What if I told you there was an anime
that was like the love-child of Your Name, Toradora!, and Noein, but
actually predated all three? It’s a largely forgotten slice of
weirdness and romance which you may have heard of but almost
certainly haven’t seen: the near Urban Legend known as Keit Ai.
Nearly as interesting as Keit Ai
itself, though, is the story of how it came to stand on the misty
border of what can be confirmed as ‘real’, how it became known in the
West, and how I was even able to watch it. So, if you’ll permit,
I’ll take a little time to tell that story before diving into the
show.
The story begins with a small anime
studio called Studio Shiranui, which is devilishly hard to find
information on. As best as I’ve been able to track down, and this in
part by word of mouth accounts, Keit Ai is Studio Shiranui’s only
actual anime. The animators who made up the studio had, under that
name, done contract work putting uncredited polish on a few other
shows in the late 90’s, building up the bankroll they ultimately used
in 2000 to bring Keit Ai to screen.
Fiercely protective of their status as
an independent studio, Studio Shiranui didn’t take any outside money
for their ‘masterpiece’, and incautious accounting meant that while
they did have the funds to make the show up to their vision, they
didn’t have the money to promote it. Keit Ai premiered in the Spring
2000 anime season, but did so trapped in a late-night Wednesday time
slot with no advertising, resulting in the show gaining only the
smallest of audiences. The first twelve episodes (of 26) were
released by Shiranui in DVD collections, but due to poor sales they
couldn’t produce or distribute DVDs for any of the later parts of the
show. That’s how Keit Ai would have died, forgotten and unloved due
to poor marketing, if not for a man named Travis Boyd.
Travis Boyd was an American who, in the
late summer of 2000, visited Japan. As best as the story can be
pieced together, he saw a couple of the later episodes of Keit Ai
(probably something like 24 & 25) in his hotel room after long
days of sightseeing, and fell in love. Somehow, likely due to the
incomplete DVD release, he got the idea to talk to Studio Shiranui
directly about the show. Mr. Boyd owned a small finishing company
called Coda Productions, and presented it as a much more significant
business than it was talking to the beleaguered and weary heads of
Studio Shiranui, ultimately obtaining a clean master copy of Keit Ai
and the rights to distribute the show in America for a $1000 USD fee.
It’s important to note, though, that Coda Productions had never done (and would never do again) anything like importing an anime series. It was a small, Los Angeles-based finishing company that had mostly arranged post-production services for a couple of independent movies. The effort to “Import” Keit Ai, thus, more resembles a hobbyist passion project than a professional import. Travis Boyd had the know-how and industry connections to subtitle the whole show (handling the subtitle script, which is evocative and reportedly extremely accurate, himself), but once again distribution would be a brick wall for Keit Ai to slam into. Ultimately, it never aired in the United States as Travis Boyd simply had a run of 500 full-series copies of the show printed… on VHS tape.
So, in its most complete form, Keit Ai now consisted of seven VHS volumes (five with four episodes each and the last two containing three episodes to the tape). Mr. Boyd was, however, pretty clever about at least getting his money back, and started out selling sets to video rental stores, particularly Blockbuster Video. By the middle of 2002, there were close to a hundred copies of each tape floating around Blockbusters in the greater LA area, leading to the show getting its first recognition from fans in the region. However, the market there was largely saturated. Luckily for Travis Boyd, one fan contacted Coda Productions (infuriated that his local Blockbuster seemed to have lost all their copies of Volume 7) and ended up purchasing the remaining 400-odd copies of Keit Ai at wholesale, thereafter selling them at Anime conventions throughout the United States at which he was already a minor vendor.
Between the Los Angeles manifestation
and the Convention circuit, Keit Ai now began to gain new life as a
subject of talk on the internet. Summaries appeared, as did pictures
of the box art, and many anime fans were enchanted by the idea of the
show. Others, due to is low availability and the lack of any
information about it online, doubted that Keit Ai actually existed.
After all, very few people outside the Greater LA Area had ever had
the opportunity to see Keit Ai, or reasonably would… until 2005
May 2005 is when the first digital
bootleg copy of Keit Ai (naturally created from one of the Coda
Productions sub VHS sets) appeared online. The Anime community, in
its larval state though it was, went wild: Keit Ai was real, and if
you didn’t mind sailing the high seas and raising the black flag, you
could actually watch it. It’s likely that the month that it dropped
saw more new Keit Ai viewers than any other moment in the show’s
troubled history, with thousands of users downloading the Keit Ai
bootleg.
Enter Sony.
It turns out that Sony Entertainment
bought out the husk of Studio Shiranui in early 2001, picking up the
Keit Ai IP in the process. And one thing is well known about Sony:
when it comes to copyrights, they are relentless. Sony Japan caught
wind of the burgeoning piracy of Keit Ai and took it down in late
June 2005. It returned the next day, but someone in Sony’s legal
department must have had a grudge, because the bootleg didn’t stay
available for 24 hours. After another couple rounds, Keit Ai went
dormant on the net for a bit, but surprisingly every time since then
a bootleg of Keit Ai has appeared to download or stream, it’s only
lasted a couple days at most, and sometimes only a few hours.
There’s some suspicion that the DMCA against Keit Ai is handled by a
bot some Sony employee wrote back in ’05, given its freakish
reliability for something so trivial (Sony has never released
anything Keit Ai related), but whatever the reason it’s stuck, most
of the people trying to host the bootleg gave up long ago, and Keit
Ai has faded back into the realm of obscurity, where many question
its existence and even some mainstream sources declare it to be a
meme, unaware that the anime actually does exist. I don’t exactly
blame them, considering that most of the earliest online sources are
those doubting or debating its veracity.
As for me, I was fortunate enough to
run into the fan who wholesaled the VHS copies at Anime Expo 2019. I
bought what was one of the last (if not the last) of the original
Coda Productions VHS sets, and heard most of this story as told by a
memorable, kind of kooky guy who looked like a space wizard you’d see
airbrushed on the side of a van and would probably take that as a
compliment. I also suspect he doesn’t engage much with the Internet,
as Keit Ai wasn’t given any special place in his display, which
explains to me how a physical copy survived the likely frenzied
search in 2005-2006. The rest of the story I researched with what
leads I could find, and thus present it to you here.
Whew! Now, how about the show itself?
The basic premise of the show starts
with a boy, Takumi Naramura, having trouble confessing to the girl he
likes, Sakura Hanazuki. After being foiled a couple times trying to
make an approach and ultimately losing his nerve, he takes a
despondent walk through Tokyo in the early evening, eventually
bumping into his childhood friend Aki Mazaki, to whom he’s able to
speak about his woes. There are a few odd things about this
conversation, from Takumi’s point of view: for one Aki claims that
she didn’t know about Takumi’s crush (and seems actually pretty hurt
by it) even though he’d opened up to her before, as he briefly tries
to protest. For another case, Aki offers to give Takumi Sakura’s
phone number, showing him on her cell phone (which Takumi didn’t know
she had). The number is also an oddity – the area code isn’t one
familiar to the Tokyo area. When Takumi rationalizes this with the
fact Sakura lived abroad in middle school and probably got her own
cell then, Aki seems confused, but she ultimately blows it off,
telling Takumi that he’ll be fine if he can just talk to Sakura.
Takumi calls Sakura on the strange
number (using his own cell to do so from the privacy of his room),
but the conversation doesn’t exactly go the way he’d hoped. Her
initial answer is fearful, and she asks, after he introduces himself,
why he has such a strange number (we saw it come in on Caller ID for
her). Takumi refuses to be sidetracked and launches into his
confession. Hearing it out, Sakura admits, with some passionate
words of her own, that she’d wanted nothing more than to hear him say
that to her. However, she’s also sharp, and noticed a few
inconsistencies in his speech.
She points out the flaws (They met in
middle school, not first year HS. He had a window seat in class and
she watched the morning light play over him, not the other way
around, and only she had been in art club, so she’d never sat for him
to paint) but seems more intrigued than angry, asking a series of
questions about basic things that he plays along with and answers at
the same time as her. Who’s the Prime Minister of Japan? What’s
their school mascot? And finally, what’s the area code for Tokyo?
Their answers don’t quite agree, and to the last they each give their
own area codes, which prompts Sakura to deduce that they’re in
different worlds.
The first episode ends with that
proclamation, which makes it as good a time as any to talk about some
of the show’s visuals.
For one, Keit Ai is gorgeous.
Information on Studio Shiranui being as sparse as it is, I don’t
really know where any of the animators for this came from or where
they ended up going, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if some of the
talent had worked on Serial Experiments Lain before joining Shiranui,
and would be even less surprised if it turned out that at least some
of those animators had gone on to Shaft and became involved in the
likes of Bakemonogatari or Madoka Magica. All the budget that,
because of the priorities of creative people managing the funds,
failed to go into the advertisement and placement the show needed is
clearly on the screen in the art quality.
It may seem odd, though, comparing Keit
Ai to Lain or Monogatari. The most famous pitch for Keit Ai (one of
the ones often cited by people believing it’s made up, and which is
at least somewhat inaccurate) uses the phrase ‘hijinks ensue’, as
though the show is going to be a comedy more like Toradora!.
However, while the phrases are technically correct the implication is
not. Keit Ai has its funny moments, especially through the first
arc, but it’s much more a dramatic piece – emotional, down-to-earth
in some ways, and often dark and/or surreal – not a zany comedy.
The resemblance to the Monogatari
series is never stronger than in the conversation between Takumi and
Aki at dusk. The environment is positively eerie, with a red sky
shining past the black shadows of buildings and powerlines. It’s
enough to make you think you’re watching a horror show rather than
what is, at heart, a romance. In general there are a lot of tricks
with the directing that are reminiscent of the anime I’ve mentioned,
or even Kubrick if you want to go that way: Shots tend to hold a lot,
and cut sharply. Without the natural pan you see but don’t notice in
other shows, it often creates a weird and somewhat uncomfortable
atmosphere that’s part of why Keit Ai is so unique
That said, the show does bring things back to “normal” often enough that at least until the last acts, you could also tune in for five minutes or so and miss that it’s anything special. It looks good, especially for its era of animation, but it comes off as more standard when taken in for only a moment. The true charm builds over time, which might be another part of why it didn’t catch on at first.
In any case, after ending an episode on Sakura’s bombshell revelation, we pick up the next one with Takumi… actually blowing it off a little. Even if he has to admit the situation is weird, the idea that he dialed an alternate dimension is just too much to take in and, depressed, disengages the conversation thinking that he was being strung along. The next day he ends up confronting Sakura (the one in his universe) only to have her be utterly baffled. He begs off saying he’s just feeling under the weather and later manages to ask one of Sakura’s friends, who won’t give him her number, to at least confirm whether the one he was given is hers. Said friend says it’s not, as though it should be obvious, and at least seems to think that Takumi was the victim of a prank of some kind rather than being a creep. He also finds that Aki has an ironclad alibi (Karaoke with her friends) meaning that she wasn’t anywhere near where Takumi had the conversation with her that got him the phone number. With that resolved, he calls the strange number again that night and this time actually engages with Alternate Sakura’s conversation about dimensions.
This conversation is arguably the most foundational one for the show and is the second place that the uncomfortable held shots really come out in force. It starts with the talk about the setup. Sakura seems to be an avid science fiction fan, and comes up with our best working theory for how the alternate timelines end up overlapping: the countless electrical wires and now radiating cell towers throughout the heart of Tokyo, she says, create a sort of electric ‘hum’, and the cell signal is able to get through because, with the right number available, the carrier waves are able to intermingle. As for Takumi’s encounter, she suggests that was a rare and dangerous bleed-over, and implores him to not wander the same sort of place at the same sort of time. Once the idea of how they’re talking is in the open, Takumi Prime and Alternate Sakura here actually get to talking. Sakura, in particular, affirms that she meant every word she said the previous day (before getting side-tracked by the dimensional weirdness) and laments that she couldn’t say them to the Takumi of her world, apparently having tried to use the first call as impetus to confess her feelings. Takumi relates his own trouble with Sakura Prime and feeling like he’s beneath her notice the same way Alternate Sakura feels she’s not properly within Alternate Takumi’s circle.
Together, they hit on an idea: no one
would know Takumi better than Takumi knows himself, or Sakura better
than she knows herself. And, they both know that love really can
bloom in their desired partner, so why not work together and give
each other the keys to their hearts, in order to match up with the
partner they can actually be with?
The game is set, but given that neither
of them got very far in their own universes, and some of the
information they have on themselves might be a little faulty, they
agree to try to take things slow in terms of how to make approaches
to their other selves.
The meat of the show typically involves
arcs centered around some fact that’s meant to get one of our leads
closer to their prospective partner, first as friends and then as, if
all goes well, boyfriend and girlfriend. With Sakura, though eager,
a little embarrassed at delving into her own dark secrets, Takumi
offers the first detail to help her make the approach: he’s picky
about his food, but has one particularly strange treat that would be
sure to be a jaw-dropper if offered: Rice Balls with Red Bean Paste.
Takumi coaches Sakura through making them in an actually kind of
funny and sweet scene. At first it seems like Sakura is kind of
helpless in the kitchen, or Takumi (over the phone) too persnickety,
but after a bit they’re actually laughing about it. Sakura even
tries one of the Red Bean Rice Balls and admits, to her shock, that
it’s pretty good, if strangely unique. Takumi also says he had a lot
of fun, though a cut back to him ‘in the flesh’ suggests that
something’s eating at him.
When Sakura goes to school the next
day, she actually manages to spend a little time with her world’s
Takumi, and at lunch offers him one of the Red Bean rice balls (with
the simple, inoffensive “want to share?” approach). He’s
enthusiastic, but after taking a couple bites, starts crying.
Sakura, quite reasonably, is shocked by the response, practically
trips over herself trying to apologize (even as AlterTakumi tries to
brush it off) and flees at high speed before any explanation. Also
quite reasonably, she calls Takumi and, in tears herself, asks what
she did wrong. Takumi, then, has to explain.
We hear from him then the full story of
the Red Bean Rice Balls: he had an older sister (in the flashback,
she looks somewhere between five and ten years older, depending on
how old Takumi is supposed to be) and, one day, made a batch together
with her. It was the first time, and he’d picked the combination on
a complete childish lark. They had a great time together in the
kitchen… but that’s the last memory Takumi has of his beloved big
sister; she died a couple days later, hit by a truck. As an anime
reviewer I can only say I hope she got isekai’d, but in any case
Takumi explains that since then, he’s made red bean rice balls when
he’s feeling at his lowest (at first specifically when missing his
sister), and that if his other self was brought to tears, that just
meant that Sakura’s rice balls managed to touch his heart. After
all, he didn’t want to admit it before, but just coaching her through
making them brought back all too much memory. Sakura apologizes to
main Takumi, saying that she didn’t appreciate how much he was
offering her, and resolves to repay him properly. The next day,
Sakura goes to school, and is approached by AlterTakumi, who
sheepishly offers her a box of sweets, both as an apology for ‘being
weird’ and as a thanks for her generosity. Sakura accepts, and it
looks like we’ve got a case of friendship level up on that side.
The next episode has Sakura offering
Takumi an approach. It takes Sakura all her will to admit it, but
there is, apparently, a card game she’s really into. It comes off as
a sort of Magic the Gathering/Yugioh expy called Wizard Duels
(probably more Magic since Yugioh cards only came out in ’99 in
Japan, and the anime in 2000, making it contemporary with Keit Ai)
and we don’t get much detail on it, but we do learn the important
things: It’s geeky enough to be a major embarrassment for anyone but
an otaku-type (especially a ‘normal’ girl) to actually play, but
Sakura is into it enough that she always carries a deck with her, and
even with the issue of propriety wouldn’t refuse an invitation to
play.
The problem is, of course, that Sakura is actually good, and Takumi doesn’t know the first thing about the game. She guesses that, if approached through the game, her other self wouldn’t respect a ‘faker’ with a starter deck and no knowledge. Thus, it’s up to Sakura to coach Takumi up to a competent level, walking him through constructing a legit deck (much to the frustration of his allowance. As a card game nerd myself, I laughed at that acknowledgment) and playing it to a smooth standard, even managing to play some games with him over the phone, using paper proxies to represent the other person’s plays. Initial frustrations and awkward hackish solutions to the video chat not being invented yet aside, Takumi actually starts to get into it, and Sakura into teaching him, and even though they’re far apart in space (as still communicated through not allowing them to share the screen at any point in their phone conversations), it’s easy to tell that even if you the viewer cannot understand the first thing about Wizard Duels from their practice, they’re sharing a very genuine joy of discovery and fun with the interest. Soon enough Sakura declares Takumi ready to take the Other Her on, though not without asking if he wouldn’t mind still playing by phone with her, every now and then.
Takumi takes his deck to school, and in
a quiet clubroom doesn’t bring it up entirely naturally with his
version of Sakura, but does manage to broach the subject. At first,
she’s a deer in the headlights, but after assuring herself that no
one else is going to see and making him promise to not tell anyone,
she smirks and tells him he’s on. As it turns out, Prime Sakura and
Alter Sakura play different decks, and she totally demolishes
Takumi… but he at least gives a good enough account of himself that
she smiles and asks if they could do it again sometime, since she
doesn’t have a lot of people to play with. So, friendship level up
on this side too!
For a little bit, the show goes on like this. We spend one or two episodes with Takumi coaching Sakura through how to romance him, and then she spends an episode or two coaching Takumi on how to win her heart. Each of them has some genuine moments with the version of their crush they can meet, but they always do feel kind of lower key than the moments the pair are sharing over the phone, preparing. Let’s be honest, the matchmaker-crush angle here about as brick-to-the-face obvious as it is in Toradora!, even if moving anywhere with that would be literally worlds more complicated.
As we go through a couple rounds of
this, we do also develop some side characters, particularly both
versions of Aki. Prime Takumi leans somewhat on his Aki when he
can’t place a call to Sakura (Because he’s at school, for instance)
and she acts as an ardent supporter, to the point where it seems like
she’s a straight-out Takumi/Sakura shipper. Alternate Aki is a
little bit different. Unlike Prime Aki, who doesn’t really know
Prime Sakura, she’s actually good friends with Alternate Sakura due
to a chance meeting in middle school when, in a world difference I’ve
alluded to already, Prime Sakura was overseas. Now, we don’t see
scenes between Alternate Aki and Alternate Takumi – every scene in
the Alternate universe features Alternate Sakura, just like every
scene in the Prime universe features Prime Takumi, keeping the point
of view tight on our lead characters. But we do get to see some
scenes with just Aki and Sakura, and this Aki doesn’t look quite so
happy with the progress our leads are making. Much like in the first
scene where she (presumably this Alternate Aki) gave Prime Takumi
Sakura’s number, she seems to be nursing a childhood friend crush of
her own.
This comes to a head as the arc
culminating in episode 12 is centered around the class southern
retreat. In both worlds, they’re set to visit a beachside resort,
with all the summer tropes expected, and Takumi and Sakura each have
a big matchmaking plan to execute. Sakura’s plan (the one she gives
to Takumi) involves the fact that she can’t swim very well and is
self-conscious about it. Essentially, if Takumi invites her swimming
and ‘guesses’ why she hesitates, he’ll be able to offer to teach her,
and get close that way. Takumi’s plan is a little more elaborate.
He’s always liked the idea of being a hero, and thus comes up with a
scheme where Sakura can play damsel in distress during the inevitable
Test of Courage, leaning into that. However, the plan will need an
accomplice positioned to be part of the group running the Test of
Courage, and for that Takumi quite naturally proposes requesting
Aki’s aid to pull it off, before groups are decided for the various
events.
Sakura accepts, though with some
trepidation, and we see her approaching Aki at school. She asks to
talk and says, when they’re alone “It’s about Takumi.” at which
point tears fill Aki’s wide eyes. We don’t see how the rest of the
conversation goes, but Sakura, in her room and on call with Takumi,
said it went well and everything is on schedule for the summer.
I want to make a note of this, because
from the unseen conversation with Aki on, scenes and shots of the
Alternate World are very sparse for a bit, essentially only cutting
back to Sakura when she’s on the phone with Takumi, and then largely
when she’s in her room or some other stock location. It’s very
subtle, actually, and you probably won’t notice or think about it the
first time through the show because that’s pretty much how it went in
Takumi-centric episodes before. Once you see it, the twist that it’s
setting up is obvious, but it’s practically invisible the first time
through, causing the reveal to hit you like a ton of bricks.
In any case, we follow up with Episode
12 and Takumi’s Summer Vacation. The plan to spend a day teaching
Sakura how to swim goes over pretty well, and ultimately she ends up
inviting him to the bonfire dance on the last day, blushing heavily
but not quite making it to Love Confession. Takumi eagerly accepts,
and before the big moment takes the opportunity to call Alternate
Sakura. She says that the Test of Courage went well, and Takumi
thanks her enthusiastically. She also says she’s a bit busy, and
while she wishes Takumi the best, cuts the call a little short.
At the dance, though, Takumi finds he’s
of two minds about the situation. While dancing with Sakura, he
tries to think about all the good times he’s spent with her, but his
mind keeps jumping to things he did with Alternate Sakura instead,
long distance or no. The time at the dance is still pleasant, but
when he has the perfect opportunity at its conclusion to make his
move, he doesn’t take it – not because he doesn’t have the nerve,
but because he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong
with this picture.
From Episode 13 to 18, we enter another
phase. Superficially, it resembles the first stage, with the main
couple sharing secrets with each other that should bring them closer,
but the focus is different. We spend two episodes at a time on,
mostly, the strategy Takumi is receiving. It’s interwoven with him
coaching Sakura, which she takes to very eagerly, and a lot more
scenes out of Prime Aki, who after the failure to launch over summer
is becoming a more aggressive shipper on deck. The main thrust of
the first pair of episodes is actually one that doesn’t involve Prime
Sakura. After hearing about how Takumi chickened out, Sakura is all
too eager to try to whip him into shape, much like Aki herself is
trying to do. There’s a really great scene in that where Sakura
suggests that Takumi rehearse his confession her, and we get to hear
how it’s changed since the first episode. It sounds a lot less like
a starstruck youth, and a lot more line someone mature, who’s built a
real bond. The attempt brings Sakura (the one on the other end of
the phone) nearly to tears, but what really puts her off balance is
when Takumi recovers by saying that she should practice as well,
since she also admitted to not making any real move.
Sakura’s confession here is one of the
most moving you’ll ever hear. Takumi’s was loving, earnest, and
mature. Sakura’s confession, on the other hand, is extreme in its
passions, filled with the sorrowful intensity of a girl with a
desperate need but a deep fear that she’ll never be able to reach
through. And, there’s one other thing. As she talks about how much
Takumi means to her, some of what she says is primed to make the
audience think (and, from a close up on slowly widening eyes, seems
to make Prime Takumi think) she’s talking about Prime, who she’s been
conspiring with, and not her Takumi at all.
“If I could just see your face every
day,” she finishes, “That would be enough, to be there with you,
really together.”
Takumi is deeply shaken, but with
Sakura’s help (since she embarrassed herself somewhat) manages to get
out of the scene with his dignity intact.
The second and third arcs here are
mostly filler, and probably the only place where this show really
could have trimmed some fat. But, in Episode 18, we get a big
incident. Prime Sakura and Prime Takumi are alone after school, and
Sakura drops a confession. It’s not much compared to the one her
Alternate self went with a few episodes before, having more the
character of someone unsure and nervous about her feelings, but it
absolutely is one. Takumi is caught like a deer in the headlights,
but Sakura doesn’t let him leave without an answer. The two of them
cast in some very intense light and shadows, he gives a speech about
he can’t really know what his answer should be, but tells her he’s
willing to give it a chance, framing his reservations as a
deep-seated case of inexperience. Prime Sakura seems to accept that,
and suggests a decently modest date.
Later, Takumi is, of course, on the
phone with Alternate Sakura. Honestly, it would be amazing to think
that either of them got their homework done if we didn’t see that
they do a little shared studying on their calls in a couple quick
cuts throughout the show. He tells her what transpired, and as she’s
forcing herself, clearly hurting, to congratulate him, drops the bomb
that it doesn’t feel right, saying that whenever he’s with Prime
Sakura, he can’t help but feeling that he’d be happier with her
Alternate self.
At this, Alternate Sakura laughs. Not
at him, but a sobbing, broken laugh, declaring “We’re both
hopeless, aren’t we?”
The next three episodes are flashbacks,
essentially covering the deferred Sakura-sides we haven’t been
seeing. It starts right where the proper Sakura scenes died off,
with her talking “about Takumi” with a tearful Aki. We see Aki
beg Sakura to not take Takumi away from her in that reality and
Sakura… accept. She bows to Aki, apologizing for all she’s done
and promising to make it right. We get their real time at the summer
retreat, how Sakura and Aki switched roles from the ones she’d
planned with Takumi, including how the rescue of the Test of Courage
goes. From there, all the advice and coaching that Takumi gave
Sakura to win his heart, she passed on to her version of Aki, until
finally Aki managed to confess, and Alternate Takumi accepted her,
leaving Sakura as a mutual friend with her unfulfilled longing. At
the end of the arc of setting up Alternate Aki and Takumi, we get
back to the phone conversation where Sakura was confessing all this.
Prime Takumi asks her why she did that, and she says it’s because she
realized she was in love with the Takumi she could never see, not the
one who Aki loved.
So, our main couple have finally
admitted that they’re into each other more than they are the other
selves, and with five episodes of Keit Ai left to go. But, there’s a
big question mark of what the star-crossed lovers are going to do
with their revelation. After all, if they follow through rather than
settling they’ll be trapped in a long-distance relationship forever.
Takumi points out that he must have spoken with Alternate Aki
before, when he got Sakura’s number, but she both insists that it
would be a terrible idea to walk into any kind of bleed-over on
purpose, and points out that whether it’s exactly what they want or
not, he did catch Prime Sakura’s heart, and that can’t just be left
as a loose end.
Prime Sakura is the first thing to
clear up. Alternate Sakura pushes Takumi to go on the date with her
honestly, and only keep pursuing their weird thing if he really can’t
be happy with the Sakura he can have. Most of the episode is
dedicated to the date, with Aki trying to spy on the date and see how
it goes without being noticed too much. They visit an amusement
park, and go through all the classics including a roller coaster,
couples’ boat ride, and haunted house, ending with a ride up the
Ferris Wheel at sunset. And to be fair, while he doesn’t act the
part of an eager and loving boyfriend, Takumi does seem to give it a
good faith effort as far as having fun with the person he’s with
goes. However, up the Ferris Wheel, Sakura proves that she’s just as
sharp as her other self, and talks earnestly about what she’s noticed
being with Takumi for a day in these conditions. Namely, she doesn’t
think he dislikes her, and certainly felt like she had his attention
more of the time, but that there’s something weighing on him that
meant he couldn’t put his all into it. She mentions in this theories
she had, like Takumi going through some personal trauma (discarded as
he seemed to be in good spirits), Takumi having trouble in school
(discarded as she knows he’d been doing fine) and finally Takumi
being in love with someone else, which she doesn’t think is quite
right but feels closer than anything else she can think of. She says
they don’t have to come out of this a couple, sad as she declares as
much, but that if they don’t she’d like an answer as to why.
Takumi takes out his phone, and puts it
on speaker. Sakura looks at the action, dubious but curious, until
her own voice crackles over the line, Alternate Sakura saying the
date shouldn’t be over yet. Prime Sakura blurts out that it’s her
voice.
The next episode begins right there.
Sakura snatches up the phone, and while Alternate Sakura shrieks at
Takumi in a “what have you done?!” sort of way, Prime Sakura
quickly starts interrogating her double. Alternate Sakura stammers,
but despite the context, Prime seems more interested in what’s
happening rather than what it meant for her date. By the time they
get off the Ferris Wheel, Sakura is in an extremely animated
conversation with herself that’s over Takumi’s head and frankly seems
kind of over the Audience’s head too, dropping loads of speculative
technobabble at high velocity But then we knew Sakura was kind of a
weird nerd, and it’s a very accurate picture of what happens when two
of the exact same type of nerd get talking.
The ramifications of the two Sakuras
getting into touch takes up the majority of the episode. We actually
get some scenes (Fully from Alternate’s point of view, of course)
with just the two of them. They mostly seem interested in working
out the mystery of cross-timeline phone calls, but Prime Sakura does
broach the topic of Takumi, asking Alternate Sakura what’s between
them. She tries to dodge by talking about her world’s Takumi (still
blissfully partnered with that world’s Aki) but Prime doesn’t let it
slide and receives a lot of the whole story, just scrubbed of the
‘matchmaker’ bits: how they first talked through a fluke, and how
they ended up becoming friends and how Sakura at least ended up
falling for a boy she’d only really been able to talk to, never see.
Prime Sakura tells Alternate to take
good care of Takumi for her and seems honestly, strangely content
with the outcome. Alternate asks Prime why she doesn’t seem to be in
pain, and Prime explains, almost laughing it off, that it’s
surprisingly comforting to know that the only girl who could beat her
was herself.
After a couple days from first contact, Prime Sakura also gives Alternate Sakura contact info (e-mail, hoping the protocols will be the same across universes unlike area codes) for an American physicist she met while studying abroad. Alternate Sakura may not have done that, but that’s exactly why Prime thinks the physicist would help. Prime, you see, already messaged her version and received back a bit of text that means the alternate of the physicist will absolutely believe Sakura. Four heads being better than two (or even three) it’s a problem the Sakuras and their mentors seem ready to work to crack.
While that’s going on (canonically; it’s in the next episode) we get a good romantic episode between Takumi and Sakura. Having resolved to carry on their relationship however they can, they take their time doing boyfriend/girlfriend things like playing games, having meals together, and even going on a date to Tokyo Tower. There’s some brilliant cinematography here We cut back and forth between close shots of our couple as they, blissful expressions on their faces, go through some of the couple rituals, only to zoom out (or rather cut to long shots; the show still never really pans or zooms) and see that they’re still not in the same place or the same time. For instance, at lunch Sakura tells Takumi to “say aah” like she’s going to feed him an octopus dog with her chopsticks, and we cut to Takumi’s mouth opening with an “aah” and an octopus dog going in… but the chopsticks are different and we then see that Takumi is eating his own lunch, alone but for his phone on the table. Similarly, at Tokyo tower, we have shots that leave Sakura on the extreme left of her screen and Takumi on the extreme right of his, watching the sunset and talking to each other, only to, in wide shots, see both quite different sunsets (Takumi’s red with a hazy sky, Sakura’s gold with a few pink clouds) and each of them standing alone. It’s a sequence that has both the real beauty of their earnest connection and the pathos of their separation rolled into a single package.
At the end of Episode 24, we get
another bombshell dropped. Sakura checks her e-mail and has one from
the scientist that starts with “Your window is closing.”
The penultimate episode begins with this being communicated in full, as a conference with the Sakuras and scientists (Prime Takumi and Alternate Aki also present) confirms it – the “Tokyo hum” that’s allowed Sakura and Takumi to connect to each other across their worlds isn’t just manmade like Sakura suspected, but in part the result of a geomagnetic flux that’s drifting and liable to level out fairly soon. They don’t know if the window between worlds will close in weeks or months, but it almost certainly won’t last a year. Takumi brings up the time he met Alternate Aki, proving that more than just electricity could meet between worlds. Alternate Aki recalls the meeting as well, and how she gave Takumi Sakura’s phone number at that point. The scientists are in agreement with each other that it could bear more study, but the Sakuras (mostly Alternate) say that it would be too reckless to try for more. With that, it seems like they’ve got to make the most of the time they have.
That new pressure throws the young love
out of sorts. We get another couple of the ‘couple’ scenes, but this
time we don’t cut to the closeups that trick you into thinking
they’re actually in the same place, and we hear more static on the
line, so that the other party’s voice is always a little bit
distorted. They’re more purely tragic scenes. We even see one case
where, in order to feel closer, Sakura lies to Takumi, saying she’s
happy watching a beautiful sunset out her window (like he is from
his) when really it’s raining and she’s crying.
In a later conversation, as fall term
gets into full swing (not that either of them can focus on their
studies), the static becomes explicit: Sakura notes it and suggests
they’re running out of time. Takumi doesn’t want to accept it, and
ultimately Sakura herself can’t hold it together, crying out and
sobbing that she just wants to hold on a little longer, in what’s
probably the emotional low point of the show.
A few days later, Prime Sakura manages
to get a hold of Takumi. She tells him that their scientist friend
(both versions) managed to work out what might have let him or
Alternate Aki cross the boundary before. The conditions would be
precise, but there’d be a window on Thursday evening if the
geomagnetic flux oscillated as was predicted – perhaps the last
window for something like that before the barrier closes forever.
Takumi is mystified, as Alternate Sakura hadn’t mentioned anything of
the sort, but Prime points out that she knows herself, and suspects
that Alternate Sakura is being self-denying to a fault, sabotaging
her happiness because she feels like she doesn’t deserve it, or would
be a burden. She asks what Takumi would do.
As icing on the cake, Prime Aki bursts in shouting to Takumi that he’s got to go. Apparently, she’d been eavesdropping, and had learned the truth by overhearing them some time ago. She gives a big, romantic speech about how Takumi needs to try something impossible for love, because love makes anything possible, and while Takumi seems a little mystified and while Sakura points out that’s not how physics work, she also notes that there is a chance. She starts to offer the technobabble explanation, but then shakes her head and says that it doesn’t really matter – a chance is a chance. At the end of the episode, Takumi is once again deep in the Tokyo tangle, like in episode 1, sky solid red casting the rest of the world in black, and the power line hum dominating the sound. He calls Sakura and she asks where he is. His answer? Coming to see her, and if she wants to meet up, they should do it half way. Then, cutting off a muffled scream telling him he can’t, he hangs up, striding on into wire-bound sunset tangle.
By how the timing matches up, these two
episodes (24, with the good times for the couple, and 25, ending with
the launch into the esoteric) would have been the ones that impressed
Travis Boyd enough to buy the show, incidentally preserving it for us
to still be able to watch (if you’re very lucky) today. And,
frankly, I believe that, because the climax of Keit Ai is a roller
coaster. For a show that had been rather sedately paced up until
now, it really turns on the intensity as the surreal stuff comes back
in a big way.
The final episode opens with Alternate
Sakura, panicked with Takumi’s phonecall, running outside. She calls
her prime self first, demanding ‘how could you’, but Prime is
unrepentant, and tells Alternate that this was for her own good,
signing off with a sweet “be happy, me” as Sakura keeps running
towards the sunset. Next she calls Aki – her Aki, of course –
and asks, purpose solidified in her mind, what Aki did the night she
met the other Takumi.
We cut back to Takumi. He’s wandered, evidently, a long way, and the red sky has given way to a weird sort of violet, still casting him as the only light color among oversaturated darkness. He notices, idly, that the place seems kind of quiet. If it wasn’t clear, he’s in a place that’s not quite his world, or Sakura’s, or really any other. The concept comes up in the show, but it’s never named (much like Prime and Alternate are my terms). I sort of thought of it as the “distortion world” so that’s what I’m going to call it. It’s an overlap between worlds, the reflection of what’s the same and different, and it’s where our climax largely takes place.
Even as Takumi’s noticing that there
aren’t any other people in the distortion world, he gets a call from
Sakura. Out of breath from running, the first thing she does is
apologize. She begs forgiveness for not having told Takumi herself,
and for doubting, but says that she’s on her way, and will see him
soon. From there, we cut back and forth between Sakura and Takumi,
as they wander the distortion world, trying to meet up. However,
it’s not as easy as navigating ordinary streets. We get them to a
landmark only to have the show fade between Sakura and Takumi. They
should be in the same place, but they’re not on the same layer of the
distortion world (a hazard Sakura was aware might be the case, and
apparently part of why she was afraid even at the end) but they’re
resolute.
The couple keep going, essentially through the night. At one point, Sakura mentions that they’re probably running out of time to turn back, but before Takumi can protest says that she doesn’t care anymore herself as they forge on to the next attempt at a meeting. They wind their way through Tokyo landmarks, becoming steadily more morose as time drags on, through a night of positively lurid shadows and bold dutch angles, doing every drop of cinematic work to convince us that this is a strange, alien place. As dawn approaches, the window of access to the distortion world, long closed, the couple realizes that their phones are dying. Takumi asks Sakura if she regrets following him into this mad run. She says she doesn’t, and asks Takumi if he regrets loving her instead of her other self. He says he doesn’t. They both say “I love you” and the phone batteries finally bottom out. We get a series of long shots of each of them, walking the silent streets of the distortion world under a pale gray pre-dawn, the distortion having lost a lot of its luster, a steady trudge that slowly but surely brings each of them along, into sight of the famous Shibuya crossing, by the time they go there, the characters themselves having become the only color in a washed-out world rather than the only pale shapes in a world of mad and dark colors like they were at night. Each of them looks down at their own feet as they step out onto the crosswalk. Then, they raise their heads, and their eyes grow wide. We cut to a wide shot of the grayscale Shibuya Crossing, and we see Prime Takumi and Alternate Sakura on screen together for the very first time, standing on opposite ends of the crosswalk.
They drop everything and run out into
the street, meeting in the middle and embracing each other with a
happy spin and well deserved tears. They call out each others names
and, in that dreary gray world, in the middle of the crossing share a
kiss. The screen fades to white… but there are still a couple
minutes left.
The screen fades back in with the
honking of a car horn, to a colorful Shibuya Crossing with perhaps
uncharacteristically light but still present early morning traffic.
Hand in hand, Takumi and Sakura scurry out of the way, making it to
the sidewalk as Tokyo seems to come to life around them.
It’s about 5am on a Friday, and Takumi
and Sakura are both dumbstruck by their apparent miracle. They agree
that, whatever they do, they’re not going to let go of each other
until they’ve worked out what’s happened. They go to school, though
it’s a long walk, and end up meeting Aki at the gate. She seems to
be more like Prime Aki, but even then it’s odd that she’d just smile
at them and call them lovebirds. They wait around at class, but no
other versions of their selves appear, and they’re able to get
through the day. Sakura uses the computer lab to e-mail the
physicist, but the message she gets back simply says that it’s an
interesting story, and she’d like to talk further about such a
supposed phenomenon since it’s germane to her research. They go back
to Takumi’s place together, and no one seems surprised to see Sakura.
She asks to call her parents, and uses the home phone and a student
roster (protesting that she never calls her own home number) to do
so, noticing that the area code is not the one for either Takumi’s
world or her own. Sakura’s family is glad to hear from her, once
again securing that there aren’t any doppelgangers, and gives her
leave to stay the night. Idly, Sakura tries to call a number from
each of the other worlds, only to, each time, have the mechanical
voice tell her that her call cannot be completed as dialed.
As an amusing side note, the area codes
for this final synthesis world are the ones for our reality.
Sakura and Takumi turn in for the night, in sleeping arrangements more than modest enough to assure anyone that nothing untoward is going to happen, and after the lights are off, talk softly. Takumi mentions that the whole thing, being worlds apart, is already starting to feel like a dream. Sakura says she almost thinks the opposite, like she’s dreaming now, but that if that’s the case she wants to keep dreaming. The get up the next morning and go out together, walking hand-in-hand into the dawn and a final end credits.
And that is the end of Keit Ai. I have
to admit, part of me wants the final world to be better explained,
like how they got there and just fit in, or what happened to the
other worlds that can’t be reached anymore. Are they just missing
persons? Or did those worlds (including the happy Aki-Takumi couple
in Alternate) vanish? But part of me is satisfied with the happy
ending for the happy couple, even if it doesn’t really make the most
sense. The happy ending isn’t entirely logical, but with a premise
as odd as Keit Ai started out you can’t rule it out, and emotionally
it does feel very deserved. It would have been all wrong to leave
them in the gray distortion world, or back in their own worlds
forever separated (with no free Takumi for Sakura to rebound to, at
that)
All in all, I rate Keit Ai at an A+. The ending is stupendous, and even if I do have to remember that some of the matchmaking arcs can go on a little long, that sort of small imperfection didn’t kill Dusk Maiden of Amnesia‘s top rating. The cinematography is gorgeous, the characters are deep and effective, and the story of the show actually manages to be more interesting than the bizarre and sordid story of how it came to be this urban legend. It really is a masterpiece. As unlikely as it is for anyone who hasn’t seen Keit Ai yet to get the chance, I absolutely would recommend watching it, as long as you get the actual show and not some fan effort put together on the back of a meme by someone who didn’t believe it existed. If you’re exceptionally patient, the tapes supposedly do show up on Ebay and similar sites now and again. If you get lucky, do your friends a favor and keep them circulating!