Rumiko Takahashi
Maison Ikkoku

"Feeling is everything! The word alone is sound and smoke." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Some stories tell feelings, describe emotions. Very few make you experience them on your own skin.

Yusaku Godai is a recently graduated student, preparing to take the exams to enter university. His is an inner world made of humble certainties, simple satisfactions, "little things", around him is the noise of loud and strange people, who enjoy making fun of him (his condition is defined as "ronin" in Japanese) and who take every opportunity to celebrate and make merry with alcohol and various dances. He, so shy, introverted, and awkward, yet also determined in his ideas, and the others, so extroverted, bold, and self-assured, almost an attraction of opposites: they are the characters of a vital theater, staged behind the traditional walls of an old Japanese boarding house in Tokyo, Maison Ikkoku.

It's a precarious, destructive balance, their bustling about the small daily problems, until a person arrives who quietly changes everyone's destiny, especially the unlucky Godai: the beautiful and complicated Kyoko Otonashi. Taking over the management of the boarding house, and secretly also Godai's heart, a story of intricate but sincere feelings in their purity, disarming in their nakedness will begin, with Maison Ikkoku as the backdrop and catalytic center of all possible emotions.

Born as a manga in 1980 in Japan, by the beloved Rumiko Takahashi, but only translated into animation starting from 1986, this long animated television series (of 96 episodes) is a tale made of "moments" condensed in the ineffable design of time (Maison Ikkoku can be translated as "House of the Moment"). The clock of this boarding house has always been still, immobile and eternal, as eternal as the feelings of men, so it's the seasons that mark the rhythm of life, the cyclic nature of events, while a train reminds in each episode that the journey is a metaphor for evolution and inner change.
Everything seems apparently the same, it would seem, yet everything changes, slowly, and grows, inside and outside these curious and lovable characters of this story. In each of them is kept the secret of a special number, symbol of a precise and orderly space (each name is a numerical reference to the existing and non-existing rooms-apartments of the house), not only within the boarding house itself, but in the frame of the entire narrative. Spaces intended as dimensions of the soul, then, as belonging (and not) to the "house of the moment," separated, united, contracted, expanded, as are true relationships between people.

Finely psychological, the entire work is pure poetry of everyday life, a delicate, ironic, intense, sometimes surreal, other times moving description of the normality of life. Normality, precisely, the banal and obvious normality of daily living and feeling, that very few geniuses manage to elevate to poetry. To true beauty.
The anime in question magnificently resumes the original paper work (the manga), cutting unnecessary episodes and modifying the content in some, assembling a story of true life, on the verge of gentle realism and surreal paroxysm, in an incredibly credible and authentic setting of 1980s Japan.
Everything is conceived and developed around an extremely high graphic rendering (especially for the times), both in terms of animations and drawings, the direction and photography are absolutely ingenious and inspired, while an extraordinary soundtrack colors with emotions every single passage of a wonderful and unforgettable screenplay.
What remains with us after completing the entire viewing of the series is an inexplicable sense of melancholy, like when you suddenly part from loved ones, a sign that the story truly entered you, and at the same time you participated in those feelings.
Almost thirty years have passed since its release, and as far as I'm concerned, even three hundred could pass, Maison Ikkoku will always remain one of the most beautiful stories ever told in animation.

PS: A small note: unfortunately, it must be noted that the Italian edition suffered from several adaptation and translation issues, and there are even errors, changes, or blatant dubbing limitations (the classic story of the very few dubbing actors having to do dozens of different voices, and therefore were forced to distort some voices), but compared to other anime of the time (and not only) Maison Ikkoku arrived to us in a version that is on the whole quite faithful to the original Japanese and, fortunately, without real censorship. Overall, therefore, an adaptation-dubbing largely improvable but still more than appreciable.