The first part of this review focused on episodes 1-35, noting the connection to other series, and plot of those episodes, including abolition of the sorority, Fukiko’s abuse of Rei, growing romantic love between Nanako and Rei, and the heart-wrenching (and accidental) death of Rei. As a warning, this review discusses sensitive topics such as bullying, harassment, drug abuse, psychological violence, divorce, incest, abusive relationships, and mental health. This is the second, and final, part of my review of Dear Brother.
The last four episodes mainly center on Kaoru, who is left with sadness and fear of dying, following Rei’s death. She even tries to kill herself. She sees her relationship with Henmi as only a sweet memory. Nanako and Tomoko appear to move on with their lives while Takashi, and others in the Ichimoya household, believe they never did “anything” for Rei. Through it all, the nice male friendship between Henmi and Takashi remains. Simply, Kaoru broke up with Henmi because she had a double mastectomy (to curtail the spread of breast cancer). The last two episodes take a heterosexual turn: Nanako, Takashi, and Fukiko pressure Kaoru to get with Henmi so she can “happy.” They want both of them to travel to (West?) Germany together, where Henmi will study. Although this push for compulsory heterosexuality seems forced, it is colored by the times this series was released. Is it truly what Kaoru wants?
Furthermore, it is odd that Nanako’s mom states that love isn’t quantifiable and in the next breath declares it “won’t be long” before Nanako falls in genuine love with a man. What this does reveal is that Nanako’s mother does not understand the full picture. If she knew how her daughter felt toward Rei, she would not say that, especially since her love for Rei was genuine. At the same time, Nanako’s mom may be socialized to think this way. After all, homosexuality was a bit of a taboo at the time. It wasn’t until 1976 when twelve women were the first ones in Japan to publicly describes themselves as lesbians. Some reviewers pointed this out, noting that the series focus on mental illness countered another taboo. Even the last seven episodes, of the anime, were not aired in France and the series suffered censorship on “several Arabic speaking networks in the early 1990s.”
Perhaps, on some level, Kaoru is happy to be with Henmi, despite the fact she slapped Nanako for pushing her to talk with him, as he remains indecisive. Surely she can live more fully than Rei, but it seems strange to invoke Rei in an effort to motivate Kaoru. I say this because Rei was a lesbian through and through. The series finale ends with Henmi and Kaoru happily together, with Kaoru shedding her tomboyish look to become more girlish. There’s also happy endings for everyone else: Mariko lives with her mom in a new apartment, Tomoko and Nanako remain strong friends, and Nanako shows that she is becoming more mature.
The “normalcy” of women being in a relationship with men is hinted over and over. Tomoko jokes she may have kids in the future and Fukiko wonders what kind of love Rei would have if she had loved a man, which is a bizarre and messed up question. Even stranger is the possibly biphobic ghost of Rei, which is completely made-up in her head, telling Fukiko that she did not have real love for Henmi. That does not square with her experience. Sadly, Dear Brother seems to have the message that those girls who love other girls haven’t experienced love, which is an unfortunate choice, and weakens the overall lesbian themes of the entire series.
Apart from Nanako learning about her birth mother, everyone seems happy. She remembers Rei and wonders whether she would love and marry someone like Kaoru did with Henmi, s implying that the person she would marry is a man. At another point, she observes that the fragrance she smelled on Henmi reminded her of Rei, which she described as lingering and nostalgic. Surely, you can say there’s an overflowing power of love between Kaoru and Henmi, and they look happy together.
Mariko and Nanako suffer from the resulting events in the final episodes of Dear Brother in different ways. For one, Nanako loses the woman she loves. Secondly, Mariko loses the woman she loves when that woman hitches up with a man. On the positive side, in the end of the series, Nanako declares she met a second-year with brown hair and brown eyes at another university who caught her attention. Even if you argue that she is talking about a man, it is never directly stated that person is a man, meaning that the person could be a woman!
Some, like for Anime Feminist, have described Rei as a gender non-conforming hero, alongside those in other works by Ikeda, like Lady Oscar from The Rose of Versailles, Julius from The Window of Orpheus, and the titular character of Claudine. All of these helped establish audience preferences for a “hotheaded, androgynous tomboy with a heart of gold.” Rei differs from Oscar. She doesn’t live in revolutionary France but in a Japanese elite boarding school in the 1970s, when student protests were peaking, but she presents similar to Oscar. She goes by feminine pronouns but crossdresses almost always in masculine clothing and is often said to have a masculine aura by characters like Nanako. Others mistake her for a man, and she goes by a masculine nickname “Saint-Juste-Sama.” You could even read, as does, as a butch woman, but without dysphoria or discomfort about being seen as a woman. Unlike Oscar, she’s part of a “remarkably nuanced” story about gender that continues to resonate today.
While this series is strangely absent from Crunchyroll or HIDIVE, the two big streaming services, it can be streamed on Peacock, Tubi TV, Pluto TV, RetroCrush, and AsianCrush, or purchased on various online retailers. Additionally, the first 26 episodes can be requested from your local library, broken up into two DVD sets, through interlibrary loan. The set that I reviewed here came in three discs. The first disc contained episodes 1-13, while the second had episodes 14-26, and the third had episodes 27-39.
Having the series broke up into three discs allows viewers to watch it in a way that divides the themes and focuses, beginning with the sorority and ending with Kaoru. Some may grumble about the animation and still scenes, which are also present in Rose of Versailles. I would say that the still scenes are powerful in their own way, and mix with the slow enka music, which is a perfect and appropriate fit for this series. The music constructs gender, class, and upper-class femininity like Revolutionary Girl Utena and Ouran High School Host Club. Kentarō Haneda delivers a wonderful score and would later go on to work on Genji (1992) and Mikeneko Holmes: The Lord of Ghost Castle (1992).
There is no doubt that Dear Brother is operatic, with elements of soap opera, which some have called a “dumpster fire” (in a good way). There is some truth about the charge that the series’ animation is limited and that characters talk over gorgeous and timeless still shots. Perhaps one day, if a talented director took this anime, they could do another well-done reboot, but considering this is such a classic, I’m not sure how I feel about that. Erica Friedman put it well. When it comes to the animation, the character styles are dated, but the backgrounds were all done by hand, without help of software, making it stand out, especially when it comes to the characters.
Over the years, this series fostered a specific community, including a small subreddit (less than 100 subscribers), fans on Tumblr and other social media sites, and less than 100 fanfictions. Some of the latter rewrite the ending so that Rei survives, or have Fukiko die. If one or the other had been done in Dear Brother, the series may have ended even stronger. At the same time, there’s no doubt that renewed fan interest in this series, and other classics, have led to more English (re-)releases.
Unlike Rose of Versailles, which re-imagines the French nobility’s downfall through a story centering on “rich, bickering teenagers,” this series centers on students who are as corrupt and powerful as the latter, mixed with self-harm, suicide, and bullying, while tackling sexuality and gender. Even so, it ends tragically, a return to “normalcy” in a heterosexual manner, even as some comics and anime, later in the 1990s, gave “gay couples happy endings.” More than anything, you can say that this series faithfully reproduces Ikeda’s 1975 melodramatic manga, while expanding and changing from the original, which was released from early March 1974 to late September 1974, in three volumes. The manga has never been released in English. Although the series is contradictory at times, it undoubtedly takes an approach which “more common dating simulations and sex comedies” do not take.
There’s no doubt that Dear Brother is influential and beloved. Even so, it’s overshadowed by Rose of Versailles, although it reunited some of those who worked on the latter. This allowed for the dropping of an umbrella and squabbles between high school girls to be emotionally heightened, and to artfully foreshadow the death of Rei from the beginning. At the same time, the opening of every episode centers on how life is composed of a balance of happiness and love, with emotional pains, even as many women in the series are out for blood.
As one reviewer put it, “pretty much everyone is a lesbian in this show” and called the series “hella gay,” even declaring that Mariko did nothing wrong. Another compared Aya to Nanami Kiryuu in Revolutionary Girl Utena, noting Aya’s posse of obedient girls and praising the show’s depiction of Nanako’s continual self-doubt. The latter is understandable. Many students in the school are in a different class, compared to her, while just about every adult in the series is cheating or lying.
Ikeda said that she didn’t create Rose of Versailles to advocate for women’s rights, noted that she writes what she wants, and called upon readers to “take away their own meanings.” The same can be said for Dear Brother. In any case, there’s no doubt that the series is, as one person put it on YouTube, an emotional masterpiece. Much has changed since it was released, whether continued weakening of the stigma around divorce, meaning that the bullying (and emotional suffering) Mariko experienced, because of a parental divorce, does not have the impact as it did in the early 1990s. It remains a deep, complex, and human drama. The characters are fully-fleshed out: they are shown as humans, rather than one-note characters. For instance, Fukiko is mean, manipulative, and selfish, but also heartbroken. Through it all, the tears won’t stop, as Nanako says in every episode preview.
This timeless series remains a touchstone. It’s a story about beautiful people, with Nanako serving as the catalyst for lives around her. It is a classic, filled with yuri moments despite the incorrect belief of some subbers (in the past) that there’s no yuri present at all. On the latter, the manga and anime unite, with a happy “strictly hetero” ending. Even so, as Erica Friedman once described it, Rei makes “doing drugs, smoking, going mad and dying tragically look…sexy.” On the latter, and despite the emotional, and occasional physical, manipulation by Fukiko, Rei moves away from an unhealthy and abusive relationship with her, to a more healthy friendship (and later romance), with Nanako before her tragic death.
Dear Brother is more than a series filled with love, friendship, obsession, insanity, emotional manipulation, and characters that make “homicidal depression and drug use” sexy (see Rei). It is echoed in themes of Maria Watches Over Us, which is also known as Marimite or Maria-sama ga Miteru, since the manga’s author Oyuki Konno was possibly influenced by Ikeda, and in Revolutionary Girl Utena characters like Juri Arisugawa. The latter, as Friedman put it, is informed by characters like Fukiko and Kaoru in Dear Brother, In fact, she notes in a later review, that Juri, who threatened protagonist Tenjou Utena, is meant to invoke fear and recall Fukiko specifically.
In years after this series released, some voice actors shared their voices in other animated productions. A few of these individuals voiced characters within Sailor Moon, whether in seasons one, two, three, and five, known as Sailor Moon season 1, Sailor Moon R, Sailor Moon S, and Sailor Moon Sailor Stars. Nishmura voiced Rei’s grandfather in the anime’s first season, while Koguma voiced Green Esmeraude in the second season. Tamagawa and Adachi voiced characters in the third season, specifically Elsa Gray and U Henshu. They were joined by Shimamoto and Takeda, along with Tamagawa again, voicing Akane, Noriko Okamachi/Sailor Ojo, and Princess Kakyuu, in the anime’s fifth season. Two main characters in the series, Sailor Jupiter and Sailor Neptune, were voiced by Shinohara and Katsuki. Koguma would voice Queen Serenity in Sailor Moon Crystal.
Some cast members later voiced characters within the Pretty Cure franchise. Shimamoto, Genda, and Shinohara voiced characters in Smile PreCure! (the Royal Queen, Emperor Pierrot, and Shizuko Aoki). Tamagawa voiced Rumi Shiku in Heartcatch Pretty Cure. Itō voiced AI in Star Twinkle PreCure. Nishimura voiced Belzei Gertrude in Futari wa Pretty Cure and Moebius in Fresh Pretty Cure!. Toda voiced Tiatine in Healin’ Good Pretty Cure. Others voiced characters in series with yuri subtext (or text). Shimamoto voiced Claire in Cutie Honey Flash. Itō and Shinohara voiced characters Cardcaptor Sakura and its sequel, Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card, specifically Sonomi Daidouji and Kaho Mizuki. In connection to the yuri themes of Dear Brother, in a sense, Sonomi has romantic feelings for another woman, while female teacher Kaho Mizuki is crushed on by series protagonist Sakura.
Both actresses voiced characters in Maria Watches Over Us: Sachiko Ogasawara and Yōko Mizuno. Genda voiced the Hell-Lord in‘ Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess. Arimoto voiced the Chairman in the continually controversial Citrus anime adaptation. Later, some cast members voiced characters in other anime which ranged across genres. Kasahara voiced Fuu Hououji in Magic Knight Rayearth. Shimamoto voiced Alethia in Space Dandy. Tamagawa voiced Natsumi Tsujimoto in You’re Under Arrest. Kogama voiced Ichi in The Duke of Death and His Maid. Horiuchi voiced Marten Liebert in Spice and Wolf and Matthew McMahaon in Spy x Family. Shinohara voiced Izumi Motoko in Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie. Adachi voiced Daryl Cavendish in Little Witch Academia.
I will always remember this series for its melodrama, hand-drawn backgrounds, enka music, female friendships between Nanako and Tomoko, Kaoru and Rei, and lesbian themes. While the latter is weakened by forced heterosexuality in the ending, characters like Nanako, Rei, and Mariko remain women who love only women, despite the push by show writers and director to justify straightwashing the series conclusion. In other words, the writers and director attempted to assimilate queer characters to fit heterosexual cultural norms. In closing, I enjoyed this series immensely and despite all the dark themes, and my qualms with how it ended, I’d love to, one day, watch this series once more, and recommend others watch it too.
