So the theme of this February seems to be questionable wedding bells, so here we have another variant. In it, atheistic aspiring doctor Uryuu Kamihate needs a place to live, due to being an orphan who wants in to a big time university. He finds accommodation at the Amagami household, but it comes with strings attached: cohabiting with the current youngest generation, a trio of shrine maidens, and a task to ultimately romance and marry one of them to ensure the shrine carries on for another generation. Given the religious differences at the very minimum, this is something of a tall order.
Now, I could get on comparing this to other shows, but I’ll leave that for where it comes up in the summary. Instead, I’m going to take my front matter to talk about shrine maidens.
Shrine maidens, miko, or “Japanese shaman girls” if you speak meme, are one of the most uniquely Japanese archetypes – young women who work at Shinto shrines, often performing various upkeep tasks as well as certain rituals. They have a very distinctive garb and a heavy cultural connection. In the modern day many are liable to be part-timers and volunteers, though I’d bet that daughters of families involved in shrine operations are still pretty well represented.
To my admittedly limited knowledge, Miko have never been expected to stay “married to the job” their whole lives, and in fact have been solid choices for literary love interests for quite some time. There is a claim – and take this with a grain of salt because I don’t remember the source – that at least part of the reason there are so many young nun love interests in anime and manga is because a number of writers in Japan got the idea that nuns were just “Christian Miko” and applied the same rules, missing bits like lifelong vows of celibacy.
It’s actually a bit surprising you don’t see more shrine maiden characters in modern anime – as spiritualists, fiction with fantastical elements often gives them supernatural powers that would let them stand on the same stage as empowered heroes, and the white Hakui + red Hakama combo is eyecatching to begin with and has absolutely been both fetishized on its own and remixed for fanservice in iterations like Reimu Hakurei’s crop top + red miniskirt variant. But I suppose a lot of modern anime fantasy (where supernatural abilities would come into play) actually apes western tropes and imagery rather than Japanese traditionalism. That closes a few doors, but not all of them.
All of this is, I suppose, a long-winded way of saying that I’m actually fairly eager to get a show that puts some miko characters in the spotlight. Let’s get into it.
We start with the basic idea that atheistic Uryuu is moving in to a shrine household. He shows up, has trouble finding the head of house, and goes about searching. He’s not an idiot so he doesn’t open the door on girls who are changing, but he also doesn’t call out so they end up opening the doors on him for the classic intro.
This ends up getting us the characters of the three sisters in one line each, before we even know their names. Eldest sister, Yae (the one with traditional vibes and black hair), is kind and nurturing but perhaps a little slow. Middle sister, Yuna (the redhead), is a spitfire with a temper. Youngest sister, Asahi (with blue-white hair.) is a teasing imp type. And we, the audience, can only pray to Haruhi that there is more to them than that… but it’s a decent start.
Usefully, we get a whole episode of fighting and bonding between Uryuu and the sisters (with Yuna, who is his own age, as the focal center) that has quite a few good moments before grandpa priest comes home and drops the other shoe, surprising both him and the sisters with the expectation that he marry one of them and carry on the stewardship of the shrine.
On that score, the sisters (spearheaded by Tsundere Yuna) briefly try to do first arc of Quintessential Quintuplets and drive him off. Luckily, rather than dangerous drugging, this ends with them learning a great deal about Uryuu’s past and circumstances before they all have to have a marriage meeting (date) with him. Specifically, we meet his mentor from the orphanage, learn about his dead mom, and encounter his childhood friend, the tomboy Shirahi.
Now, one thing to note for this show is that there is a supernatural element. It’s subtle at first, with inexplicable blasts of wind causing happenstances that they probably shouldn’t. More explicitly, when Uryuu takes a lethally dangerous fall and his life flashes before his eyes, it includes his future… and he spontaneously wakes up at his desk with a trinket that suggests it is not all just a dream. Thereafter, Uryuu seems to receive occasional prophetic dreams, some of which lay on the idea that there may be a harem ending for our four main characters.
From there, we start to go through arcs. In the first, a major donor seems prepared to foreclose on the shrine, but accepts a challenge that if the gang can get five thousand attendees at their festival, he’ll reconsider how much of a future the place has. This really gets Uryuu bonding with the sisters, and the shrine with the townsfolk they’d been cut off from since the death of the sisters’ mother, and ultimately (of course) they manage to make it.
The arc after had to do with the sisters confronting their mentor, who challenges them about what they want to do with their lives. Uryuu has to work things out with all three of them, who all have their own issues. Asahi, a runner, has been scouted for an athletic scholarship in Tokyo. Yuna, being high-strung, kind of breaks down under stress. And Yae is of course off in her own world, including the ability to disappear at a moment’s notice. By the end, they’re all willing to inherit the shrine, including at least accepting the idea that Uryuu may come with.
After a vignette of everyone going back to school (where in a classic anime contrivance they hang a lampshade on, Uryuu is to be a classmate of Yuna at her freshly co-ed school) we launch into more meaty arcs, each of which puts one of the sisters in the spotlight while admirably not forgetting the other two.
The first one is for Yae. Uryuu finds her wallet and notices her ID has a different name, Reiko Ichijoji. On a night outing with the sisters (and a college friend of Yae), Yae falls off the mountainside at the Inari Shrine and, looking for her, Uryuu is thrown into some sort of mystical lucid flashback where he encounters the young runaway rich girl Reiko and, sliding between his past and present minds, recognizes her as Yae. He helps Reiko escape her insane controlling family, making a promise that she’ll be able to be free as she wants to.
The mystic flashback leads to Uryuu finding Yae in the present, where she’s remarkably unharmed and they’re able to talk over their shared past. This ends with a bit of a tail as Yae realizes that she loves Uryuu and starts to at least make passes, much to the chagrin of her sisters.
The second of these arcs is Asahi’s. It’s Tanbata, so we get the summer staple of a time loop, wherein Asahi and Uryuu are the ones aware, and need to figure out what Asahi’s true wish is, so they can grant it and move on. After she wins marathon gold in the right way at the right time, we’re allowed to head on with summer festivals and Asahi’s feelings being upgraded and taken seriously.
After a one-shot that gets us the truth that all three sisters are adopted, and that convinces Uryuu to take seriously the task of becoming a priest as well as a doctor, we get Yuna’s arc. Well, since we’re moving through the year, it’s time for the culture festival! Yuna and Uryuu’s class is set to put on a play, but the big problem is more supernatural in nature as a helpful/mischievous god causes the two to body swap for a while, seemingly because that’s the only way to convince Yuna to open up. Uryuu learns how to handle a tsundere and challenges her so she can reach for her dream of being the shrine’s head priest some day, and they ace the play at that. In the end, Yuna realizes that she, too, has fallen for Uryuu.
With all our sisterly ducks in a row, you’d think this would lead rather directly into Uryuu making a choice, deferring the choice, or making the “full trio” choice that’s been teased in visions. But there’s one more character whose name hasn’t been called who might have a stake in this: Shirahai. And she gets the final arc as her focus.
The arc goes for the parallel world angle, where the god of a rundown shrine responds to Shirahai’s wish to be with Uryuu, transporting them both to a world where that’s true. This leaves Uryuu confused, struggling to form a new connection with the sisters who don’t know him, until Shirahai ends up spilling the beans as she sees Uryuu slipping from her grasp again.
Ultimately, this leads to a rather painful sequence – Shirahai, realizing she almost went yandere with this, resolves to set things right, but the god warns her that the tie between her and Uryuu will be forever severed if they are to return to their world of origin. Shirahai takes a last opportunity to make her feelings known.
Uryuu tries to let her down gently, but when push comes to shove, he’s very much decided
“Tying the knot” is used in this arc not as a marriage metaphor but as one for the gods’ manipulation of fate and bonds. And also a marriage metaphor I’m sure.
This ultimately leads him back to the origin world where we are played out with the idea that everything is going to be alright. I mean, except for Shirahai. Things don’t work out for her, we know that now. But as to the sisters? Take from this what you will.
The end.
One of the aspects of this show for which I really have to give credit is the balance. Sure, there are only three real main girls, but even with that number and a conceit that you want to create an “any result could happen” harem, it’s really easy for an author to lean on a favorite, because she’s easier to write or has better chemistry out of the gate. Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister doesn’t do that. All three girls have their appeal and their issues from start to finish, and it never really feels like one of them gets things sewn up. This is accomplished in large part by having the first arcs include all three of them at all times, getting them to a really good baseline before leaping into arcs that put one more in the limelight than the others.
Last week, I griped about a Tsundere character being just too dang harsh, to the detriment of her show. Yuna shows how you do that archetype well. Her dere moments are few, far between, and reasonably mild, especially in the earlier arcs of the show. But her Tsun phase was also not hideously exaggerated, with there usually being a reason for her outbursts and most of them being directly proportional to the trigger. The result is that when she actually shows Uryuu a softer side, it feel like a precious moment rather than an arbitrary mode swap, and when she’s being shrill it doesn’t feel arbitrary.
Something you really realize is that most of the show is like this. It is, taken down to its skeleton, every Harem Romcom with Ecchi that tops out at underwear shots. It uses all the tired old tropes, and obeys a tired old structure. There’s the supernatural element, but we’ve seen those before; nothing really new or revolutionary is being brought to the art form.
But the execution is good, sometimes great. Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister is, if not the best execution of the structure that it’s using, at least up there. To pick on an example that shows both sides of the dichotomy, there are a lot of “Walked in on a girl changing” jokes in this. The show more or less both begins and ends on one. Classic overused staple of ecchi-harem, stale as Commodore Perry’s hardtack. In this show, the majority of those moments are slipping the audience some ecchi, yes, but they’re also actual jokes, which is a big ask from the kind of show that would normally use such scenes in plentiful number. What’s more, an appreciable number of them are actually funny. They delay the reaction, or subvert expectation, or otherwise provide humor that builds on the formula in order to get a genuine chuckle. That’s incredibly hard to do with that sort of material.
The rating I have for this show, which is often average but spikes towards wonderful execution, is B+. It’s a very nice romance story, and I’d strongly recommend it.
