-pleaser, that is, an individual who is regarded as nice and helpful to anyone. The problem with this kind of profile is that they tend to put the needs of others before their owns. By the way, in one episode, Mr Kondo tells Akira: ‘When you reach the forties, you try not to attract too much attention and, especially, not disturbing people around you.’. Mr Kondo does not think about him first but acts according to what people think about him. But does he really want that? It is yet to be proved.
Strangely enough, Mr Kondo might be complementary to the character appeared in The Silent Voice — Shōya Ishida. Both seek forgiveness for what they have done in the past so that it had rendered them people-pleaser. In the same way, they’ve both known a moment of passive-aggressive behaviour.
Mr Kondo has known this moment with Akira. While the latter was praising him for what he was passionate about, Mr Kondo coldly replied ‘You know nothing of me’ to her whereas the rain was still dripping outside.
Mr Kondo is, therefore, a character deeply regretting his past. Nonetheless, in term of complexness, I would choose Akira Tachibana over him.
During my first viewing of After The Rain, I could not help but think that the character of Tachibana was not as developed as Mr Kondo. Nonetheless, it did not mean that I considered her as being a bad character. Her background story remained quite credible, her clumsiness about love was adorable and her beautifulness did not cease to amaze me. And yet, despite all her assets, she did not fully succeed to draw my total attention. To my eyes, she was good but too simple. In short, she appeared to lack something that Mr Kondo possessed. Depth.
I now realize that the only being who was truly simple was my own self. Back then, what I believed to be everything of her was only her surface. Tachibana indeed possesses a depth. But the latter can be only discovered if we pay attention to Tachibana’s youthfulness.
Tachibana is 17 and, therefore, in the very middle of what we call the period of adolescence. Consequently, like many teenagers, she seems not to know what she wants to do and how to properly express her emotions.
Love is naturally a complex feeling. However, in the case of Tachibana, this feeling appears to be more intricate. Tachibana loves Mr Kondo. But that one-sided love has often appeared to me as quite innocent — almost childish. In some episodes, Tachibana might be seen as drawing Mr Kondo’s face in her notebook or trying to get a talisman toy from a grab machine so as to have more chance with the Garden’s manager. A behaviour which oddly sounds of what many of us were doing as children. However, the love that Tachibana holds for Mr Kondo is somehow permeated with deep resolve. In love, I hope not to be the only one thinking that we rarely choose with whom we are going to fall. By the way, the simple fact to explain for which reasons we have chosen this person instead of another one often turns out to be tricky the majority of the time. Tachibana could have fallen in love with a classmate but her heart rather chose to Masami. For which reasons? We have no real answer. As told by Akira to Masami: “Must there be a reason to like someone?”.
In the same way, Mayuzuki wittily engages in not revealing Tachibana’s thoughts too much. Thus, throughout the anime, it is relevant to notice that Masami’s thoughts are clearly accessible to the watcher while Tachibana’s ones inexplicably remain closed. Unattainable. At first, I vaguely believed that it was because of Akira’s gloominess. In reality, it might be more judicious to once again link this fact to Akira’s youthfulness.
Teenagers tend to rarely express what they want. Moreover, though it is not exclusively reserved for this life phase, it often seems to be more intricate to know what is going on in a teenager’s head than a grown-up’s one.
A notorious example of that turns out to be how Tachibana deals with her Achilles Tendon Rupture. Getting such an injury as such a young age is obviously dramatic — especially if we take into account Tachibana’s privileged position in her high school’s track and field team. The scariest aspect of this injury is not the surgery in itself, it is its long rehabilitation. And the longer the latter, the more likely questions will pop up in one’s head. ‘What did it happen to me?’ ‘Am I going to be able to run again?’ ‘Will I regain my bygone days’ level?’ ‘And if this injury happens to me again?’. In the worst case, a hatred for the sport might follow develop — provoking the incapacity of one to play the sport has once loved so much. However, such thoughts seem to have never crossed Akira’s mind. Or, at least, it has never been shown on the screen
The only time where Akira somehow states her uneasiness vis-à-vis her injury was with Mr Kondo. In this scene, Akira shoots to the Garden’s manager that ‘she has nothing else to do’ apart from her job at the family restaurant and her high-school duty. Then clearly rejecting a possible return to the track-and-field team.
Nonetheless, Tachibana’s statement does not seem to add up if we thoroughly analyze some of her actions.
A peculiar scene shows a quasi-parallelism of construction between Tachibana and the track-and-field team. Indeed, while the latter is running on the school training, the former is also seen running for a few seconds on the pedestrian before stopping herself from pain. In the same way, Tachibana is seen helping Kota to get better at track-and-field as well as running after a client to get his phone back to him while not having accomplished any rehabilitation.
To sum up, her actions often alter her sayings. Tachibana probably wants to run but she seems to be quite oblivious of this fact.
By the bye, it is those two concepts which link Akira and Mr Kondo. Thus, while the latter is often moved by Akira’s actions, the former will be often touched by Mr Kondo’s wiseness and words towards her.
Both are helping one another but they seem to be unaware of this fact. And that’s what makes After The Rain so significant. Neither of the two expects to receive something from the other.
After The Rain is currently available on Amazon Prime Video since January 2018.
