Deiji Meets Girl

By Andrew Osmond.

Deiji Meets Girl is an anime that plays with anime formats and storytelling, in ways that may bewilder newcomers to the medium, though fans will latch onto the joke fast. The anime itself has been shown in different ways. It was first screened on Japanese TV as a series of twelve very short episodes, each lasting only 90 seconds. They were shown as part of a long-established “block” of late-night anime. Called Animeism,it’s broadcast on the MBS television network; the block debuted back in 2006 with the original Code Geass. Technically Deiji Meets Girl was part of a 30-minute extension to the block called “Super Animeism,” which started in 2019.

In its Japanese TV incarnation, Deiji Meets Girl accompanied the TV anime series Blue Period, about a budding artist. In Britain and America, the Deiji Meets Girl episodes were compiled into an 18-minute film, which was screened in cinemas to accompany an anime feature, Fortune Favours Lady Nikuko. Deji conspicuously takes place in a very different part of Japan, over a thousand miles to the south of Nikuko’s setting.

These anime were separate creations by different studios – Deiji Meets Girl itself was animated by Liden Films, who anime films may know for series such as Killing Bites and Tokyo Revengers. However, Deiji has a playfulness that’s not so far from Lady Nikuko, especially when it comes to messing with how things are normally done in anime.

Deiji is a girl-meets-boy comedy, set on the subtropical island of Okinawa – deiji itself, or more exactingly deeji with a double ‘e’, is an Okinawan word that means “very” or “totally,” used in Okinawa where a standard Japanese speaker might say taihen. Sixteen-year-old Maise is spending an unpromising-looking summer as a part-time worker at a beachside hotel. The hotel’s guests include a reclusive boy on his own, who’s about Maise’s age. Some onlookers comment that he looks familiar; perhaps he’s a celebrity hiding away from the limelight.

Within moments, strange phenomena are springing up around the boy, which mostly only Maise and him can see. Maise is both astounded and exasperated by the sudden flood of magic fish and a giant beanstalk that bursts through the building, and even more by this unfriendly, stand-offish but annoyingly handsome boy who refuses to give any explanation… and so inevitably, Maise tries to learn his secrets.

The story also had a strange genesis, with director Ushio Tazawa approaching creator Akane Marubeni after seeing her fanzines at the Comitia dojinshi event. Marubeni at the time was only drawing illustrations and manga as a hobby, with little hope of becoming a professional, so initially doubted she could do it. Instead, she found herself fast-tracked up through successive levels of the production.

“Originally, he asked me to create image roughs and original character designs,” she told the Febri online magazine, “but before I knew it, he asked me to also do the series composition and the screenplay… Because I had no experience in anime production, I was full of anxiety about my abilities, if I could make something that would be usable from a professional’s point of view. In the end, most of them were used, so I was relieved that I managed to complete my duties!”

Marubeni had to juggle several issues per episode: a setting in Okinawa, a fantasy revolving around Fortean events, and a teenage tale of boy-meets-girl. “In the story,” she says, “I hoped to depict Okinawa as a place that can heal the hearts of people who have been hurt, or who have had to give something up.” Ichiro Suzuki (?) is the perfect foil for this – an actor who has hit a career wall, retreating to Okinawa to reboot himself. “I think it became a timely subject,” observes Marubeni, “reflecting the current situation with the COVID pandemic, which has forced many people to stop or give up something they love.”

The question mark, by the way, is part of his name. “He’s a mystery guy for an actual reason, so I thought his name would be an obvious pseudonym,” she explains. “But people might not have noticed it was a fake, and the impression you can get across in 90 seconds isn’t strong, so I added that question mark to his name to make it really pronounced, and give a sense of strangeness.”

But the central joke is this is a story that TV anime would normally serialise in twelve or thirteen twenty-minute episodes, with a running time around four or five hours. Deiji Meets Girl keeps the “serial” format – even watched in one go, it feels like an anime serial, starting with inexplicable incidents, then letting Maise investigate the mystery, then finally revealing what’s really going on and putting the kids into a high-stake crisis. There’s also a last-moment question mark about whether the story’s over, allowing for a possible sequel down the line.

All this is put into a running time that’s slightly under that of a single conventional TV anime episode. The mini-episodes are arranged in pairs, with the first part of each pair ending on a beat that feels like the lead-in to a mid-episode TV commercial break; the next part “resolves” the episode. In that respect, Deiji feels like a six-part story, rather than a twelve-parter – though there’s no end of ways that Deiji’s story could be expanded, should the producers want to do a longer-form remake.

With thick outlines and light tones, the series looks balmy and distinctive, with character designs that are attractive without collapsing into blandness. Maise herself is a decidedly “mouthy,” assertive teen protagonist, in the mould of someone like Makoto in Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

However, she wasn’t always planned to be that way. Marubeni had initially intended for Maise to be a downbeat character who had suffered a setback in life, brought out of her shell by the attentions of a happy-go-lucky tourist. She was defeated by the 90-second episode timings, which didn’t allow for quite such a high level of nuance.

The story has plenty of echoes of fantasy situations in other anime. For example, a subplot involving a day that never ends (“Time just seems to flow differently here” says a happy drinker), has shades of an early classic film by Mamoru Oshii, Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer, as well as Masaaki Yuasa’s film Night is Short, Walk on Girl. They’re both comedies, but they have a frightening edge that Deiji keeps too.

The opening phenomenon in the series, which plunges the youngsters into a magic realm of fish, evokes Ponyo or Children of the Sea. Then again, it also suggests a gentle joke – aquariums are a favourite dating spot for teens in Japan. Later, supernatural visitors show up at the hotel and must receive top service, as in anime such as Spirited Away and the more recent film, The House of the Lost on the Cape.

However, it’s not just fantasy anime that you may think of while watching Deiji Meets Girl. The boy’s backstory gets revealed later on – it involves glimpses of the Budokan, a famous arena in Japan, originally built as the stadium to host the judo competition in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which has hosted music stars since the days of the Beatles. Ichiro’s character’s situation has parallels with the heroine’s problems in a non-fantasy TV anime series, The Aquatope on White Sand, made by the P.A. Works studio. That was also set in Okinawa, featured Maise’s actress Kiyono Yasuno in a supporting role, and was broadcast in the same year, 2021.

Director Tazawa and his staff ram-raided the original illustrations from Marubeni’s fanzine, working many of them up into the supernatural events that form the episodes. For her part, Marubeni tried to concentrate on uniquely Okinawan imagery or ideas, in a replay of the sort of “Holy Land” tourism we have seen in many anime of the 21st century. Her Okinawa is a place where magic can really happen, but also a background steeped in real-world locations, like the shopping area of the Heiwa-dori main street, or Naminoue beach, which… well, until this anime was released, used to be a local secret.

“I consciously wanted to be true to the real Okinawa when it came to the dialect and the cityscape,” she says. “So, for example, the heroine Maise is a modern girl who grew up in Naha [the capital of Okinawa], so her accent is closer to standard Japanese, with a different intonation, rather than the actual Okinawan language of Uchinaguchi.” And Uchinaguchi really is a language, officially endangered in the eyes of UNESCO, but still spoken by the elderly, used extensively by Maise’s father and grandmother, and liable to require subtitles for most Japanese. To give one example, here’s a simple sentence in standard Japanese, followed by its Uchinaguchi analogue.

I often swim in this sea.

Kono umi de wa yoko oyogu yo.

Kunu uminjie iruku ujindo.

Okinawan cultural references also allowed Marubeni to slip in a number of things that might at first seem to be artistic licence or errors, but turn out to be part of the plan all along. “There used to be a custom that women in Okinawa tattooed their hands,” she says. “However, the Japanese government clamped down on it and in 1899, it was banned. Still, people secretly did it until the early Showa-era. If the last generation of tattooed women was still alive, they would be over 120 years old, and Teruko would be too old to be the grandmother of a teenager like Maise. How old is Teruko? Is she really Maise’s grandmother? I would like you to savour mysteries like that, which are not told in the show.”

Andrew Osmond is the author of 100 Animated Feature Films. Deiji Meets Girl is released in the UK by Anime Limited.