Yuuta Takemoto
As time passes, the day will come when everything will fade to memories. But, those miraculous days, when you and I, along with everyone else, searched together for just that one thing, will continue revolving forever somewhere deep in my heart as my bittersweet memory.
And finally, the main character. Takemoto, the epitome of “ordinary poor college student who has no clue as to what he wants to do after he graduates.” Takemoto, an oddly sentimental but hesitant sophomore who fell in love but didn’t do a thing about it. Takemoto, who found the will to build a massive tower, break it down, and then ride half way across Japan and back, even though he has no distinctive traits or abilities to drive him forward. Takemoto was an interesting guy because he was normal, but it was his ordinary, relatable personality that let his story culminate everything that Honey and Clover stands for.
If H&C is about love, which I firmly believe it is, then it’s only fitting that Takemoto’s arc would cover his college love from its bittersweet beginning to its bittersweet end. It began the moment he saw her; illogical, inexplicable. It took him a while to realize that it was there, but sure enough, the feeling in the pit of his stomach was not a result of spoiled milk. He tried to get closer to her, which is a natural human instinct, but he reluctantly gave up when he realized that Morita was also interested. He didn’t like when love was about winning or losing. But as time passed, he lost his direction in life, unsatisfied with his studies and unhappy with his distance from his love. And so he traveled.
The beauty of Takemoto’s arc is that it was all internal. True, he was friends with Hagu, and there were a few conversations between them that were shown, but by and large, his emotional journey took place entirely within his mind. It had nothing to do with her actions, his decisions; it was simply the result of a love that appeared where it probably should not have, running its course even though it was futile. Perhaps it is a bit like spoiled milk, when you look at it that way. Even after he was rejected, his feelings couldn’t stop; if a rejection were all it took to stop a heart from feeling, then stories like this wouldn’t exist. However, the tragedy near the end added even more to Takemoto’s stress, and when the forces of Real Life tore them apart, he was faced with a very important question: was it worth it?
And that, right there, is the single most important part of the show. It’s the central message behind every arc, accentuated through Takemoto’s solitary emotional roller-coaster. Is something that will disappear the same as something that never existed? Is a failed love a worthless love? Unlike the other characters, Takemoto hardly had any outside influences; there was no relationship, no pre-existing friendship to either create or destroy. We see his story from beginning to end, we follow his heart as he tears down his Tower of Adolescnce and journeys into the distance to determine how much he cherishes the people back home. We see him at his best and worst, and we experience his mental dilemmas as he tries to find his way through life. His story, as with the other characters’, is viewed through the lens of love, and as his love comes to an unsuccessful end, he realizes the difference between something that would eventually fade and something that never existed. He realizes something simple but fundamental about life, something that we all wordlessly come to understand as we grow older; something that cannot be fully explained in a sentence, a blog post, or even a TV show. But we can try. Chika Umino and the folks at J.C. Staff tried, and their main character tells a story of the bittersweet nature of love, and of the emotion’s strange ways of weaving its way through one’s life, leaving both scars and precious memories in its wake.
