#197: Dear Brother (1991-2)

 

Director: Osamu Dezaki

Screenplay: Hideo Takayashiki and Tomoko Konparu

Based on the manga by Riyoko Ikeda

Voice Cast: Hiroko Kasahara as Nanako Misonô, Keiko Toda as Kaoru "Kaoru no Kimi" Orihara, Kenyuu Horiuchi as Takashi Ichinomiya, Mami Koyama as Fukiko "Miya-sama" Ichinomiya, Masako Katsuki as Aya Misaki, Sakiko Tamagawa as Mariko Shinobu, Sumi Shimamoto as Rei "Hana no Saint-Just" Asaka, Tesshō Genda as Takehiko Henmi, Waka Kanda as Tomoko Arikura

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

It is sad knowing Dear Brother is an obscure title. Thankfully, over the decades, the show has been more readily accessible in the West, but even in 2021 when they announced a Blu Ray release in the United States, classic anime distributors and restorers Discotek Media even kindly warned fans that theirs would be a limited print run due to the rights. The interesting thing is that, with fingers crossed, Dear Brother will one day become a much more talked about show, hopefully a more readily accessible one as word of mouth grew. Considering how much the industry has changed, this lavish NHK produced production by directorial auteur Osamu Dezaki and based on a work by Riyoko Ikeda, a high school melodrama, time has made this nowadays ready for an audience.

Everything, and everyone working on this thirty nine episode series, succeeded and I will say this now immediately, but since Osamu Dezaki was the figure who brought me to this series, not Riyoko Ikeda who this is my first introduction too, he warrants his own credit. A working director, prolific until his 2011 death, Dezaki worked in countless genres of anime, and he was a collaborator, especially when his work with character designer Akio Sugino is some of his most acclaimed work. Even that pair, let alone Dezaki himself, were not always successful, as whilst (especially in its English dub), the OVA Sword of Truth (1990) is not a "great" work of samurai pulp, which is funnier now knowing it was released only a year before Dear Brother. But when he succeeded, he hit it out of the park, and a huge reason why he deserves auteur status is he had trademarks, both a taste for melodrama, and also distinct artistic touches. The "postcard memory" is his most famous, uses throughout Dear Brother multiple times in single episodes, cuts to more detailed still shots at moments to heighten the drama. It is strange that, yes, due to his working style, Dezaki could have this high school drama, set at an all-girls school Seiran Academy and focused almost entirely on young women, but also have adapted Golgo 13, Takao Saito's very macho and adult assassin manga, for the sleazy and over-the-top 1983 theatrical film, but like that film being unexpectedly experimental and artistically bold, Dear Brother is as bold and dynamic in its own way. He was an eclectic figure, working on classic literature to pulp manga, even adapting Herman Melville and the Old Testament.

Whilst thirty nine episodes is a large scale to work with, the plot of Dear Brother could have been told in thirteen. Where that length comes into play, alongside being a rare experience as someone who normally does not watch long length shows frequently, is that Dear Brother is a slow burn drama which leads you to experience one school year of Nanako, a new graduate who will struggle through bullying, her conflicting relationship with the sorority she is inducted into, and the struggles of the classmates she means, including her own complicated family history as she pens letters to Takehiko Henmi, a teacher she bonded with but does not realise is her step brother. The length of the show in itself means Dear Brother will breathe, allowing you to engage with these characters, and wrench every little moment of heartbreak and angst for what it's worth.

Writing to her "brother" throughout the narrative, and also the narrator, Nanako is thankfully not a generic lead, her own conflicts and self-doubts in herself fleshing her out, but she is as much a bystander to a world where even people who do detestable things in this school environment are shown to be flawed figures you will eventually sympathise with, their bullying or even their questionable behaviour due to pressures, neurosis, or eventually causing incredible guilt. Even a stabbing in the arm becomes less a moment of someone committing a criminal act in class, but a moment of the glass ceiling finally breaking. The bleakness of the show, when it does not pull punches, is to be emphasised in how it tackles subjects like suicide, enough that for the 2021 Blu-Ray release Discotek does include messages on the discs before you reach the menus, recommending suicide help lines for any viewers affected by the content. The show drastically juxtaposes its flawed human heart with its elegance, the opening credits a montage of symbolic images pulled from Western iconography - porcelain dolls, elaborate gowns, and in mind to Riyoko Ikeda's other famous series being The Rose of Versailles, a manga adapted to anime around the French Revolution, a lot clearly indebted to that era of French culture. That will even play out in direct nods as, among the many figures we will encounter, one girl named Rei Asaka is even nicknamed "Saint-Just" after Louis de Saint-Just, a real historical figure from that time whose own tragic end in actual history shadows a metaphor for the young woman bequeathed that name.

By the fourth or fifth episode you are already aware of how heightened this show will be, when a flower arranging tool dubbed the "Spiked Frog", a literal pad with metal spikes, is deliberately dropped on someone's hand, but the show will force you to see how these characters became how they are, even those seemingly monstrous like Fukiko Ichinomiya, the head of the sorority whose cold demeanour and her sorority's draconian "dog-eat-dog" mentality of forcing girls to fighting and backstab each other for entry is inherently evil. Contrasting them are Saint Just herself, a very masculine figure Nanako becomes close to, looking in her suit clothes like the self-destructive libertine artistic of 18th century Western culture with a drug habit and death wish to match and contrast her nobility. A star who gathers other girls in the school around her in crushes of idolisation, her mirror and best friend is "Prince" Kaori, nicknamed after a character in The Tale of Genji, another star of the school, both in prescience and being a basketball star, whose severe medical issues place her in a fragile place contrasted by her strong will, antagonistic to Fukiko's sorority and a hero to Nanako in moments of danger.

Alongside Nanako's childhood friend Tomoko is also Mariko, who at first to a modern viewer, with her clingy nature, and what can only be seen as an early episode of her being obsessive in a toxic and sexual, may ring alarm bells of her being a predatory lesbian stereotype, but again this show comes from a source which is more progressive and intelligent than this. Mariko's back-story, when fleshed out, makes her a very sympathetic character, alongside the fact, knowing this is based on a 1975 manga, and an early nineties anime series, this show does not hide at all how much of the show is an LGBTQ narrative even if characters stayed heterosexual and one even marries in a Western church in the final episodes. Crushes among classmates and peers are common, and with Nanako crushing over Saint Just especially, you have an explicit narrative even if it never reveals a hand in the last scene what that influenced in the protagonist's life. That relationship even has a Freudian level of symbolism over the cigarettes Saint Just smokes, how smoking is banned off campus, and Nanako even keeping one of her cigarettes in her possession, this show not even using subtext and clearly coming from the school where subtle metaphors are for cowards.

There are moments where Dezaki is heavy handed. An episode called "Bad Apple", as the sorority is eventually challenge in the school and starts to devour itself, has shots to a literal rotten apple floating through the city river among flotsam-and-jetsam, but credit is to be given for Dezaki for being that upfront in a grandiose and artistic way, alongside the individuals who painstakingly animated those images in the first place. Dear Brother as an animated show looks sumptuous, probably not a surprise both as a production by NHK, a major television broadcaster known as much as an institution behind documentaries and highly artistic programming, and Riyoko Ikeda, a legendary figure whose control over her work is likely why they have been difficult over the years to access in the West, but again someone just from this one show who shows an incredibly storytelling hand. She belongs to the Year 24 Group, female manga artists who heavily influenced shōjo manga (Japanese girls' comics) beginning in the 1970s, a list of significant names where Ikeda herself is just one by herself of a huge reputation, let alone bringing in others¹.

Belonging to the Shōjo genre, more than anything this show does suggest that, whilst it should proudly include that genre tag, it is pointless segregating it from shōnen (boy's) genre work, as Dear Brother in itself can grip anyone, regardless of genre and country of origin. In mind to how diverse Dezaki's career was and yet how they all feel of the same creator's CV tells a lot. This show's slow growth in awareness in the West is only a good thing, and once it concluded, this set a high bar in terms of just how good an anime television series is. From Dezaki this is a high quality work, which considering how good the work I have been able to see says a great deal of Dear Brother's worth.

 

=========

1) Aptly Osamu Dezaki's brother Satoshi Dezaki, whilst also know for directing the infamous Mad Dog 24 (1990-2) OVA, also co-helmed They Were Eleven (1986), from another pioneering shōjo author of the Year 24 group called Moto Hagio, whose work really undercut stereotypes of what comics from young girls and women were by the fact, alongside other genres she worked in, They Were Eleven is science fiction set around a group of space cadets, of various races, trapped in hazardous spaceship environment paranoid about a mysterious extra member unaccounted for among them.