Review of Tsukigakirei

Romance stories usually deal with the love between two people. Even when more than two people are involved in love triangles and such, most of the time the story is about which pairing will end up being the pairing. Aside from this kind of love, however, we sometimes lose sight of the other people who love us in life. Family, friends. Of course, when we get into this area, we have crossed genres entirely. Tsukigakirei is about the love between two people. And in a sense, these two people will be the main focus of the story throughout. However, the usual way this focus is appliedin many romance anime, nowadays, seems to be to focus just on these people who are involved in the actual romance, and maybe one or two support characters who only get to be there because they will have a direct effect on the romance. Any tension or drama that is generated will arise from misunderstandings (which over repeated usage at best make the characters seem a bunch of idiots, and at worst leads the audience to start questioning the skills of the writer), love rivalry, or just poor luck or bad situations.

There is more to our lives than our boy/girlfriends, however. Even as a middle school student, you have a social circle, your own hobbies, ambitions, obligations (and as a side note, activities could fit into several of these categories), and of course, your family, who try to keep your best interests at heart, but that sometimes means they push you into making a particular choice, and sometimes means they will disagree with your (in hindsight, perhaps a bad) decision. Maybe this kind of drama is not as exciting, but in Tsukigakirei, it resonates.

While watching this, I enjoyed watching two people play the game of romance. It is for this purpose that we enjoy romance stories, after all. But equally, I enjoyed watching two people try to get through middle school life, with all its various obligations, at the same time. I will note that I say "people" here, not "characters", because at some point, I became heavily invested in these two, for a variety of reasons, though I believe the largest of which is that I got to see their circle of friends, and their supporting families. These are the people who we also love, though perhaps in a different way, and I could see that they were as important to each other as the people I care about in my own life.

One final thing. Tsukigakirei has, as far as I can recall, no internal monologue. We never know what any of the people are thinking other than what we see displayed on their faces, or what they say out loud. Because complex misunderstandings leading to fights between couples is not what this story is about. And because the writer and the animators are skilled enough that they can show us information about what these people are going through, without having the character explicitly spell it out for us.

The moon is beautiful, isn't it?