#Nanahoshi Youji

[tanenigiri]

Review #32: Hello, Green Days

Japanese title: ハロー、グリーンデイズ (Hello, Green Days)

Story and art: Ayu Sakumoto

Number of volumes: 1 in Japanese (complete)

A blossoming romance between two opposites.

(This review contains story spoilers.)

One trope that I’ve gradually realized that I’m a sucker for is the main couple comforting each other. In hindsight, it should’ve been obvious with Our Dining Table being my favorite manga so far and Koimonogatari being one of the titles right behind it, but I find something really powerful in how two characters can find solace in each other. It definitely makes their eventual relationship more solid for me as they’ve established this emotional trust.

It takes a while for Hello, Green Days to get to that point, and I admittedly initially thought that the one-sidedness of the comforting for a bulk of the story was to its detriment, but the story really proved me wrong by the end. In its defense, though, Mikage really deserves that comforting after everything he’s been through. The very first thing we find out about Mikage - aside from his age and the fact that he’s a botany major - is that he was ridiculed back in junior high school for confessing to another guy. The trauma from this incident was enough for Mikage to give up on romance altogether, pushing himself to seclusion for the eight years that followed.

Of course, that’s upended by the other lead character of the series - Nanahoshi, a younger student who participates in the seminar held by the professor Mikage is assisting. I sort-of bent the truth in the previous paragraph, as the actual first thing we find out about Mikage is how Nanahoshi likes him - the very first page of the manga features a glimpse into the confession. It’s an interesting choice to start the story with this scene with a promise of coming back to it later, as even if you already expect the two leads to get together, it recontextualizes the subsequent events and revelations as building up to this confession rather than establishing the relationship.

Turns out, we don’t have to wait that long, as the confession happens at the end of the first chapter. But that doesn’t mean that the events leading up to it were rushed - as a matter of fact, quite a lot happens in the first chapter before this confession. One of the main things is how Mikage notices that Nanahoshi is struggling to make ends meet, so he offers Nanahoshi to move into his dorm so that they can split the rent and reduce costs. We find out that part of Mikage’s seclusion led him to decide to live alone, so this offer is as much of a huge deal for him as it is to Nanahoshi.

We also get the first instance of one of my favorite things about this manga - Mikage’s plant talk. When we first get a glimpse of Mikage’s room, we find it surrounded with plants, and while that’s partly because of him being a botany student, we also get a sense that this is part of Mikage’s ways to deal with his solitude - Nanahoshi even brings up later on how Mikage is fond of talking to his plants. In any case, since Nanahoshi is helping out Mikage in taking care of the plants, the latter takes it as an opportunity to educate Nanahoshi about them and how to properly care for them. And, expectedly, the manga uses these monologues as parallels to what’s going on in the main story.

My favorite instance of this is in the second chapter, where Nanahoshi asks Mikage about the shameplant - the one that closes its leaves whenever you touch them. Mikage explains that one of the leading theories as to why this happens is because the plant wants to protect itself from being eaten by animals, and the chapter uses this as a parallel to how uncomfortable Mikage is about his newfound relationship with Nanahoshi. Just like the shameplant, Mikage seems to retreat to his shell when Nanahoshi makes any advances to him, but he recognizes that he needs to break out of that shell if he wants the relationship to work out.

This naturally leads to a plot point about intimacy, and when Nanahoshi is shown to want to take things further, Mikage says he isn’t ready. While this expectedly causes Nanahoshi to take a step back and be more careful around Mikage - much to the latter’s dismay - what I didn’t expect was how this would be the catalyst to Nanahoshi’s backstory.

An unfortunate incident in high school involving him using his martial arts skills in the wrong place and time comes crashing down on him, and he’s seen to be left aimless and directionless until he happened to go on a university visit for his prospects. We find out that it’s here where he actually meets Mikage for the first time, though not to the botany student’s knowledge - Nanahoshi just so happens to see him in a greenhouse talking to plants and being in his element. He gets his drive back from this one-way interaction alone, studying hard to get accepted in that university even without the guarantee that he’ll be able to meet Mikage. While at my first read I thought this was a bit shallow and too convenient, I did realize afterwards that someone at rock bottom like Nanahoshi at that point can get motivation in the most unexpected places, and if that just so happens to be from someone talking to plants, then I’m glad he was able to find it.

It’s also by this point that we get to see just how Mikage’s able to “comfort” Nanahoshi even without the former even knowing it. Not only did Mikage pull Nanahoshi out of his funk, but he had also given him something new to work toward, and Nanahoshi credits all of his progress to Mikage’s kindness and passion. This understandably makes Mikage flustered - we even see a small sequence of him as a young boy already being interested in plants, and we get the sense that this is Mikage realizing that his "weird obsession" since he was a kid was all worth it.

There’s one other plot point I really want to talk about here - Mikage running into one of his former bullies. The story’s final chapter sees Mikage attending an academic conference with his professor, and one of the people running the registration booth just so happens to be one of his former classmates who ridiculed Mikage for confessing to another guy. While they start with exchanging pleasantries, Mikage is expectedly uncomfortable with the whole situation, and he’s saved from having to deal with the bully bringing back those memories by his professor calling him over.

I was a bit wary with what they were going to do with this plot point when it was teased at the end of the penultimate chapter. On one hand, I’m not a fan of the whole “forgiving bullies” trope as it’s often done very lazily. But on the other hand, I wasn’t expecting the story to come back to the very first scene like this - those kinds of tragic backstories usually just serve as characterization fuel rather than plot fuel - so I was interested in how the story was going to handle this.

Thankfully, the story does avoid any of the common pitfalls of dealing with bully characters. Not only is the forgiveness quite bumpy - while we do get that the bully is genuinely sorry for hurting Mikage’s feelings, he still has his own biases about homosexuality in general - but the resolution we get isn’t that Mikage is now on good terms with the bully. Rather, we see Mikage taking a very important step toward moving on from that incident and accepting it for what it is, and that’s a billion times better than whatever other resolution involving the bully we can possibly get.

And, of course, Mikage credits that to Nanahoshi’s presence in his life - he even outright says that it’s because of Nanahoshi that he’s able to save himself from dwelling on his conversation with his bully too much and letting it weigh him down. I’m not surprised that it’s this instance that breaks the intimacy barrier for Mikage, and while it does take a few more months for Nanahoshi to break his own barrier, it does show that they’ll be alright, despite all the baggage that they’re lugging behind them.

I didn’t expect to say this much for a story as short as Hello, Green Days - it’s only five chapters long + a bonus chapter of what happens next - but I’m amazed at how it’s able to pull all of this off despite its length. There are definitely plot points that I think could’ve benefited from this story being longer - Nanahoshi’s relationship with his family is the biggest one for me - but for what it is, it’s an incredibly sweet and comforting read.

Random thoughts that I couldn’t fit elsewhere:

One of my favorite scenes here is when Mikage talks to his professor about how he can be jealous of plants, specifically in how they don’t seem to need to worry about anything. It comes as no surprise that the professor counters this quite methodically, saying that plants don’t “worry” because they don’t have the same type of brain as humans do, but if they did, they would constantly be worried about the environment around them. It might not be as uplifting as normal relationship advice, but it does steer Mikage in the right direction in terms of handling his worries about his relationship - and it’s yet another reason why the whole plant theme running through the manga is such a good way of giving the plot a unique flavor.

This is one of a handful of titles I’ve covered for this project where the story doesn’t really give that much space to characters outside of the two leads - the professor and the former bully are really the only other ones with prominent lines, and even they don’t get that much. While I would’ve liked to see more dynamics outside of the main relationship, I do understand this decision, seeing as the story is told from Mikage’s point of view - who had already decided to seclude himself from the rest of the world by the start of the first chapter.

One thing I didn’t expect is for the last bit of plot we see in the story - at least, the last scene of the bonus chapter - to be about Nanahoshi’s relationship with his family. I mentioned above that this was one plot point I thought could’ve been expanded on if this story was longer, but what we did get here is a fantastic way to wrap it up. After eating corn that Nanahoshi grew for breakfast, Mikage suggests sending some of the corn back to Nanahoshi’s family so that they could see that he’s doing well. Nanahoshi’s taken aback by the suggestion, but before Mikage could worry about how forward he was being, Nanahoshi assures him that it’s a good idea and even thanks him for his concern. It’s these kinds of moments that really make me come back to this manga, as they’re so simple but carry so much weight.

Thanks for reading! I think Hello, Green Days is one of the titles that I keep rereading the most, and while part of that is because of its short length, I also like how comforting it feels. I really hope it gets an official English physical release soon so that more people find out about it - it’s such a good read!

I’ll post my next review in around a week. I hope you look forward to it!