Finding Peace in Anohana
I thought I could just apologize tomorrow. But that tomorrow… never came.
I used to pretend that death wasn’t real. Not for me specifically, but the loved ones around me. I would force myself to forget that in a split second I could lose any future hope of contact with someone and they could be gone in an instant. I struggled to accept this as when you're growing up, protection is everything. Your guardians warn and test you and you feel invincible. What might feel like a 50 foot fall, was a misstep on a baby monkey bar. A sniffle for me as a child meant a doctors visit and a panic attack from my mother. I wish the naivety could stick, it felt better. I was 14 when my beloved grandmother died in front of me. It was my first real brush with a loved ones death and only this year was I able to learn what it meant in the grand scheme of things. “It” being the cycle of process and grief — and no this is not a pity write-up but more-so a reflection in how a little acclaimed anime named Anohana stopped me in my tracks of repression and forced me to cope with that death. The world moves on with or without you. This is the flower that I saw that day. This is how I stopped pretending.
Finally. The ever so harsh sun is here and it’s summertime in awe. A reclusive truant teenager cloaked in depression sits alone playing video games angrily, akin to a 2017 youngin glued to their call of duty match. A young white-haired girl punctuates the moment bursting into shot and blabbering interruptions to the boy. Joyfully jumping on him with not an ounce of regret. Almost cute and damn near commonplace in something you’d see in an intro to a cutesy anime. Although…the girl is actually dead and has been for 5 years. The boys name is Jinta and the girls name is Menma. This is the intro scene to Anohana: The flower we saw that day, and it’s one hell of an intro. We learn later in the pilot the reason for Menma’s sudden existence into Jinta’s life is that she is in need of a (forgotten) wish granted, and Jinta needs to figure that out. It’s jarring to say the least for both the viewer and Jinta, as he is the only person who can see Menma. He resents her, he’s crass at first, but at the bottom of all of it is a boy who dearly misses his friend, not to mention also a boy who lost his mother soon after that dear friend died. Who could blame him?
This is where the I should absolutely note the exquisite writing by Mari Okada, as Jinta is essentially a mirror of her younger self in most ways. Truancy and flaws at the forefront of Okada’s childhood there bares a burst of profound originality to be found in this show’s writings. It’s hats off to her, as the most telling thing in her autobiography From Truant to Anime Screenwriter: My Path to ‘Anohana’ and ‘The Anthem of the Heart’ she states she grew into a overtly bullied life at Jinta’s age “I became adept at running away from things I couldn’t stand” she writes in regards to a day she was bullied due to becoming known as the school truant. And we see that in Jinta as the shield to push Menma away, along with an unwillingness to want to go to school conveys that trouble Okada went through is ever so prevalent.
Throughout the first 2 episodes we’re also met with the four other friends Menma’s left behind. Youthfully nicknamed Poppo, Anaru, Yukiatsu, and finally Tsuruko. These four characters along with Menma and Jinta formed a joyous alliance as children, The Super Peace Busters as the shows calls them. They cope messily even 5 years after the death of their close friend. Jinta going as far as dropping out of school almost entirely. Anaru, almost a stranger now to Jinta also resenting Menma for her own selfish childhood jealousy reasons. And yukiatsu bare’s a same resentment for different reasons. I didn’t lose a friend in middle school but I know my lashing out with the death I went through didn’t come with a warning label. If it’s supposed to I guess we’re all doing it wrong.
Anyways I won’t lie, I’m crying as I write this. If you’ve seen Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day you know exactly where this is going. Admittedly, this was going to be a critique of the praised anime and I had bullet points for days….but that didn’t do this beloved series justice. I mean yes it’s gorgeous, has incredible pacing, every single character is so well fleshed out and has one of my favorite Anime openings I’ve ever seen/heard. But see, before I watched this show I had a difficult understanding of what grieving meant. I have had a few people pass away around me and yes like others I have cried, maybe even sobbed — but I don’t quite think I ever processed what those deaths meant to me. Repression is a weird, yucky feeling. It’s creepy to be transparent and Anohana as a concept is the epitome of recovery and processing. I remember the day I finished the show I texted a friend that I “finally felt like I soaked it in, I can feel it now” in regards to my Grandmother’s passing. If you want to feel something new please watch this show before reading the rest of this, it may change you. It’ll all make sense I promise.
With that being said…
Anohana broke me. No it didn’t break me in the “Boo-hoo” sense — no nothing like that. It broke my grand bubbly shield around my subdued feelings regarding my dead grandmother and popped it. It popped so fucking hard that I accepted it. Finally, 10 years and a trillion manners of trying to understand it and pushing it out of my head later — it was Anohana that reincarnated the idea of moving on the right way. I asked a few people close to me as I wrote this how they’ve coped with a loss and all I can say now after the various responses I’ve received is:
What is the “right way?” to move on.
It’s almost an insulting question since I think everyone reading this has a personal vague answer and an even more personal story to go with it. The right way for now is being able to miss someone who died 5 plus years ago and knowing that’s it’s okay to still grieve. Hurt is ever present and that’s completely valid. I won’t budge on that anymore. Anohana’s biggest virtue is to let a child grieve as they see fit and to not force that sense of “hardening up” letting the world take you over.
In the show we’re met with a plethora of ways that the Super Peace Busters handle Menmas death. At one point we learn that the hardened rude academic of the group, Yukiatsu, is still trapped by the memory of Menma, keeping a white sundress similar to hers in his closet. He sniffs it at times, the smell a decade long memory of what could have been.I can smell my grandma’s bingo perfume right now thinking of how smell is such a time capsule. Hell at one point in the show he wears the dress in a manic bout of missing her and not understanding why she only appears Jinta. Jeering angrily at him in a fit.
Another peace buster, Poppo, the goofy love-able bear of the group is the character I found myself in most as his admiration for Menma’s memory leads him to welcome the idea of her coming back even if only Jinta can see her. Poppo is the one from the group never changed even through all that, as when we first meet him he’s still living in the “headquarters” that the group used to hang out at before Menma died. He greets everyone with a grin and a joke. It’s not long after that we find Poppo might actually have it the hardest in the group. He’s the strongest one and not only that he’s the one that watched her die. The weight of guilt bear on his shoulders so harshly. That’s what struck me the most. He held it together so well and in his final moments in the last episode he grieves and cries and yells because he wishes he could have something differently for his old friend. I know I wish I did things differently too.
I think we all can see a small mirror of ourselves in even one of the characters as everyone is valid in how they cope.
The biggest tear I shed from this show and you probably did as well was the ending. The group bands together (not without a fight) and struggle to find Menma’s real wish. They try a knockoff game of Pokemon to capture a character she was after, Jinta tries going back to school, they even try getting a large firework display together for her. The countless times in the show the group thinks they have truly found it, and it’s not until they play a childlike game of hide and seek that they’re finally able to see her. The group finds their innocence in it and they can all finally see Menma, crying in a large bout of unison yelling at her how much they love her, ultimately accepting it. Now that she knows that her old friends are going to be okay she drifts into the wind. Because we find that in the end her ever so rightful wish was for everyone to be okay. For her friends to feel at peace.
I sure as hell know that even if I don’t believe in any afterlife or anything like that my grandma would want to see me be okay. I ignored it for so long and Anohana let me find my own way of grieving. It showed me that I was the exact same as Jinta harboring a resentment that I thought was me willfully forgetting about it. But face it someone who’s 14 years old watching his grandma he calls “mom” pass in the slowest manner on a Monday morning is not easily forgotten. Not by a long shot.
I just texted my mom right now and I think it’s time we talked about it. I think I’ll be okay.
