Yakuza Fiancé: Raise wa Tanin ga Ii

Episodes 1-2

Don't let the glut of cute and cuddly yakuza anime fool you. This is no Yakuza's guide to Babysitting, capitalizing on the gap moe of a bunch of tough gangsters doting on a young child, with the occasional burst of cartoony fights where no one gets hurt. Nor is this an A Girl and Her Guard Dog situation, where the guy may be a hardass in general, but soft and gentle with her. Yakuza Fiancé is the story of a young woman who finds herself engaged to an awful, violent young man. In this situation, she has two choices: turn tail and run home to Osaka in disgrace, or match his energy to gain the upper hand in the relationship and exert her power.

There is no sugar, here folks, just spice.

It all begins when Yoshino Somei's grandfather, one of the top yakuza bosses in Osaka, informs her that she'll be moving to Tokyo as the fiancee of the grandson of one of his best friends. He reassures her that the boy, who she has never met, isn't a gangster himself, just related to one. Yoshino reluctantly agrees.

Nothing in Tokyo goes right for Yoshino. Sure, Miyama is gorgeous and seems hot, but her position as his fiancee earns her the ire of the other girls in her class. Then on a night out gone wrong, she learns Miyama's true colors: romantically he's a masochist, disappointed that Yoshino wasn't the spoiled, manipulative ice queen who would crush him like a bug he's been hoping for. In all other things, he's a total sadist, a violent thug with no self-control with no qualms about beating anyone who crosses him to death. He suggests she sell her body to earn some money, much to her horror.

Yoshino does what anyone else would do in this situation: calls home looking for comfort. Her grandfather, however, gives her very unorthodox advice and recommends she figure out the way to Miyama's heart, make him fall in love with her, and then use that to destroy him. She figures out how to follow both men's suggestions in one fell swoop: disappears for two weeks and returns with several million yen, her earnings from selling her kidney. Just as planned, Miyama can't help but fall in love with a woman who makes as unhinged a choice as this.

I'm new to Yakuza Fiancé, so I genuinely don't know what kind of story this will be. It seems to eschew most of the typical conventions of recent yakuza romances. Miyama is not a nice guy at heart. Yoshino is not going to gentle him with her love. If anything, he's going to make her worse. So far, the story has no aspirations toward likability or moral lessons. It is a pure spectacle, top to bottom, offering nothing but the thrill of watching terrible people do terrible things and the unease of watching Yoshino, who has by and large been sheltered from the family business, get pulled into the gritty, violent reality of the family business.

While the first episode was largely devoted to setting up Yoshino and Miyama's dynamic and building that sense of unease, the second episode feels like a more representative sample of what to expect from the story on an episode-by-episode basis. Yoshino has found herself unable to shake her overeager fiance, who as it turns out planted a tracker in her electronic dictionary. But it doesn't matter anyway – after the 20-year-old daughter of a subordinate family disappears, Yoshino is ordered to stay by Miyama's side 24 hours a day for protection. Yoshino isn't exactly pleased, since her determination to impress him isn't exactly borne of affection.

It's a talky episode, using the situation with the missing girl to iron out some of the finer details involving inter-clan politics and territories and introduce Miyama's backstory. Much of the first half is spent on Miyama and Yoshino in various locations talking about the situation; luckily, Miyama is played by Akira Ishida, one of the best living voice actors, and while I still don't buy him as a high school student, his performance of Miyama as vaguely threatening even when affably explaining things and taking Yoshino out to dinner keeps things from getting dull.

The situation shifts when out on an errand to buy a new hairdryer, Yoshino spots the missing girl entering a club. The club is on another family's territory, so normally it would be asking for trouble to track her down there, but lucky enough it belongs to a sub-group of the Somei family. Yoshino can gain her and Miyama's admission to the club by calling up her family. This scene is exemplary of what makes Yoshino a fun character – she may have everygirl energy, with ordinary needs like a new blow dryer when her old one blows out, but she can turn around and call up her gangster family to gain admission to a club. When she gets into said club, she's uncomfortable with the booming bass and sexually charged atmosphere but is also willing to throw herself into a fight when things break bad.

See, the missing girl Shiori Akaza is very much not an everygirl, but a spoiled yakuza princess who fucked up royally by getting caught cheating at underground baccarat tables run by the Filipino mafia. Oops. She's planning to leave the country for a while until things cool off, but uh-oh! Here comes Miyama to ruin everyone's day. It's a perfect example of how he's the opposite of Yoshino; even when he's acting casual and smiling, there's something off about him. No normal human would think it's okay to throw his arm around a stranger and start eating out of the bowl she's holding, and that casual violation of boundaries makes him extremely menacing. It asks, “What are you going to do about it?”

Because when people respond in any way other than freezing in fear, it goes badly for them. The human mind generally puts limiters on our strength; when those limits are off, the results can be horrific. Miyama simply does not have those limiters; it led to him breaking 20 other children's bones when he was 12, and now he's beating the everloving shit out of some petty thugs. While Yoshino isn't a fraction as vicious as he is, she holds her own in the fight, breaking her brand-new hairdryer on one's skull when she gets shoved out of the way.

There's an odd “all's well that ends well” vibe to the ending, with Miyama and Yoshino chatting in class about the results of their adventure as if it didn't end with at least one man permanently disabled and Miyama covered in bandages. The tonal incongruity is a large part of what sells the show and makes it stand out. We're not here for meditations on violence or to chill out with pleasant human beings. We're here for a schlocky good time, unbound from conventional morality.

It looks like next week we'll find out who the other guy with tattoos and a six-pack in the opening is.

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Yakuza Fiancé: Raise wa Tanin ga Ii is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.