Reviews

Non Non Biyori follow the idyllic lives of Hotaru, Komari, Natsumi, and Renge, a group of friends aged 7 to 14 and their little adventures in the rural paradise of Asahigaoka. The show is very episodic in nature and you can pretty much watch in any order you like. I think it’s very hard to add anything new when talking about this, for two reasons. First, everybody already watched this. Second, there’s not that much to talk about. It’s a very well established formula at this point. A group of sweet, endearing characters living the best time of their lives in the Japanese countryside. Non Non is just better than most at it. The plots are not what makes this special though. You’ll go through all the same stuff; fireworks, melon and a hot summer, a beach episode, a school festival episode and so forth. What makes it better than most are the characters, they felt more unique and realized than most entities populating Iyashikeis and CGDCT I’ve seen.

I particularly liked two characters. First would be Komari, one of the Koshigaya sisters. I enjoyed how she encapsulated the ideas children have about being a grown up. Liking bitter foods, reading fashion magazines, liking certain types of music and dressing up. The funny part is she’s actually going through the process of becoming an actual adult through the conflicts with her slacker sister. She finds herself in a position of responsibility at her home, having to perform domestic tasks and helping her sister to not get too unhinged and mediating between her and their mother. It’s interesting how she never realizes those things are what is turning her into an adult, perhaps the most adult, responsible person in her group but since she has an idealized idea of what’s about she gets lost in things like having a phone or using a certain type of clothing. The way the internal conflict of this character is handled is one of the best parts of this show in my opinion and what I enjoyed the most in it.

The other character I enjoyed following around is Kaede, the candy shop owner. Now, this is a character more or less on the fringe of this whole thing. First, she’s the only one who has financial problems, not exactly an iyashikei thing to have in there. It’s a bit of a mystery how she manages to have any money at all. The town is obviously dying, there’s simply not enough kids in there to sustain her business. At one point she agrees to close shop for an entire day for 30 bucks, so times are certainly dire. She also has very little business sense since we can safely infer the families living there need to go to the next town to get basic supplies. She could definitely make more things available at her shop so townsfolk would stop having to do groceries in another town. It seems this candy shop is a very well established business and it’s been there since forever. I think she’s living on some inheritance or something, and is keeping this shop out of some nostalgia or filial piety, that’s the conclusion I got after watching two seasons of this show. The other thing I like about her is her position as observer, this is basically a trope you usually have when the show is centered around children growing up. You’ll have adults around whose life gets a little bit sweeter by watching the whole process and Kaede is pretty much one of those. It helps to see the impact the main characters have on the people around them, which in turn makes them more interesting to watch.

Worth a watch if you like the genre. Art and music are of high quality and add a lot to the show.