Kowloon Generic Romance

Episodes 1-2

Do I feel smugly vindicated right now? Hell yes, based on the first two superb episodes of this adaptation of my current favorite manga, the one I feel I've been screaming into the void about for ages. It seems so many others have now woken up to the mysterious charms of mangaka Jun Mayuzuki's (After the Rain) latest opus that it scored the most votes from ANN readers for daily streaming reviews! To me, that merely confirms that our readers have excellent taste in animated entertainment, and that I almost couldn't have hoped for a better adaptation.

At turns intoxicatingly beguiling, and others painfully romantic, Kowloon Generic Romance is a very unusual manga, slow-moving yet densely packed with nuance and metaphor. Arvo Animation and director Yoshiaki Iwasaki seem to get Mayuzuki's intentions. Like the manga, this show exudes utterly immaculate vibes, conjuring a sense of potent nostalgia for a place that no longer exists… yet in this strange world, somehow still does.

Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, once the most densely packed human habitation on the planet, was finally torn down in 1994, to be replaced with a municipal park. An irreplaceable oddity, it was a hotbed of organized crime and human exploitation – yet to fifty thousand people, it was home. Protagonist Reiko Kujirai, a 32-year-old realtor, and her love interest, Hajime Kudo, are two Japanese ex-pats who have made Kowloon their home. Except it appears this isn't the original Kowloon: it's referred to as “Second Kowloon”, plus it has Generic Terra, a sinister, futuristic, glowing metallic octahedron (not dissimilar to a certain Neon Genesis Evangelion angel) floating in the skies above.

This is where I wonder if the first episode gives away a little too much. Whereas in Yen Press' manga translation of the first volume, Generic Terra is described as “a new world for mankind, based on safe and sophisticated technology,” the anime equivalent scene goes a step further, explaining it “is capable of backing up the memories of all human beings, making even eternal youth and immortality a reality.” That information isn't revealed until manga volume nine.

Perhaps that's a symptom of the process required to cram the entire story into a relatively paltry thirteen episodes, presumably with some kind of definitive ending, which is somewhat concerning, as the eleven-volume manga doesn't have one yet. To illustrate this: episode one's startling cliffhanger comes right from the end of the first volume, and the second episode concludes at the second volume's penultimate chapter. In total, between these initial two installments, the first sixteen (of 96 currently published) chapters are swiftly and efficiently adapted, while excising the contents of two chapters entirely. At this accelerated rate, it's quite conceivable how the rest of the series will fit into the episode order.

Sometimes when anime rushes through its source material, it's a total disaster (*cough* The Promised Neverland Season 2 *cough*), however, so far I'd argue this approach works extremely well for Kowloon Generic Romance. Anyone who has read my reviews of the first eight volumes here on ANN will know one of my only criticisms of the otherwise masterful manga is its achingly slow pace, with minimal plot development per volume. It's a manga designed to be savored slowly, and I kind of love it for that. However, it may be hard to sustain viewer interest in a longer-form twenty-six-episode anime series with such deliberately languid pacing. By trimming out many of the more incidental slice-of-life interludes, the show does lose a little of the manga's charmingly oddball character, however, the extremely lean, efficient storytelling of the adaptation somehow manages to maintain the slightly unsettling yet nostalgic vibe, while the plot develops at a fair clip.

Central to Kowloon Generic Romance's magic is its cast of multifaceted characters, most notably dual protagonists Kujirai and Kudo. Whereas Kudo gets some early viewpoint chapters in the manga, here he's mostly sidelined by Kujirai, and we see him almost entirely through her eyes, except for one crucial flashback in the second episode. We don't just get one version of Kujirai either – episode two introduces the concept of Kujirai “A” and “B”. It's obvious from the outset that there's something wrong with Kujirai and her world, and it's not only due to the creepily omnipresent octahedron in the sky.

For one, it seems Kujirai no longer needs her glasses – people's eyes don't just suddenly improve out of nowhere. Then there's her sweetly awkward relationship with Kudo, who seems to see someone else when he looks at her. Their playful banter is a delight as they flit between platonic coworkers and potential romantic partners, the tension between them practically palpable. Kujirai realizes she's falling for him, yet there's something in the way… Or more like a person, namely… herself, or at least another version of her.

Kudo's apparent secret is that he'd been engaged to Kujirai, but she's forgotten? Or perhaps she's a different person? A clone? A replacement? Whatever she is, this version of Kujirai A is different in several ways from the version of Kujirai B previously engaged to Kudo. We see it in B's photographed expression – confident and seductive, very different from her counterpart, while she also wore deep red lipstick and earrings. Kujirai A's ears aren't even pierced. No wonder she's so freaked out when a just-woken-from-nap Kudo grabs her and deeply kisses her, before pushing her away to announce she's “the wrong person.” How's a girl supposed to recover from that?

Kujirai's new friend Yaomay helps her to pick up the pieces of her heart to try and make sense of the madness. I like Yaomay, she's the kind of friend Kujirai needs, even if she seems to be some kind of freaky plastic surgery fiend. Yaomay announces that “I'll be the one to decide who is and isn't me.” Kujirai A's attempt to copy B's style only leads to Kudo rejecting her, and she symbolically puts B's glasses and earrings into a box. Finally, Kudo can look at her as she is, not what he wants to see.

Who knows what creepiest doctor ever, Dr. Hebinuma, sees when he looks at Kujirai? She's rightly freaked out by his snake-like forked tongue and personal-space-invading slithering. As the son and inheritor of his father's “Hebinuma Pharmaceuticals,” he practically screams wrongness out of every serpentine pore. (Do snakes even have pores?) Hebinuma knows a lot more about what's going on in this Kowloon, and perhaps even with Kujirai, considering his file on her that describes her as a “compatible person,” whatever that means. Kids, if your doctor acts like Dr. Hebinuma, tell an adult you trust.

Kujirai's identity crises are complemented by layers of visual metaphor, stunningly depicted in the excellent opening sequence, filled with mirrored characters and recursion. Wednesday Campanella's supremely catchy, 80s-tinged opening song only adds to the nostalgic vibe. The award for most obvious metaphor goes to the recurrent goldfish motif, as little captive fishies swim around their small enclosure, and one dies as Kujirai wonders what happened to her previous counterpart. That Kudo even bought Kujirai a goldfish is a constant reminder that she's a memory-less being, drifting inside a densely packed enclosure.

At least said enclosure is convincingly recreated here, with the narrow, grimy streets, tiny cafes, and dim alleyways of the real Kowloon depicted in incredible detail. Rarely does TV anime go so far to conjure such a compelling sense of place. I'm so delighted at the frankly stupendous effort made by Arvo Animation to bring this wonderful manga to such vibrant life. I can only hope they can sustain such quality throughout the entire series, and that we're not short-changed with a lame anime-original ending. I'm crossing my fingers for a Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood-style situation, where final episode and final manga chapter releases coincide...

Episode 1: Rating:
Episode 2: Rating:

Kowloon Generic Romance is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.