So, here’s the pitch for this anime: Shogo Mikadono is the heir to a powerful corporation. With his father’s passing, though, one hurdle stands between him and his inheritance: his father’s wish to secure the line by having Shogo find a bride before he’s done with high school. Thus, Shogo is sent off to a new school with the secret mission of acquiring a partner in his time there. However, he’s contacted by a girl claiming to be his sister (though he sees himself as an only child) who comes off as… potentially dangerous and stalker-ish, as well as infatuated.
It’s a pitch that could go a lot of ways. My Little Sister Is Among Them! (or Nakaimo for short) just had to pick one and attempt to execute that vision.
The first episode opens with basically delivering that pitch. Dead father, mysterious voice of an unknown sister, heir club requirement to inherit. I will say, as BS inheritance clauses go this one at least has comprehensible motives, and as plot hooks it gives us good reasons on all sides to see the harem romance through. After all, even if the girls Shogo meets don’t know that he’s actively hunting for a bride, it’s no secret he’s an obscenely wealthy heir, so you’d expect there to be no shortage of girls looking to get their claws into him.
On the way to school, Shogo meets the first such girl, the kind but somewhat teasing Konoe Tsuruma. He even gets seated next to her and helps her out with tasks later, leading to an almost-kiss encounter. Before Konoe can end this show right out of the gate, though, another obvious contender intervenes and the whole cast introduces themselves and breaks up the event.
Once Shogo gets home, he gets some delivered gifts from “little sister” (a birthday cake when he hasn’t told anyone his birthday and an action figure of a hero he liked as a kid, so personal) as well as a call from her where she affirms that they’re now going to the same school, and she refuses to identify herself by name despite her dogged interest. Again, she comes off as at least a little bit creepy.
Muddying the facts around Shogo’s early life, he apparently suffered a major head injury, ruining his memory of his childhood. The family’s operative (who is basically this show’s version of Tsugumi from Nisekoi, except deliberately pretending to be a guy) does confirm that the late head of house had an illegitimate child, suggesting that the little sister is real and why she would be unknown, before transferring into school to help with the investigation.
Konoe invites Shogo to a formal dance party, which gets them some motion and also allows him to have moments with other contenders, matching up with the Student Council Vice President on the dance floor and the tsundere classmate outside, as well as with his intended date. After the event “little sister” calls again, affirming that she was there which still doesn’t do much to narrow it down.
After some ecchi harem hijinx involving Tsundere Miyabi and sweet Konoe trying to make Shogo “see the appeal of women”, he has an encounter that makes him feel relatively sure that Miyabi is his sister, especially when she opens up to him about her desires. He calls her on this, putting a rift between them, but when he tells Konoe, evidence starts to point to her as the little sister instead. When confronted, she confirms it… but this is episode four so it doesn’t seem like it could be that easy, even as she’s clearly responsible for the calls (a prank, based on characters from a show the two of them liked as kids).
And, sure enough, by Konoe’s testimony, it’s not. She may be responsible for the vaguely creepy/flirty calls, but she relates that her father and his were friends and they played together often, until she kind of became responsible for his head injury (he got it getting her out of the way of being creamed by a car). So, by that account, she might call herself his sister as a term of endearment, but she’d actually be a childhood friend instead. Miyabi interrupts what might have turned into a kissing time, and gets the full story, followed by revealing that she, too, is a forgotten childhood friend. Remember, brain trauma – they had their time together while he was in the hospital. I guess the childhood friend won’t lose if everybody is a childhood friend, but what about this sister nonsense? Well, neither Konoe nor Miyabi accounts for the voice Shogo heard on the day of his father’s funeral, so that remains a sister-shaped mystery.
Indeed, the next episode starts with a creepy call from Sis. She seems to have the same rare voice changer as Konoe, throwing some shade there, but has a different story about the funeral. At least one suspect presents herself in the form of Sagara, a prodigy who also runs a siscon maid cafe sort of place. True, she’s a year ahead, but her date of birth is ambiguous due to having been abandoned as an infant. She has the requisite device, and kept it more or less hidden at that, but some of the other details don’t seem to line up.
This is uncovered over the course of growing closer with Sagara. She offers him a napping spot when he’s sleep deprived thanks to sister’s wake-up calls, gets involved in her failing business, and helps to turn it around with an ad blitz, big event, and menu that doesn’t suck. After, she tries to seduce him (from which our agent friend provides an escape) and he figures out that she was the caller claiming to be the sister… but also that she’s a faker who was using her knowledge of the first set of calls to get under his skin and the execute the whole convoluted plot.
Why? Because she wanted to frame herself as the sister in order to shield the real little sister, who she knows and is extremely close with and thus wants to support the cause of (if not romantically than at least in not getting messed up by the rest of Shogo’s corporate family). Naturally, she won’t give up the name, so there’s still an unknown sister out there.
Before we can really do anything with that, we get another faker incident as someone claiming to be the little sister makes a strange PA announcement. This results in Shogo getting roped in to working with the no-nonsense vice-president of the Student Council, so of course it turns out that she’s the one responsible for this fake-out, having done it for complex family politics reasons. By the end, she even throws her hat in the romantic ring since having a shot with Shogo means a cancellation for the undesirable engagement she was being forced into.
From there, we enter the final arc with the arrival of a new girl who outright claims in a public manner to be Shogo’s little sister. A blood test even seems to confirm it, but the audience is given reason to believe that those results may be falsified, and Shogo himself runs across a hint to the same effect later.
While Little Sister the Open is shaking up the group dynamic, we get a rally from Miyabi. She comes on strong at a high-class party when she gets accidentally drunk and, seemingly jealous of an almost-kiss she witnessed between Shogo and Konoe, insists that the two of them go on a date. She confesses at the end, but Shogo turns her down.
The reason for this is that he’s deduced how New Little Sister is a faker, and how her real master plan is probably to set him up with his actual sister in order to create a scandal – that real sister being none other than Miyabi. Her plan foiled and her true identity as a hired actress revealed, she vanishes from the show.
After that, Shogo has a heart to heart with Miyabi, learning how she learned she was his father’s secret love child after falling for Shogo as a kid, and the dark thoughts that saw her keep the facts to herself. Shogo, however, is more than willing to kindle a sibling bond, and Miyabi is now in a position to accept that, meaning that the show can play us out with “and the harem antics continue.”
My powers of prediction have sometimes been less than 100%, but I somehow think Konoe is going to win that one since the romantic tension there was laid on hot and heavy.
So, to address Nakaimo’s issues… a big one is the pacing. These episodes feel long, like true marathons. They’re a standard 24 minutes but more than once I checked the timer expecting to be at the end only to discover I was at the halfway point.
That’s not, in and of itself, a bad thing – some good shows have had that effect… but the good ones have it for a different reason. When a good show feels like a marathon, it’s because the scenes have a ton of weight that makes them seem longer than they are. When Nakaimo does it, it’s because you’re kind of wanting it to be at the end, like most of these setups overstayed their welcome. As a result, the show was an absolute slog to battle my way through.
It’s strange, because I don’t actually think the writing in this show was that bad. The characters were… mostly distinct character types. They did start to degenerate into waifu-blobs in a few scenes, and the student council vice president in particular flipped real hard when she decided to be a (late) competitor, but most of the time I liked Konoe and Miyabi and felt like they had distinct voices, while Ikusu (the Tsugumi character) made a decent support and Sagara had a solid theme to her. What’s more, the various mysteries, while all following their weirdly specific theme of “someone is pretending to be Shogo’s little sister”, have a good structure where you’re given enough clues but not so many that it’s blindingly obvious.
All that and some R-18+ level fanservice should turn out something that is engaging and fun to watch on some level… but it’s not. The fanservice wasn’t awkward and painful, but I’ve often said that if a show isn’t good with the tits covered, revealing them won’t save it, and that’s true here. The mysteries may be decently written, but the presentation is such that you don’t exactly enjoy your time with them. “Who is Imuto?” is no Hyouka even if Nakaimo is weirdly the secret love child of Hyouka and Onegai, Twins!.
This makes Nakaimo truly baffling to rate, in that I can recognize a lot of quality components, but don’t ultimately care for what’s served up or like it. On one hand I try to be objective, which would suggest the show should at least get some kind of passing grade. On the other hand, this is my review blog, I’m not meant to censor my opinion and there’s part of me that thinks of what a chore this show was and wants to fail it.
So, I looked deep inside myself and asked: under any circumstances, would I watch this again? Would I pick up another episode or hazard a second season? If a friend expressed interest and wanted to watch it with me, would I tap out or would I grin and bear it?
And in all that, I found I ended up erring on the more positive side. Maybe it’s imagining another person there to give it the Mike Nelson treatment, or maybe it’s remembering that the girls did have some legitimate charm, but going back wouldn’t take a huge incentive. It’s not a show that I honestly feel like avoiding or that I’m going to do this comedy bit about fleeing from. It’s not the kind of show that makes me tap out, it’s just garden variety middling at best.
With that, I’ll rate Nakaimo at a somewhat confused and quite worried C-. I wouldn’t recommend it, but if for whatever reason you decide you’re going to watch it anyway… it will only hurt a little, and there will be some things worth seeing there.