The Island
I cried through the last episodes of Barakamon. Me—this bearded guy with a belly and a sharp mouth. Not because anything legendarily dramatic happened in those twelve episodes, but because the characters had gotten under my skin in a way that normally takes other shows years to pull off.
The setup is as ordinary as it gets. Seishu, a failed calligrapher, gets exiled from Tokyo to some backwater island to fix his art style, and he absolutely hates it. The place is full of yokels, his house is falling apart, and there’s this six-year-old girl named Naru who seems specifically designed to drive him insane.
You know how this story goes. Seishu gradually befriends the locals despite being kind of an asshole. He starts to realize that living on this sweat-soaked island is giving him exactly what he needed to work. And Naru, that relentless little pest, works her way into his cold, depressed, essentially dead heart.
There’s a genuinely dramatic moment near the end that I won’t spoil, but by then it doesn’t matter because you’ve already fallen completely for every person on that island. Miwa with her reckless energy. Ikko, the school principal who’s always smoking and passionately into fish. Hina, Naru’s sweet, painfully shy best friend.
I think about how anime does this—compresses emotion into thirty minutes so tightly that there’s nowhere for it to go except straight through you. You’re laughing at Tamako, the unhinged manga aunt who sees hidden homosexual drama in everything, and then suddenly you’re anxious watching young Kosuke confront Seishu about losing his style, and then you’re watching Naru come home and… I actually can’t talk about what happens. It’s too much.
About Naru—I wanted to adopt that kid immediately. There’s nothing forced or precocious about her, just genuine joyfulness and these complete observations about the world that make you realize how complicated yours has become.
By the end of it, all I wanted was to pack up and move to that exact island. Leave the stress, the pressure, all the bitterness. Live something quiet and real with Naru and Miwa and Ikko and the rest of them, far from all this.