Your Lie in April: What It Did to Me

Who doesn’t like a good tragedy? In my case, I love beautifully-crafted tragic endings and Your Lie in April does it quite well.

What I loved about it

Your Lie in April (Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso) is an artistic masterpiece. I seriously don’t know how else to express how sophisticated, refined, and beautiful the cinematography was. It’s the kind of feeling that you get when you experience a picture perfect scenery. You just look at it with awe and take in its beauty. That’s how I describe the visual aesthetic of Your Lie in April.

In the same way, the music speaks to our hearts and elicits communication through our feelings. The music is just as phenomenal especially the epic openings and endings. This is probably the only time when spoken dialogue didn’t play a big role in touching my emotional side. Rather what tugged at my heartstrings was the emotion evoked by the music.

All technical bits are simply amazing. There are simply no words to properly describe how amazing the production is, you just feel it. It’s able to connect with you on that kind of level. But this anime will also make you a complete emotional wreck. It will ruin your emotions and send you down a spiral of depression, grief, and confusion. In the end, you are left with a loss of sense about the things around you. Yes, that’s how hard it hit me. Still, it’s a wonderfully-woven, riveting story that will surely make an impact on anyone who watches it.

What frustrated me

My biggest beef is that there wasn’t enough at the ending for closure. It feels as though the ending fell short in relation to the climax. I felt shortchanged a bit. Or maybe a lot.

I mean I loved the ethereal, otherworldly swan song duet of Kousei and Kaori. But I felt there wasn’t enough time or cushion for us to pick up the pieces after the tragic death of dear Kaori.

I felt they could’ve explored the aftermath of Kaori’s death more in terms of how it changed the dynamic between the characters. I wanted to see how it affected the flow of the story from the different characters’ POVs. Also, the ending felt like it was setting us up for a sequel and so I’m still hoping for one.

I was quite invested

Now, moving on to what my friend and I had an argument about regarding Your Lie in April, which were the characters. The male lead and the source of our argument is Kousei Arima who was a piano prodigy. He earned the nickname “The Human Metronome” because he played the musical pieces with stone-cold accuracy like a machine but lacked heart. Because of this, he won various competitions and became famous in the music scene.

However one day, his mother, who was also his piano teacher, died. After that, he lost his purpose in playing the piano and his identity as a musician. He stopped playing the piano for a few years because of the trauma that he endured. Until he met our heroine of the story Kaori Miyazono, a crazy, free-spirited girl who played the violin.

Kaori helped Kousei get back on his feet and love music again. She pushed him to play the piano to accompany her in a competition. At that moment, Kousei’s passion for music was revived. However, it was also revealed that Kaori had an illness that I guess is similar to multiple sclerosis. She had been in and out of the hospital since she was a child and from that moment, I already knew the tragic end of this story.

As the story progressed, we see how Kousei constantly struggled with playing the piano as he was unable to hear the notes after playing for a while. He also often saw his mother’s ghost taunting him. That usually caused him to become flustered, losing his pace, and angrily banging at the piano.

Off the stage, he also struggled with the fact that his love interest Kaori was going to die. Although Kaori was technically dating his best friend Watari, Kousei undeniably falls for Kaori. But he always kept his distance out of respect for his friend and was content to just be “Friend A”.

In the latter half of the series, Kaori’s illness grew worse and she stayed in the hospital most of the time. Kousei rarely visited because of his conflicted feelings, not wanting to overstep the boundaries. And at the same time, he did not want to go through and relive the same experience he had when his mother was sick.

Our argument

This was the crux of the argument with my friend. She thinks Kousei was just a selfish wimp while I understood the struggles he was going through and the way he acted in response. Considering that we’re talking about 14-year-olds here who probably don’t know any better. Like give them a break!

Anyway, I think the writer captured quite well what it felt like to be a teenager going through those kind of problems. Kousei with his angst and the emotional walls he has built around his heart. And Kaori with her terminal disease that inhibits her from doing what she loves and being with the one she loves, Kousei. The main characters were superb, however, I do agree with some critics who say that there wasn’t enough screen time for the supporting characters.

Actually, there’s a similar dynamic going on with Kousei as it was with Ishida in Koe no Katachi. While Ishida had Ueno and Nishimiya, Kousei was linked with Kaori primarily but she wasn’t the only one. There was also Tsubaki, Kousei’s childhood best friend; Emi, his female rival; and even Nagi, the little sister of his male rival Takeshi.

However, Koe no Katachi gave us enough scenes with the supporting characters that would make them more relevant to the story. Whereas in Your Lie in April, supporting characters didn’t really make as much of an impact in terms of plot, character development, or conflict resolution. They usually had one role to fill that made them one-dimensional. Nevertheless, they did lend support to the main characters and they were quite interesting so that deserves a thumbs up.

In both of these stories and perhaps in a lot of slice-of-life anime, there was romance but it wasn’t the main subject. It was a good means of exploring the feelings that the characters had, the experiences they were going through, and their relationship with one another. But it wasn’t the main highlight of the story which is what I love with how these anime portray romance.

It’s not over the top neither is it perfect or ideal in any way, shape, or form. But at times, it can be awkward and silly. It’s full of twists and turns, and it doesn’t happen instantaneously. Which is how it really is. I mean relationships are messy especially if you have two people who have a messed up past, various existential and identity crises, and on top of that a terminal illness.

Two people who have broken, messy, screwed up lives getting together does not fix their issues. At times, it even makes things worse. And I love how uncompromising these anime are in showing the ugly and the bad along with the endearing, heartfelt moments.

Conclusion

These are bold choices that I think make these narratives believable, deeply moving, and relatable. They resonate with us because they show glimpses of reality that we often try to escape through romance. Something that we have been used to with all the cliché love stories out there. But with Your Lie in April, it’s a little bit different.

Not everyone will appreciate these choices but that’s why these narratives are so compelling. They don’t show you what you hope for to try and shield you from the pain. Rather they show you reality that flows naturally from the narrative.

Sure, we love to be optimistic about having a happy ending but that’s just not how life works. Not all the time. There are stories that end in an uplifting and happy note. But not always. Being able to show this side of life takes a lot of guts and conviction. And I loved that the writer made such courageous decisions.

Having said that, it doesn’t take away all the pain and frustration you feel about it. But because of it, you learn to grow and mature. The great thing about ending in tragedy is that stories don’t usually end there. Life moves on. And you can always hope for something better and brighter moving forward.


Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aL0gDZtFbE