The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

My Happy Marriage

Miyo Saimori is the eldest daughter of the noble Saimori family, but as the un-Gifted daughter of her father's despised first wife, she's treated like a servant by her stepmother and half-sister. When escape comes in the form of being offered in marriage to the infamously cold Kiyoka Kudou, Miyo barely has enough left in her to hope, assuming that because she lacks Spirit-Sight she'll be rejected and die on the streets as her parents intended. But contrary to everyone's expectations, Miyo is not universally loathed, and her betrothal offers her the most precious chance of all: to learn to stop hating herself.

My Happy Marriage is based on writer Akumi Agitogi and illustrator Tsukiho Tsukioka's My Happy Marriage (Watashi no Shiawase na Kekkon) light novel series. It streams on Netflix on Wednesdays.

What we have here is a classic Cinderella setup complete with an evil stepmother, scapegoat, and golden child. Miyo is the daughter of a wealthy Japanese man. However, after the death of her mother, her father remarries and has another daughter. Miyo is then treated more like a servant than a daughter growing up—spending years doing menial tasks around the house while her half-sister is pampered to an extreme degree. Sadly, instead of getting animal friends and a fairy godmother, Miyo has to watch as her only friend (and longtime crush) is forced to become her sister's husband while she gets sent off to be the fiancée of a soldier who is notorious for mistreating his potential marriage partners.

This entire first episode is designed to make you feel as horrible as possible for Miyo. It's scene after scene of her being mistreated by literally everyone she knows; her father, her stepmother, her sister, the maids, and even the boy who claims to love her. Her existence is a living hell designed to repeatedly tear at a person's soul until nothing is left.

While this makes it easy to root for Miyo, the pure emotional torture of this episode makes it hard to tell where the series will go from here. If the title is to be believed, Kudo will turn out to be a nice man, and their marriage will revitalize her life—help her come to terms with her trauma and start the journey to become a confident individual. On the other hand, the title may be a sarcastic one and Miyo's suffering may just have started. Either way, I feel emotionally attached enough to Miyo and her plight to come back next week to see if I can get a better feel for what this series will be in the long run.

It's ironic that, with so many double-length (or longer) premieres this season that felt stretched out, this is a regular-sized episode that I really wish could have been longer. That's certainly a good problem to have – always leave the audience wanting more, as they say – but it means that this first episode only barely gets us to the “Marriage” part of the title, and there's decidedly little “Happy” to anything in Miyo's life by the time credits role. Thankfully, the character focus we get on our protagonist is more than enough to keep me locked in.

While the episode feels a little incomplete by its ending, everything leading up to that point is really engrossing. There's a strong grasp of tone that allows us to dig into Miyo's emotions, and her harsh circumstances, and just absorb all that tension and worry alongside her, while never going too over the top to tumble into misery porn. It's just subtle and restrained enough to make the drama feel real while assuring we sympathize with Miyo rather than pity her. Probably the most striking moment is when she's slowly making her way to the family meeting to arrange her marriage, and she keeps trying to push down the hopes of marrying Koji. A lifetime of mistreatment by her family has taught her not to expect anything but the worst, and yet there's some flicker of hope – a desire for something to go her way for once – that she can't extinguish. It's heartbreaking and all too real, especially when we know the cruel reality that awaits her on the other side of the door.

There's a lot of emotion packed into the animation as well, which is subdued to fit with the story being told, but all the more effective for it. I appreciate the attention paid to the characters' more subtle expressions, like the way Miyo will sometimes let her placid, resigned mask slip before recovering, or how her body language is always tense around her family as if she's braced for an attack, only relaxing when she's alone with Koji. There's a noticeable change to the lighting and color of the environments when Miyo finally leaves her family household to meet her new husband, in a way that perhaps portends a genuinely brighter life for her. Heck, by the end of the episode, it's almost startling to see one of the Kudo's servants give Miyo a warm, welcoming smile – something that takes the heroine and audience both by surprise. It's far from the most jaw-dropping production Kinema Citrus has delivered, but it's just about perfect for the quieter, emotion-driven story here.

The biggest question mark is the husband himself. We get a scant couple of lines from him before credits, but besides speaking very directly and being very pretty, we don't learn much about him. Miyo's story here is delivered well enough that I'm guaranteed to watch more and to have confidence in the direction of the story, but right now it's hard to tell what the dynamic of the central relationship will be. Like I said though, that's a good problem to have when you're already invested.

I often describe the light novels that this is adapting as “a dark Cinderella,” but when you get right down to it, all Cinderella stories are dark. In many, if not most, of the tales that are classified as “Cinderella A,” her father is alive and apparently perfectly okay with her stepmother and sisters' treatment of her, while in “Cinderella B” stories, her father actively wants to marry her. My Happy Marriage is an A story, thankfully, but that doesn't stop Miyo Saimori's father from being positively loathsome, because what kind of reprobate allows his second wife and daughter to treat his eldest daughter worse than the servants? (It's also worth mentioning that Miyo's mother's tree is likely a reference to the German version of the tale, where a magic tree planted on her mother's grave replaces the French fairy godmother.)

In fact, this episode is replete with horrible people. One of its strengths is in the way that it shows this; while Kaya is allowed to be very in-your-face with her treatment of Miyo, most of her abuse is revealed in a series of flashbacks. During these sequences, the only vocalizations we hear are those of toddler Miyo; otherwise, the scenes are silent but for background music. This works very well to allow us to grasp what's happening while also showing the emotional distance Miyo has had to place between herself and her own memories. Her only pleasant recollection is of her mother hugging her beneath the sakura tree; everything else is a sequence of aggressions and sinking feelings. We don't even see some of the worst bits – Miyo mentions in passing to the housekeeper that her stepmother threw out all of her mementos of an inheritance from her mother, and the way she reacts to getting a new kimono tells us a lot about how she's come to believe that she doesn't deserve to have anything new or nice.

In fact, the one thing she let herself hope for, that her friend Koji would somehow manage to help her, is dashed, which likely drives the point home that she doesn't deserve anything. Koji's submission to his father's orders to marry the odious Kaya is a double blow to Miyo, and even Koji thinks he should have had the guts to refuse harder than he tried to. Koji is the one person outside of the Saimori family who knew what Miyo was suffering, so his betrayal cuts the deepest. She expects it from her family. She hoped for something more from her friend. And by the time she reaches her betrothed's home, we can see that she's all but given up. She doesn't know how to react to Yurie's warm welcome, and she's plainly afraid of Kiyoka, her husband-to-be. Right now he looks more like Prince Surly than Prince Charming, and that's hardly what Miyo needs.

With its soft colors, gentle soundtrack, and interesting retelling of ATU510a, this is looking like a very solid adaptation of the light novels. It's not always an easy story, and Miyo has a lot to overcome. But if it retains this level of faithfulness, it should be worth watching to see Miyo and Kiyoka grow together.

I haven't had a whole lot of luck finding one of these very emotionally heavy, frequently melodramatic anime romances that have clicked with me, in the past, though I've definitely opened up more to the tropes and archetypes of the genre in recent years. I want there to be a gooey, saccharine love story that I can really sink my teeth into, but while there have been some visual novels that have really done the trick for me (play The House in Fata Morgana if you haven't; you won't regret it, I promise), it's been a while since a television series has had the same impact on me, at least so far as the anime that don't also contain giant robots, demon fights, or other such trappings are concerned.

My Happy Marriage has potential, but this first episode still has me afraid to get my hopes up. The production values are strong, which is always a plus. The music is affecting, the character designs are appealing, and everything moves at a solid pace, despite the subdued tone. Even though the visuals aren't exactly doing anything especially wild or inventive, the pathos of our heroine Miyo's plight comes through loud and clear.

For some, it might be a little too loud and clear, because like many a Cinderella-esque protagonist before her, Miyo's life sucks, and this show will not stop until you know it. Her stepmother and half-sister hate her guts and openly mock her with literally every line of dialogue they have. Her father is just as bitter and resentful, and only barely manages to mask his contempt behind his unfeeling monotone. The one guy that looks at Miyo as a human being gets married off to the catty stepsister, while Miyo is forced to move out and get hitched to some recluse she's never met. It's dour times, all around, is what I'm saying, and the show's overwhelming assault of unrelenting sadness won't be for everyone.

Still, for folks that are in sync with what My Happy Marriage is going for, I won't deny that the show seems to be checking all the boxes with gusto. I will admit that I am curious to see how Miyo's dire circumstances turn into a heart-pounding romance, and I won't lie…her new groom is a pretty fella. I can't blame the girl for thinking, “You know what? Maybe this won't be the worst thing to ever happen to me!” Chalk this up as one of the shows that have earned the 3-episode test to see if the story picks up now that the setup is out of the way.

My Happy Marriage is going to get called a melodrama a lot, I'm sure, but I just want to say right off the bat that I don't think that's at all accurate. A melodrama is deliberately heightened and prioritizes explicit text over subtext; I didn't get that vibe at all from My Happy Marriage, which does a beautiful job in the first episode setting up the characters and situations with little in the way of histrionics or exaggeration.

Miyo has a raw deal in life; while the lack of powers mentioned in the plot summary is barely even hinted at, the abuse she lives under isn't too far off from the conditions of many people who live in a state of emotional abuse and neglect. Her family treats her as a scapegoat, blaming and berating her for every little error or inconvenience, and all Miyo can do is accept it. My heart broke for her when, after her half-sister, Kaya dresses her down for supposedly subpar tea, her stepmother snaps at her to stop bowing and go make a new pot; you know that had she done anything differently, she would just have gotten yelled at for not being sufficiently apologetic.

The episode effectively portrays Miyo's emotional state through narration, her expressions, body language, and relationships with the people around her. She comes across as a whole person, who may be mistreated by her family but still has people who care about her, who can't quite give up on hope. Although I knew the basic premise, and thus that it wouldn't work out in her favor, I felt invested in her relationship with Koji, because I was already invested in her happiness.

Kinema Citrus has turned out a lush production here, a true delight since anime aimed at women has tended to get the short end of the stick. The animation is fluid, with delicate characters acting in every frame that supports the understated writing. Lighting and color set the mood throughout the episode, using drab shades and shadows with the occasional pop of color to emphasize the hopelessness of Miyo's situation and contrast it with the coddling that Kaya receives. In the final minutes, when she meets Kiyoka, the world becomes bright, awash in gentle, pink tones. I found Evan Call's tinkling piano score a bit simple, but it consistently set the mood.

I could spend another several hundred words listing small moments in the episode that struck me, but I'll spare you. Instead, I'll leave you with this: I want to know more. I can't wait for next week, because I want to learn about Kiyoka and who he is, and how he's chased away so many fiancees, despite Miyo's affectionate narration.