Friendship that disappears because of a fight over a man is boring!　A female writer talks with the scriptwriter about "Tsuki ga Kirei" Interview with screenwriter Yuko Kakihara and producer Ken Minami

Tsuki ga Kirei" has made viewers' hearts pound, regardless of age difference or gender, with its head-on depiction of the love lives of junior high school students, whose personalities are so realistic that it is hard to find a precedent in recent anime. In a previous Akiba Research Institute interview [#
], Director Kishi and Producer Minami said that screenwriter Yuko Kakihara's help was indispensable in portraying life-size junior high school girls. In an interview[#] with Soken in the past, director Kishi and producer Minami said that screenwriter Yuko Kakihara's help was indispensable in portraying life-sized junior high school girls! (laugh). We asked Kakihara and producer Minami to talk about how they created the characters and the interesting human drama of "Tsuki ga Kirei" from a woman's point of view. We would like you to read about Mr. Kakihara's life experiences that led to the creation of characters that women can relate to and those that divide opinion, the life of a junior high school boy that was difficult to portray, and the reasons why this work was "a miracle" that "had been locked away for a long time. (Text: Akiyoshi Hizume)

When I explain the girls' sensibilities, they say, "What's that?　It's a mendoukai! they say.

─ First of all, what was the starting point of the "Tsuki ga Kirei" project?

Minami: The original plan was to depict a "normal love story," so the only thing that existed from the beginning was a story about a boy and a girl, right?

Kakihara That's right. The choice of junior high school age was also gradually determined by working backwards from the idea of "portraying pure love. There was a period of meetings between the three of us, including director Kishi, to determine what we wanted to portray, the level of tension in the romance, and whether it would be popular with the viewers. The characters were not decided until long after the project began.

─ I heard that the three of you had an intense discussion about the differences between men and women, based on your own experiences. Were there any gaps between men and women that you felt through the meetings?

Kakihara: I think that boys have it easy (laughs). (Laughs) I felt that girls' thoughts are more complex. For girls, the big question in April is how to make relationships in class. I would explain to Director Kishi and Ms. Minami how the girls felt, "If it's this girl, she can join this group," or "If it's this girl and this girl, they can't join because of their personal relationships," and they would say, "What is that?　That's a pain in the ass! (laughs).


Minami: I had never thought about "creating" a relationship. For men, such relationships were something that was naturally "created. In the first place, junior high school boys are still far from being fully human (laughs).

Kakihara When I asked them what kind of conversations they had with boys during recess, they would tell me that they were studying where to pinch their arms so that it wouldn't hurt, or that they were shoulder-banging each other (laughs).

Minami: It wasn't a conversation anymore (laughs).

Kakihara They would say, "How much does it hurt?" or "It hurts me more than it hurts you" or something like that (laughs). (Laughs.) So when I wanted to write an everyday conversation between junior high school boys, I couldn't come up with the idea, so I kept asking this and that in the script meetings. I kept asking them about shadowboxing with a fluorescent light string, and they would say, "Yes! So I wrote it down and said, "Oh, I know that ....... Moreover, I don't have any male siblings, so boys have always been sampled from shoujo manga. But I was taught in a solicitous manner that boys in shoujo manga are an illusion, and I realized once again that I had no idea what boys were! I realized once again.


──Did you listen to or refer to Director Kishi's and Ms. Minami's love stories from their middle school days?

Kakihara They tell me their stories, but Minami-san and Kishi-san are quite special. ......It's not the main part of "Tsuki ga Kirei," but the C part. ...... (laughs). When I said, "Is there really such a girl? I said, "We did it" (laughs). I'd like to get a more normal sample. ...... (laughs).

Minami: Despite the differences in location, they were both similarly rough kids. They were not samples of ordinary junior high school students (laughs). The assistant director, Mr. Iwasaki, was from Fukuoka, and he played sports and took the high school entrance exam, so he was the most normal sample.

Kakihara That is why I referred to Mr. Iwasaki's stories in my daily life. I said, "Not with these people!" (laughs).

─ ─ When you think about it, Kotaro was probably very mature for a junior high school student.

Kakihara Kotaro was created that way on purpose. In the early stages of character development, when we were discussing what kind of charms we should have for an ordinary boy and a girl to attract each other, I said, "I want Kotaro to be strong. When we thought about how to express this, we decided to develop Kotaro's humble specs, such as being in the literature club, being involved in the adult community at festivals, and having a surprisingly wide range of friends. Akane responded to this and became a girl with just the right balance of being able to see through Kotaro's charms.


Minami: Yes, she has high specs on the plain side.

Kakihara She may look plain, but I thought, "Wow, this girl has a lot of things. We talked about how Akane sees things that ordinary junior high school girls don't notice. Akane has various characteristics that would make her stand out in class, but on the other hand, she is very insecure and withdrawn. She likes old-fashioned things and can see what is important. As I wrote these details, I came to the conclusion that he was attracted to a girl who stepped back from the stage and did not stand out, and we settled on the idea that the two of them could meet, see each other, and fall in love.

Minami: So in the end, these two are "a cracked pot with a cracked lid.

Kakihara That's right. We had a lot of discussions about what kind of background should be set up for these girls to fall in love with each other. I feel that we went through a process of confirming each other's parents, where they lived, and so on during our meetings.

─ When designing characters for an animated film, it is tempting to include bizarre elements, but the character modeling for this film is very natural, and I think this led to the realism that is the charm of this film.

Kakihara Director Kishi was uncompromising in this area and went into great detail to find out what would happen to such a child and what would be in her room. Really, we went on and on about everything from where the parents worked to the location of branch offices, and we even created a history of the company's size and transfers.

Minami: There is a clear history of Akane's father, Hiroshi Mizuno, since he joined the company (laughs).

Kakihara I worked backward from the image of the house I wanted to portray to find out the parents' annual income, whether it was a love marriage or an arranged marriage, and even talked about how the parents viewed love. I was also quite concerned about the characterization of the characters and wondered if it would be possible to create a TV series based on such a story about such ordinary-looking children. But the directors strongly told me, "We don't need a bizarre setting this time! I was reassured by the director's strong words, "We don't need a bizarre setting this time!


Kakihara──What did you pay attention to when writing the script in order to create a realistic junior high school atmosphere?

Kakihara I tried to keep the number of lines to a minimum. To put it simply, I eliminated explanatory lines, but in order to make it more like a realistic conversational tempo, I took out the subject and tried to capture the raw reality of how conversations can be understood even with meaningless words exchanged. For example, if it was a conversation between boys, I would only use words like "ouch" and "yabee," and I sometimes wondered if I was doing okay when I was writing. (laughs). (Laughs.) I tended to add more lines to convey the situation, but then I would think to myself, "He wouldn't say two lines in an everyday conversation, would he? I would cut them down as much as I could. The director told me, "It's okay, it's understandable." But since the script has fewer lines than other anime, I tried my best to convey the emotions of the characters with just a few lines of dialogue. I couldn't use flashy quotes or cool lines, so the hardest part was suppressing the anxiety of "Is this going to be understood by the viewers? It was the hardest thing for me to suppress the anxiety of "Is this going to get through to the audience? Even when I confessed my love, I was told, "I can't say 'I love you'! I was told, "I can't say 'I love you'!

Minami: You've never said a definitive line in your entire life, have you?

Kakihara That's true, but that was the part that worried me the most (laughs). That was the part that worried me the most.

─ ─ When I read the script, I thought it was like a script for a Japanese movie.

Kakihara I myself liked plays that had few lines and used pauses. I was also a graduate of the screenwriter training school opened by Satoshi Kuramoto, and my favorite tempo is "From the North". However, it is a style that does not fit well in animation work, so I naturally kept it locked away in the back of my mind. By coincidence and circumstance, I was able to open the drawer for the first time in a while this time. Even when I wrote lines with lots of pauses, the director said, "That's fine, let's make a work like that. But later, I learned that it was deathly difficult to make it into an animated film (laughs).

Minami: It was quite a struggle to make this into a picture (laughs).

─ ─ What did you keep in mind when setting the film in Kawagoe?

Kakihara As with the character modeling, I worked backwards, lining up the stories and interviews I had done with each of the characters and scrutinizing them, thinking, "This is what it would be like for children of this age living in Kawagoe. "Is this about the same level of rural feeling?" Or, "Wouldn't that be too much like the culture of the city? We mixed and subtracted from each other's experiences. I read many blogs published by junior high school students.

Minami: If you notice, there is more than a decade's worth of accumulated information on the Web, so I definitely relied on that. However, the information on the pages I visited was not always up-to-date, so I got into the habit of looking at the date of update with this work.

Kakihara Through this process, I was able to confirm that the mood and tension of junior high school students were not so different in the past and still are today, but I could not get a sense of the way things were perceived and the sense of the times. For example, when I wanted to know how Kawagoe's entrance exam system was for higher education, or how close the boys and girls in club activities were depending on the area, I would search for "Kawagoe club activities track and field" and see what people who had been there before had to say. Even for school trips, I wondered what kind of luggage they would bring, whether they would go to the arcade or not, and so on.


Minami: Do kids today buy wooden swords, too?　Things like that (laughs).

Kakihara: I didn't have any real junior high school students around me. So the only people I was able to talk to directly were people who said, "I was a junior high school student until recently. I was shocked to see that the students I interviewed in 2014, when the project first started, were university students by the time the program went on the air.

Minami: Come to think of it, junior high school is only three years long. It seems like a very short time to us adults, but to them, it must feel like a long time.