We Were There

AUTHOR:Obata, Yuki

ARTIST: Yuki Obata (illustrator); Inori Fukuda Trant (letter)

PUBLISHER: Shogakukan (Japanese); VIZ Media (English)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION:Bokura ga ita, 2002-2012

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2002-2008, 2009-2012 (English translation, 2008-2012)

Publication History

In May of 2002, the Japanese shojo manga magazine Betsucomi, published by Shogakukan and targeting a young-adult female audience, published the first chapter of Yuki Obata’s new series, Bokura ga ita. In English, the title has been published as We Were There. The success of the series led to publication of the first tankobon book volume by Shogakukan in October, 2002.

The series enjoyed considerable success, and the magazine installments were regularly collected in new tankobon. However, in early 2008, the series suddenly stalled following the publication of chapter 51, which ended with a cliff-hanger. After more than a year, the series resumed with the publication of chapter 52 in June of 2009. The book publication continued, with Volume 13 published in October of that year. Obata ended the series in February of 2012, and the sixteenth and final volume was published in the spring.

VIZ Media began to publish an English translation of the series under the title We Were There in November of 2008. The English volumes collect the same chapters as the Japanese originals. VIZ also kept intact the Japanese right-to-left reading order, the original black-and-white interior artwork, and the color covers.

Plot

Obata began her Artistic career by creating manga for a young female audience, and she felt comfortable in this shojo genre. Four years after her debut, in 2002, she developed We Were There, a series that follows the key characters from high school to early adulthood, focusing on the effects of first love on a person’s emotional development. As an initial setting, Obata chose her own hometown of Kushiro on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island.

We Were There begins on fifteen-year-old Nanami Takahashi’s second day of high school. The cheerful, sunny Nanami tries to make friends with her bookish homeroom desk mate Yuri Yamamoto. Like many girls at school, Nanami develops a crush on the sixteen-year-old Motoharu Yano.

The plot quickly introduces a dark element that complicates the story and ties the key characters together. It is revealed that Motoharu’s girlfriend, Nana Yamamoto, the older sister of Yuri, died the previous summer in a car crash. To make matters worse, she was riding with her former boyfriend, whom Motoharu had thought was no longer part of her life.

Despite these ghosts from the past, Nanami and Motoharu develop a powerful high school romance that overcomes a variety of challenges. This idyll is shattered when Motoharu moves to Tokyo with his mother. At the end of Volume 8, Motoharu promises Nanami that their relationship will continue despite the distance between them. However, Motoharu reneges on his promise. His troubled mother has committed suicide in Tokyo, causing Motoharu to sever his ties to Nanami and his friends. Assuming Nanami and the others will attend Tokyo colleges, Motoharu moves back to Hokkaido for a while.

Obata moves the plot to a climax in Tokyo. At age twenty-three, Nanami works at the same publishing company as her fellow high school classmate Akiko Sengenji. Nanami is dating Masafumi Takeuchi, also from her high school. By accident, Akiko rediscovers Motoharu, now using the last name Nagakura, in Tokyo. Akiko urges Nanami to see Motoharu one last time on the eve of her engagement to Masafumi, but Nanami refuses. A flashback reveals that Motoharu had slept with Yuri Yamamoto once after Nana died. Later, she followed Motoharu back to Hokkaido after dropping out of college in Tokyo. Out of pity, even though he dislikes Yuri, Motoharu lets her move in with him when he returns for a job in Tokyo.

On her twenty-fourth birthday, Nanami refuses Masafumi’s marriage proposal. Instead, she hurries to the airport to try to see Motoharu, who is on his way to Sapporo. At the same time, Masafumi confronts Yuri at Motoharu’s place. Nanami finally confronts Motoharu at the airport. It seems that for Motoharu, their love is finished, and Nanami attempts to let go of the past.

The next two volumes reveal that neither Nanami nor Motoharu can really let go of the other. Leading up to the final volume, Nanami falls into a coma, and Motoharu rushes to the hospital to see her.

Volumes

• We Were There, Volume 1(2008). Collects chapters 1-4. The key characters of the series are introduced, and the central, troubled romantic relationship between high school students Nanami Takahashi and Motoharu Yano is established.

• We Were There, Volumes 2-8 (2009-2010). Collects chapters 5-31. The romance between Nanami and Motoharu develops further. At the end of Volume 8, after graduation, Motoharu moves to Tokyo but promises to remain in a romantic relationship with Nanami.

• We Were There, Volume 9-11 (2010). Collects chapters 32-44. In Volume 9, Nanami is stunned when Motoharu stops contacting her, apparently severing their romantic bond. The ensuing chapters explore Nanami’s near obsession with her love for Motoharu and gradually reveal that Motoharu has turned to a solitary life because of his mother’s suicide. Motoharu returns temporarily to Hokkaido without letting Nanami know. Nanami flashes back to visions of her high school romance.

• We Were There, Volume 12 (2011). Collects chapters 45-48. The series moves on a trajectory to its conclusion with the rediscovery of Motoharu in Tokyo. Three chapters flash back to explain Motoharu’s relationship with Yuri. The volume also includes a bonus story, a spoof on the Little Red Riding Hood tale that features the series’ key characters in cutely drawn disguises.

• We Were There,Volume 13(2011). Collects chapters 49-53. Unwilling to marry Masafumi, Nanami meets Motoharu and appears ready to let go.

• We Were There, Volumes 14-16(2012). The outcome of Nanami and Motoharu’s relationship is revealed.

Characters

• Nanami Takahashi, the protagonist, is a petite young Japanese woman with light brown hair who grows from a fifteen-year-old high school student to a twenty-four-year-old professional. She is cheerful, a bit shy, and anxious to make friends and falls hopelessly in love with Motoharu Yano. Her unwillingness to give up on Motoharu despite years of separation drives the plot to the climax of the series.

• Motoharu Yano, a.k.a. Motoharu Nagakura,is a lanky Japanese man with light brown hair and a big smile who grows from a sixteen-year-old student to a young professional. He appears extremely self-confident, wins all challenges with his teachers, and later becomes friendly with his bosses. His tragic relationship with Nana Yamamoto makes him somewhat distant emotionally; he rejects the love of Nanami and becomes the focus of many young women’s romantic attention.

• Yuri Yamamoto is the younger sister of Motoharu’s first love, Nana, and a rival for his affection. She is a pretty young Japanese woman with brown hair who appears somewhat mousy in high school but becomes rather stylish in her early twenties. She is driven to win Motoharu’s love even though she knows he dislikes her.

• Masafumi Takeuchi is Motoharu’s high school friend and later a rival for Nanami’s love. A serious, good-looking young Japanese man with light brown hair, he is career- and family-oriented. Nanami’s rejection of his marriage proposal finally makes him reject Motoharu as a friend.

• Akiko Sengenji is a high school classmate of Nanami and Motoharu. A young Japanese woman with straight black hair, she is sincere and cares for Nanami, with whom she works in Tokyo. She also had a crush on Motoharu in high school, and her discovery of him in Tokyo launches the climax of the series.

Artistic Style

Obata’s Artistic energy is focused on her key characters. They are drawn in classic manga style, with pointy chins, exaggerated eyes, tiny or sometimes absent noses, and mouths often drawn to reveal the characters’ emotions. To highlight scenes from Nanami’s memories of her happy times with Motoharu, Obata includes some watercolor panels, which convey well a sense of vague but powerful nostalgia. Similarly, Obata’s color covers for the book volumes also use watercolors and often feature Motoharu’s trademark wide, bright smile. This image of Motoharu’s face consistently appears throughout the manga and is in deliberate contrast with his increasingly cold and emotionally detached behavior.

To indicate a character’s thoughts and feelings, Obata styles her lettering differently than the main text, a feature that is preserved in the English lettering. In addition to regular dialogue and internal thoughts, the manga includes some authorial commentary on the characters, which is expressed in small, cursive lettering and accompanied by an arrow or line pointing at the character being described. As the series moves from the high school romance of Nanami and Motoharu into darker terrain, black boxes with white lettering express the characters’ most painful thoughts.

Obata’s drawings are generally sparse and concise. Characters are often shown in a highly stylized fashion, with just a few key facial or body features depicted and more detail left to the reader’s imagination. People, particularly their faces, come first, and backgrounds are filled in sparingly. The characters’ physical environment is drawn unobtrusively. The Japanese setting, including the style of homes and characters’ school uniforms, for example, is drawn to emerge as a matter of fact. The backgrounds generally have an unspectacular, everyday feeling to them. There are occasional large panels depicting special, particular scenes, such as the mountains of Hokkaido during a high school hike or the wide, oppressive Tokyo sky hovering over a dwarfed, disconsolate Nanami suffering from her unfulfilled longing for Motoharu.

Themes

The key theme of We Were There is the lasting effect of a powerful first love. The series explores the various challenges to such a love both in the initial high school setting and later with the characters as young professionals. When Nanami falls in love with Motoharu, her emotions can be seen on her face in the form of big smiles and deep blushes. Indicative of the relative formality of a Japanese high school, Nanami often refers to Motoharu by his last name, Yano, just as he often calls her Takahashi.

Obata complicates her plot through Motoharu’s past. Because of his popularity and charisma, he was able to steal Nana Yamamoto from her former boyfriend, even though she was one year his senior. The theme of deep suffering caused by romantic disappointment is explored through the depiction of the pain Motoharu feels. Behind his bright smile, his heart is cold as a result of Nana’s betrayal (she died in a car driven by her former boyfriend, implying that she was cheating on Motoharu on the day of her death). In turn, Motoharu becomes a rather difficult boyfriend for Nanami. His reluctance to talk about his past, together with his one-night stand with Nana’s younger sister, Yuri, causes Nanami to break up with Motoharu at times. However, Nanami is shown, sometimes in special watercolor panels, to hold on to memories of all the happy times with Motoharu. She cannot accept the love offered by Motoharu’s friend and later rival Masafumi.

Obata brings the theme of high school love to a close when Motoharu moves with his mother to Tokyo. In a panel often repeated to show its importance in Nanami’s memory, she and Motoharu link their pinkies together in the Japanese style of sealing a promise, in this case, to stay lovers. However, Obata goes on to explore the theme of a love lost. Because of his mother’s suicide, Motoharu decides to forgo all deeper romantic attachments and effectively breaks off contact with Nanami. As both Nanami and Yuri seek to win Motoharu’s lasting love, We Were There focuses on the related theme of an intense romantic rivalry between two different young women for the same difficult, elusive man. This theme carries the series to its conclusion.

Impact

We Were There quickly developed a large, loyal readership among Betsucomi’s teenage female audience. Its story of a difficult high school romance fit right in among the popular themes of the genre. Obata’s decision to keep strictly to realism and not to include any magic or fantastic elements also proved a successful decision. The somewhat unusual initial setting of a high school in Hokkaido distinguished We Were There from more common Tokyo-based series.

As a sign of the series’ success, five month after the series was launched in Betsucomi, its first four chapters were collected in a tankobon book volume. This volume ranked among the top ten manga best sellers following its publication, as did many of the subsequent volumes. By 2006, the first nine volumes of the series had sold 4.5 million copies in Japan. At the end of 2011, more than 10 million copies of the first fifteen volumes had been sold.

The series survived its sudden one-and-a-half year hiatus, with readers returning quickly to chapter 52. The series’ conclusion in March of 2012 was timed to coincide with the theatrical release of the first part of the live-action film based on the series.

Films

Bokura ga ita. Directed by Takahiro Miki. Toho Films, 2012. This live-action film stars Yuriko Yoshitaka as Nanami Takashi and Ikuta Toma as Motoharu Yano. It was released in two parts and follows the manga faithfully up to the series’ ending.

Television Series

Bokura ga ita. Directed by Akitaro Daichi. Artland, 2006. This animated television series comprises twenty-six episodes, which cover the story of Nanami Takashi and Motoharu Yano during their high school romance, ending with Yano’s departure for Tokyo.

Further Reading

Motomi, Kyousuke. Dengeki Daisy (2007- ).

Shina, Karuho. Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You (2005- ).

Bibliography

Ashcraft, Brian, and Shoko Ueda. Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential. New York: Kodansha, 2010.

Prough, Jennifer S. Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011.

Thompson, Jason. Manga: The Complete Guide. New York: Del Rey, 2007.