Slice of Life edging towards Slice of Nothing hits a little different when its intentional, doesn’t it? Shows like Tonikawa (short for “Tonikaku Kawaii”, which translates to something like “generally cute” and which can also be referred to as “Fly me to the Moon” after its subtitle or “Over the Moon for You” after its English subtitle), as well as others I’ve reviewed in the past, prove that you don’t always need a fancy story with a lot of drama happening in order to carry a show. It’s just if you don’t have that, you need to know what you’re doing and generate the proper pace and atmosphere to support it, unlike last week’s topic of review.
So, what’s the premise of Tonikawa? In short, it’s about a couple that get married essentially as soon as they meet. Those of you versed in late 90’s sitcoms may already be groaning (depending on your taste), but this story really is ultimately its own.
It starts properly when young Nasa Yuzaki (named after the American space agency by his profoundly weird parents) sees a mysterious, beautiful girl one snowy night, and reaches out for her. This causes him to have a close encounter of the truck kind, but the girl dives in and saves this show from becoming an Isekai. She seems uninjured (or at least able to properly walk away) but Nasa was still very badly battered. Despite this, he manages to push his broken body to the limit and beyond to catch up with his savior while she waits at the bus stop, asking if they can meet again. Seeing his devotion outweighing things like a broken leg, she says they can… but only if he agrees to marry her. Nasa consents to this, and then his strength is spent.
A couple years pass with no sign of the mystery girl. Nasa, however, lives his life believing she’s out there, a sharp change from the overachiever who cared about nothing but his studies. Now of majority and living on his own, he’s surprised when the girl from that night shows up at his pad, marriage certificate in hand.
If you think the girl, Tsukasa Tsukuyomi (or, very shortly, Tsukasa Yuzaki), seems weird… get used to that. She’s equal parts sweet and kind of a space alien when it comes to her understanding of human interactions. In fact, I’m not sure she isn’t – Tonikawa plays its scenario incredibly realistic most of the time, like this is a scenario that could happen and characters that could exist on Earth as we know it, with no weird magic or science fiction nonsense in sight. We never get any confirmation or sign that Tsukasa is anything but an oddball of a young lady, perfectly human and mortal… and yet you kind of have to doubt.
It’s in the background more often than not, but there’s a great deal of focus on the moon in this show, most notably when it’s found that Tsukasa has (in a friend’s care) an extremely precious moon rock that in the past seemed to be the only thing that brought her comfort. Tsukasa seems a little shaky on human interactions and normal mores a lot of the time, lacking in experiences and interests that others would find normal, but at the same time she seems to be quite the scholar of history, reacting to old things almost as though she were there to see them the first time. And the story is framed at times with references to the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, often likening Tsukasa to the mythical Princess Kaguya. This, of course, could be nothing more than a motif; it’s not as though the story isn’t popular, and its trappings are used to frame other shows that take place in fully mundane worlds, notably Kaguya-sama: Love is War.
The way these elements are deployed, and the degree to which Tsukasa’s past remains unknown, invites the viewer to go tin foil hat on it… if they want to. There is no text that suggests she’s a moon person like Kaguya or anything like that, just some clever subtext that I’m perfectly happy leaving as that and nothing more. I mention it now because it helps get some of the tone and feel of the show across. The “maybe magic, maybe mundane” approach seems to be emblematic of how Tonikawa wants to feel. It wants to be a slightly magical, slightly unreal little trip, perhaps because that approaches the remembered sense of new and first love, or the atmosphere created on the snowy night of the opening. For a show that has to deal with love at first sight and instant marriage, which are kind of over-the-top and schmaltzy, perhaps it’s best to make sure that the audience isn’t too set in the cold reality of the world they know.
As I may have alluded, the overall story is very slice of life. Tsukasa and Nasa marry (on paper) and then have to get used to the facts of married life, like sleeping arrangements (given that as cute and domestic as Tsukasa is, they’re still quite shy about physical intimacy). They meet some of Nasa’s friends, a big sister-little sister duo who run the local bath house, and Nasa actually gets the idea to do the right things (like getting rings and holding a ceremony) even if they’re out of order. It’s implied the elder sister may have had a thing for Nasa, but this is played fully for comedy.
They then end up encountering a wealthy young lady, Tsukasa’s former host and self-described sister, Chitose, who isn’t terribly happy about how Tsukasa pulled a disappearing act to marry some guy out of the blue. She kidnaps Nasa and tries to cause a break-up, but she’s not terribly competent and Tsukasa isn’t an idiot, so after getting to see that moon rock I mentioned earlier, this ends with Tsukasa escorting Nasa out of her “sister’s” clutches fairly effortlessly. On their way out, they pass an old church, and Nasa actually manages what’s more or less a proposal. They spend an episode getting wedding rings (and a TV, since Nasa didn’t have one and classic movies are one of Tsukasa’s established interests) and another mostly looking into living arrangements given the small size of Nasa’s bachelor pad, which ends with a plan to meet his parents properly and take a little honeymoon at the same time.
Chitose tries to interfere again, but during the tourism ends up coming around and reaching a point of Pro-Nasa acceptance. They meet his parents, who are very accepting of Tsukasa even with the sudden notice, especially when its clear that she’s the one who saved Nasa from the truck back then. With their blessing the lovebirds return home only to discover that the apartment burned to the ground while they were out.
That’s okay, because Nasa didn’t have a lot of stuff and they were hoping to do house hunting anyway. The bathhouse family goes ahead and hosts them in the meantime, since Nasa kind of saved their business in the past with some modernized bookkeeping, and thus they’re put up in an outbuilding that cleans up rather nice. After a little time spent getting back on their feet, Chitose appears again, to once more be misled and pranked by Tsukasa, who seems to enjoy that Chitose will take any weird story, like living in a playground with gas and electricity, at face value. They have a takoyaki party with everyone invited and a video game tournament that comes down to Tsukasa and the elder sister of the bathhouse family, earning some mutual respect.
For the last episode of season 1 proper (which is where I’m stopping for this) we have a little vignette where Nasa gets sick from overwork, Tsukasa tends to him, and they affirm that there are still a lot of things they want to do together in their oddly-sequenced but still very happy and affectionate married life.
As you can probably tell, this does straddle the line between Slice of Life and Slice of Nothing. I think it falls more on the “Slice of Life” end because of the atmosphere, and because of the fact that they’re clearly still making some very basic progress in their own way. The episodes, while light on “stuff happening” are not light overall. In the interactions between Tsukasa and Nasa, they have to discover more about each other, and even though every turn is sure to make Nasa fall ever harder for his super-cute wife, we do get to know them meaningfully better and their relationship does progress at pace. They may not go through a harrowing adventure, but they still do face trials befitting the show, ones that make for some great moments where it matters.
In the end, the show is what it sets out to be – generally cute, as the translation of the title would say. It’s charming enough, and one I’d be happy to come back to. The real question is whether to give it a Pass or an actual letter grade.
This is something I’ve been a little inconsistent on in the past. I usually choose to apply the Pass-Fail scale to cases where I don’t think an ordinary letter grade would properly communicate the show’s level of quality, and where instead it’s just easier to apply the binary “is it something I can recommend or isn’t it?”
In the case of Tonikawa, I think I can communicate the level of appreciation I have for it with a true letter grade. In this case, that letter is a B. It’s not a great, truly moving or impressive. I feel like, eventually, it will fade from my memory and the zeitgeist alike, joining the silent ghosts of countless shows where reviewing them feels almost as much like archaeology as it does media analysis. But at the same time I don’t want to completely sell it short. It is cute, and it is charming, and it does have enough intelligence and real emotion to carry that. If it ultimately gets buried by time, that would probably make it more of a hidden gem than anything else. And, with a second season on the way, perhaps it’s a bit premature to be writing the show’s epitaph in any case.
Speaking of which… I’m looking forward to it. I want to see what the writers do with the show, whether it keeps growing and evolving and showing us new things, or whether it settles into a Slice of Nothing or RomCom loop once the happy couple is fairly positioned. I have some degree of faith that the creators who turned out the first season can keep the quality going and produce enjoyable content that’s generally cute, but also has more to it than just that cuteness.