The Otaku’s Wife: Kimi No Na Wa

Kimi No Na Wa is a stand alone anime with a sometimes super natural, sometimes romantic, and sometimes tragic theme. It follows the lives of a City boy, Taki, and a country girl Mitsuha, as they mysteriously begin to swap bodies. This, as you can imagine, poses quite a few problems for the two as they can’t remember what happened in their own bodies, nor can they even remember each others names. (appropriate since Kimi No Na Wa translates to “Your Name”)

As time goes on, Mitsuha goes missing, and it is up to Taki to find out why.

I loved it. I loved how body swapping became as mundane and common as brushing their teeth. I love how the foreshadowing is built into the story line, and how they use things like the contents of each characters room to help flesh out what amounts to a short story.

Kimi no na wa is a very popular anime, at one time rated as #1 on anime list. For a non-otaku, this doesn’t mean much since I found the #2 anime, full metal alchemist, incredibly boring. But still. It’s a good indicator that lots of people do like it.

Here are the facts: if your otaku is asking you to watch this, go ahead. It’s run time is less than 2 hours. that’s less time than it takes to get my kiddo to eat one vegetable. That’s less time than it took to draw and color the picture on this page. Most importantly, it isn’t 457 hours, if you get suckered into watching an entire show.

One possible drawback for you is that this anime is not really appropriate to watch dubbed. parts of the story aren’t really translatable to English, such as the jokes where Mitsua-In-Taki’s-body mistakenly uses the feminine version of “I” and then also the incorrect male pronoun. We don’t have any such pronouns in English, so it would just sound odd if dubbed. That means if you’re not a strong reader, you may need to pick a different one, or have your Otaku read for you. (Bonus: If he has to read for you, he’ll rethink asking you to watch something with a thousand episodes. Also, laying there listening to the sound of your man’s voice as you watch is actually pretty nice.)