i need a tissue!

okay, so my friend davecat or maybe one of his several svelte and sultry roommates posted on bluesky a while back about an anime that was coming up, which is now actually already out, but nobody here has seen it because we don't have whatever service it's running on, if it's even available here in the states. but it sounded cool-o-riffic even just from the title: my wife has no emotion. and it's about this guy and his robot wife, so that sounded even cooler.

considering we didn't want to wait for it to come out and then for it to be translated and then for it to hit one of our streaming services, msg decided to check out the manga, and wow, it was great. we totally tore through the first six volumes and then spent a couple months waiting anxiously for the seventh book to come out.

which ... it did, like, a week ago. and because we wanted to be able to savor it some and not just speed through the thing and be stuck waiting months and months more, we went back and re-read the other six volumes before starting the new one.

have you ever been super excited about the next entry in a series coming out, and then it does, and almost right away as the story is getting started, you're like, "uh-oh." not as in, "oh no, something bad is going to happen to these characters i like," but as in, "has something gone really wrong here?"

well, the art in the first chapter of the volume was like, really rough. i'm not as big an art aficionado as msg, but even i thought, "dang, this is definitely not up to the snuff of the previous stuff in this series." msg went a step further and was like, "oh man. i hope the artist didn't get really sick or something" and then had to go and google it, and sure enough, the poor guy has some kind of personal life crisis stressing him out so much he's losing his hair and announced recently he's putting the manga on hiatus. he feels like it's really impacting the quality of his work and he doesn't want to let people down that way.

on the one hand, that was a pretty major bummer. but on the other hand, it kind of turned my ability to appreciate the new part of the story around. instead of feeling let down by the rougher artwork and new story threads that weren't about my favorite characters, i felt like i didn't want to let the artist down by not appreciating the fact that he was trying, even if he was obviously struggling at it.

and that got me through the first two chapters in the book, which like i said weren't even about the main characters or the more major of the minor characters, but kind of about some third-stringer characters in a storyline introducing several brand-new characters.

only what happened next ... jeepers weepers, peeps. in the third chapter the story goes back to the guy and his robot wife and a couple of other robots who live in the house with him, and even though the art was still kind of off, the story was just overwhelmingly touching. that chapter felt like it was really showing something -- helping you as the reader understand something about the world. and i mean the real world, not the science-fictiony world that the characters in the story live in.

so then i'm hooked again, and totally down for the art not hitting the same standards as the earlier books, because real art sometimes is just a lot more about what you're doing than about how well you're doing what you're doing. does that make sense? i guess i'm talking about artistic vision, and whether the artist is able to get you to see the vision he's working to get across. if the vision is strong enough and it gets you to connect with it, the details can be full of all kinds of flaws and it won't matter.

and the rest of the book was really all that way, only more and more emotional because the story was pulling together a bunch of bits and pieces and odds and ends that didn't start off seeming connected, but were all working toward this major climactic moment that was simultaneously uplifting and also heartbreaking. msg read most of it before i did, and then when i was reading it, he was watching me and he said, "oh, you just got to that part, didn't you?" which, all i could do was nod and keep reading with tears running down my face.

i mean, we're talking major pathos the way an omelet recipe takes breaking some huevos, you know? there are a lot of characters by this point in the story, and by the time it got to that moment, the writer had managed to make me really worried about what might happen to a whole bunch of them, even ones i never expected to really care that much about.

there's a volume 8 coming sometime next year that i guess he finished before his hiatus, and i honestly feel like he could draw it in crayon and i would still love it, just because of what he's given us so far with the first 7 books.

anyway, if you like stories with quirky humor about robots trying to adapt to the human world, and you also like stories with meaning that sometimes get bittersweet in their emotional weight, you might want to check out "my wife has no emotion."

it's really, really good!

xoxo,
claire