I caught up to Adachi and Shimamura (manga)

[Caught up February 16th, 2024. Current opinion: Really good!!]

At the beginning of this year, I read a lot of yuri manga. Part of the reason I avoided making review posts for so long was because I didn’t really see these as stories to truly ‘intellectually evaluate’ in the same way as the type of stuff I’d been into last year. I knew they all had artistic merit, but I definitely wasn’t reading them to analyze their writing, and most of them weren’t trying to be complex character studies anyways. Originally I wasn’t planning on reviewing any of them… but there’s been one that emotionally stuck with me far more than any of the others, and through getting friends to read it, I’ve been convinced it really is worth posting a more traditional analysis of how amazing its writing can be.

Adachi and Shimamura is not really a love story. I mean, it is, but not only have neither of the main characters confessed their love by the most recent volume, only the former of the two has even barely begun to realize she has romantic feelings for the latter at all. It’s not a story with a bunch of awkwardly intimate coincidences, either; while there’s occasional hand holding and hugging, these two are pretty emotionally distant from each other, and that’s the point the manga chooses to most heavily focus on. So, what’s their relationship even supposed to be? That’s what the main two can’t stop asking themselves. But I have an answer: Adachi and Shimamura is a story about two girls trying to navigate their mutual detachment from the rest of the world — resulting from both comphet and unexamined attachment issues/dissociative mental illnesses — and somehow finding each other as the answers they’ve been looking for, even when they hate it. It’s a story about isolation and ingrained grief for all the versions of you that could’ve been, as much as it is about love overcoming those things. It’s a story about desperately fighting for your love to finally be seen as real, even when you don’t know you have that fight in you, and you don’t understand why that love would be worth fighting for.

Right from the start, this story cut a path straight to my heart with its depiction of borderline personality disorder. Technically it’s never canonically confirmed that Adachi struggles with it, but her symptoms are so prominent and meticulously crafted that it feels like the only way to interpret her. As though it’s as natural as breathing for her, the story beautifully walks the reader through how her highly unstable self-image warps her aspirations and attempts to reach out to others, subtly weaving it into every casual interaction of hers to show just how normal a part of her life she sees it as. Of course, it goes beyond just that — Adachi’s idea of love is perhaps the most heavily affected by her mental issues. To her, love is an amorphous mess of physical and emotional desires that can’t really go anywhere, because her mother neglected her to the point where she’s never really had a point of reference for the feeling. When she does reach out, it’s in short and messy bursts that never quite get that feeling across. But as she takes her weird half-steps closer to Shimamura, she seeks comfort in the form of revolving increasing amounts of her life around her, and this anxiously remodeled personality built on emotional repression starts to explode into a whole new series of issues she doesn’t know how to internalize. That lack of self-awareness in particular feels like the key to why I love her writing. Adachi’s problems are just insidious enough that she can intake them as an ordinary part of her existence — after all, she’s far from being outwardly crazy. But it’s also this normalization that increases how abstracted and inescapable her relationship problems feel, and before she or the reader can notice it, they’ve suddenly become the foundation of how she interacts with the girl she loves most.

With all that said, I think it speaks to the manga’s quality that I don’t even think Adachi’s writing is its crowning achievement in subtlety. Shimamura is equally if not more multilayered in her subdued coping mechanisms, and how she processes depression and attachment avoidance makes her the perfect contrast to her narrative partner. Although the title might lead you to believe Adachi and Shimamura have equal billing in the main character role, it’s the former who often gets more POV focus, and I think playing the part of her object of desire is the perfect framework for the latter to demonstrate her worldview. Shimamura doesn’t like the spotlight. She hates the attention and expectations that come from maintaining relationships, which her mother frequently gets on her case about in an attempt to turn her into an upstanding member of society. But because neither her mother nor anyone else really understands how hard it is for her to do that, she constructs a people-pleasing demeanor to satisfy others’ expectations while simultaneously offloading the work onto a performance she doesn’t see as meaningfully part of herself. The way she manages her relationship to this is so cracked and maybe the most actively interesting part of the story. Not only are there tons of delicious internal contradictions around what expectations she wants people to have of her, the inherent dissociation of it all leads her to miserable moral conclusions about herself and others based on whether they like her ‘real’ parts. It all makes Shimamura an amazing portrayal of what it’s like to depressively dissociate on a casual, almost habitual level, as well as a character perfectly designed to play off Adachi’s yearning for validation and identity from others.

This next part is hard to describe, but Adashima has a really unique vibe that makes it continue to stick with me more than anything else. Much of it comes off as something like ‘slow-burn slice of life’, but what makes it so special is that it’s actually a psychological drama about the characters’ deepest insecurities the entire time well before anyone realizes it. Shimamura likes to think of her and Adachi’s mutual habit of skipping class as a shared hobby between acquaintances with nothing better to do, but what she doesn’t recognize is that the reason they’ve nothing else to do is because their feelings of unease and isolation from the rest of the world are so much more debilitating than they should be that they need an escape to keep up the act that nothing’s wrong. They need each other way more than either of them is willing to admit. So the story proceeds like a normal school life fluff series on the surface, but neither of them can fully get away from their desire to return home to that empty classroom with each other, stuck in a loop of silently reaching out to each other while also wishing for nothing to change. This awkward comfort is where the manga finds its niche: as a love story trying really hard to pretend it’s not that and is just about a couple of girls living their slightly nonstandard high school lives. It’s not exactly ‘nostalgic’, but it’s a paradoxically comforting story to read that understands its own emotional nuances impeccably well.

Even if you’re not particularly into yuri, I would still recommend this one. It’s one of the most distinctive stories I’ve read in how it makes use of subtext and yet it’s really difficult to express exactly why. Currently I’d probably give it a 7/10, but I’m not that into giving ratings to unfinished stories. The point is that it’s beautiful and I think most people should give it a look!! It really is deceptively complex, and it took me a while to understand it on the same level as other stories I’m invested in, but it was so worth it to get there.