I couldn't get past the first three episodes since my hatred for Hazuki ran so deep. I just couldn't stand the guy somehow and I felt so miserable for Atsushi, but then I heard he gets pretty insufferable as well...sooo that doesn't bode well for me ever finishing up the series since people say the first half is the superior one. *sigh* As a woman in her twenties, I would kill for a decent josei, but sadly this one was not for me. (Or for many others, it seems...)
|
I just finished this series a couple days ago, and I found Carl's assessment to be pretty on-point with my own feelings, and also agree with a lot of what everyone else is saying in this thread.
Natsuyuki Rendezvous looked to be just the kind of show I dig, but ended up really falling flat. The crucial failing of the series, in my viewing experience, is that both Hazuki and Atsushi were not at all likeable people, so I wasn't rooting for them. Their foibles were understandable, and would have worked had they been balanced out by a broader look into their lives. The show can tell us that Hazuki is a gentle soul or whatever, but we know almost nothing about him - about his life before, how he ended up where he is in life, or how he has related to other people in his life. A fuller portrait is required, but this show's suffocating insularity gave us no window there. Hazuki and Rokka never seemed to have any particular chemistry, and his bluntly asking her for sex on their first date together had all the charm of dead animal on the side of the road.
We do see some of Rokka and Atsushi's past together, but it's difficult to reconcile the living Atsushi with his dead self. It often seemed that, lacking many other outlets for dramatic tension, ghost Atsushi was made to seem dangerous. Those scenes near the end where he talked about killing Rokka so they could be together in death and give Hazuki his body back just in time to take the rap for a murder charge was creepy, and torpedoed what remained of his likeability and my sympathies for him as a character. Atsushi in life was a guy it was easy to sympathize with, battling cancer even in childhood and having that pall hanging over him all his life. I liked how that showed up in how he chose to live his life and what he ascribed value to. I can understand how being a ghost for 3 years could have twisted him, but I feel like that really conflicted with the show asking viewers to sympathize with his plight.
Also crappy was how long "Hazuki in Wonderland" dragged on. That segment really did not develop his character much - it was just something to have him do so viewers wouldn't forget he was in the story. I'm not sure if the fact they were able to do so little with him speaks to the limitations of the story, or just how uninteresting he is. In the end, I was kind of hoping Rokka would end up with no one, because I didn't feel like either of those guys were good for her.
So in the end, what we had is a three-person play (though I, too, liked Atsushi's sister most of all; she was so chill) that could have taken place on a few abstract stage sets, but would have benefitted greatly from growing out the world around them, showing the neighborhood in which the flower shop exists, how long-time customers remember the shop, or how Hazuki went from a high school grad to an aimless dude living alone. I wanted to pull out my red pen, write "needs more CONTEXT" and circle it for emphasis before giving the paper back.
I'm glad I finished it, because when I think I'll like a story and then don't, it's very easy for me to pick out what I felt were the shortcomings. Makes me kind of sad, though, because the ingredients for it to be really captivating were there - it just never came together.
|