Hachimitsu to Clover

Yuuta Takemoto, a sophomore at an arts college, shares a cheap apartment with two seniors—the eccentric Shinobu Morita, who keeps failing to graduate due to his absenteeism, and the sensible Takumi Mayama, who acts as a proper senior to Takemoto, often looking out for him.

Takemoto had not given much thought to his future until one fine spring day, when he meets the endearing Hagumi Hanamoto and falls in love at first sight. Incredibly gifted in the arts, Hagumi enrolls in Takemoto's university and soon befriends the popular pottery student Ayumi Yamada. Ayumi is already well acquainted with the three flatmates and secretly harbors deep feelings for one of them.

Hachimitsu to Clover is a heartwarming tale of youth, love, soul-searching, and self-discovery, intricately woven through the complex relationships between five dear friends.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Morita, Shinobu Main

Ueda, Yuuji Japanese

Takemoto, Yuuta Main

Kamiya, Hiroshi Japanese

Yamada, Ayumi Main

Takahashi, Mikako Japanese

Hanamoto, Hagumi Main

Kudou, Haruka Japanese

Mayama, Takumi Main

Sugita, Tomokazu Japanese

Nomiya, Takumi Supporting

Hamada, Kenji Japanese

Hanamoto, Shuuji Supporting

Fujiwara, Keiji Japanese

Harada, Rika Supporting

Ohara, Sayaka Japanese

Lohmeyer-senpai Supporting

Yamadera, Kouichi Japanese

Leader Supporting

Aono, Takeshi Japanese

Takase, Atsuya Producer

Kasai, Kenichi Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Aketagawa, Jin Sound Director

Nagai, Tatsuyuki Episode Director

Reviews

Jan 25, 2026

Sakura131

Recommended

Honey and Clover is about discovering what love is - slowly, awkwardly, and often too late to do anything about it. Love in this series is rarely mutual and almost never clearly spoken. Characters struggle to express their feelings, misunderstand one another, or sit silently with emotions they don’t yet have language for. Unrequited love isn’t treated as a narrative obstacle to overcome, but as a formative experience: something that shapes who you become, even if it never resolves cleanly.

The series widens its lens beyond romance. It explores how people express love in fundamentally different ways - toward friends, family, art, and the future they’re ... trying to imagine for themselves. There’s the complicated love of a child watching a mother remarry, the confusion of what loyalty means when a family structure changes, and the quiet acceptance that love doesn’t always look the way you hoped it would. One of the show’s most honest sentiments is that some people aren’t lovers or friends in any neat category - they’re simply important. That importance doesn’t need a label to be real.

Life in Honey and Clover is materially fragile. The characters live in cramped, ragged apartments where money is tight - sometimes too tight for food - but there’s always enough for cigarettes. It’s a small detail that captures the mood of early adulthood: self-destructive habits, emotional coping mechanisms, and the sense that you’re surviving rather than progressing. This instability mirrors the larger question haunting the series: discovering purpose. Loving art doesn’t mean you’ll succeed at it. Wanting something deeply doesn’t guarantee it will love you back.

The show is also deeply interested in why people fall in love at all. Why this person, at this moment? Why does affection grow in one direction and not the other? Jealousy emerges not as villainy, but as confusion - what do you do when your feelings don’t align with reality?

Importantly, Honey and Clover refuses to provide clean answers. The future is never fully spelled out, relationships remain unresolved, and emotional arcs end in ellipses rather than conclusions. But that open-endedness is the point. Love, like life, is never finished. It grows, changes shape, and sometimes fades without ever giving you closure.

In that way, Honey and Clover isn’t a story about finding love - it’s about learning how to live alongside it, even when it doesn’t turn out the way you imagined.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Aug 20, 2018

Seelly

Mixed Feelings

Funny

Monologues.. a lot of them.
Sad piano music... a lot of that too.
They are very sad... and they like to show it.
Hagu is sad... the main character (don't recall his name) is sad cause she sad.
the idiot (also don't remember his names, i think he won an oscar?) is just an obnoxious idiot (pls go away).
the other chick is also sad (she makes a lot of plates) cause she likes guy that likes other sad woman with crutches (she wears heels...),
but he also sad cause other chick is sad.
professor says stuff... sometimes (i don't know what he teaches)
he also smokes (not the bicycles).
Bicycles
...

i wont even mention the first opening...

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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May 15, 2025

lastnameEver

Not Recommended

The show ends before it even begins. The messy-haired guy with glasses already leaves college before we have a chance to get to know him, Hagu’s cigarette-smoking guardian goes off on some trip to Africa, and Morita is hardly ever around – and yet immediately, the story thrusts itself into these sad feelings without even having laid the necessary groundwork for the viewer to become attached to these characters.

Silver-haired guy’s bicycle trip, and his eventual return capping off the first season, where he finally gets the better of Morita, is a satisfying moment. The scene at the very, very end where Takemoto opens up the ... good-luck charm Hagu gave him is inspired. In general I appreciate the maturity of the writing and its attempts at realism. All the characters are very likeable so long as they aren’t whining, but its subject matter is joyless, and watching it was an exercise in tedium.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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