Twenty Years and I Still Miss Nami

Back when One Piece was running in afternoon anime blocks and I had nothing better to do than absorb episodes one after another, I was essentially a member of Monkey D. Luffy’s crew. I knew the Grand Line like the back of my hand—which Devil Fruits did what, which arc was building to which confrontation, where Nami’s navigation charts would take us next. It all lived in my head with the comfortable permanence of geography.

Then the show migrated to late-night slots, the filler arcs multiplied, and somewhere between trying to catch up on One Piece manga volumes and following storylines that had clearly moved on without me, I had to let go. When I watched a few episodes while in Tokyo and discovered they’d rebooted the early arcs with updated animation, I felt more lost than nostalgic. The world had kept sailing. I was standing on the dock.

Still. One Piece holds a corner of my heart that nothing since has quite reached—specifically Nami, who was always the smartest person on the ship and knew it. The early episodes have that quality of things you loved when you had unlimited time and no self-consciousness about how you were spending it.

Uniqlo is marking the series’ 20th anniversary with a line of shirts built around Luffy and the crew, and something about that number just sits right. Twenty years. The Straw Hats are still out there. I fell behind somewhere in the Grand Line, but I’m glad the ship kept going.