This is an English translation of the first part of an interview conducted on November 26th, 2019 for Excite News featuring Nakatani Nio, author of Bloom Into You. This part of the interview was released several days prior to the final volume and will be (almost entirely) spoiler-free for readers who have read up to volume 7 of the series. The second half will be published at a later date.
You can read the original article here.
Before the Last Volume of Hit Manga Bloom Into You is Released, Nakatani Nio Says, “Please Don’t Think Of Yuu and Touko As ‘Fated To Be Together’
Considering someone as special – High school freshman Koito Yuu, who is unable to understand the feeling of love, witnesses Student Council President, second-year Nanami Touko, refuse a confession from a male student. When she finds out that Touko also has never fallen in love with another person, Yuu tells her about her own troubles, but directly after, Touko tells her, “I might be able to fall in love with you.” Yuu is confused by this sudden confession, but when she finds out how Touko hides her true self from the people around her, she becomes determined to help her and joins the student council. As the two take part in student council activities, their feelings of being unable to reciprocate love gradually begin to change.
Serialized in Monthly Dengeki Daioh starting April 2015 and achieving an anime in 2018, the popular manga Bloom Into You had its last chapter published in the September 2019 volume of the magazine. On November 27th (Wed), volume 8, the final volume of the series, will be released.
Excite! News interviewed the author of this yuri manga masterpiece, Nakatani Nio. In this first spoiler-free part, we ask about the origins of the characters and story for Bloom Into You, Nakatani’s first official debut serialization.
When I was writing doujinshi, I didn’t really set out to write yuri
– You drew doujins before writing Bloom Into You. The editor of Dengeki Daioh asked you if you would write a yuri manga for them, and that’s how things began, right? When he proposed that to you, did you already have a theme that you wanted to write for a yuri manga?
Nakatani: At the time, I had just been thinking about how I might want to write a volume of yuri manga, but I didn’t really think about having an official serialization. I just thought I’d try my hand at selling a yuri doujinshi at Comitia (a doujinshi market event) or something. When I write manga, I write stories about the relationship and feelings between two characters. In the past, I drew fan comics for Touhou Project. It’s a series that basically only has female characters, so the stories were automatically girl x girl, haha. I think a lot of people thought of me as a “yuri mangaka,” but from my own point of view, I just write stories about human relationships. I don’t set out intentionally to write yuri.
– If you set out to write relationship stories for Touhou Project, those works will naturally be seen as yuri, won’t they.
Nakatani: That’s why this offer came at the exact right timing when I was just thinking about wanting to write an original love story between two girls that could only be seen as yuri no matter which way you looked at it. However, when I was invited to write one, I didn’t have any concrete thoughts about what kind of characters or story I wanted to write about yet.
– It was your first serialization, and you were starting from scratch. You had to have some difficulties, right?
Nakatani: I was pretty worried over it at the beginning. To be honest, before Bloom Into You’s story about Yuu and Touko came into being, I had a lot of prototypes of different characters and stories. But I just kept on thinking, “This one’s not it,” over and over again. For example, Touko’s design is a remnant from that time period, but the work itself was completely different from what I had in mind at the time.
The two have to keep their relationship a secret precisely because of who they are
– Please tell us any ideas that persisted from the conception of Bloom Into You, or any points that you decided on before progressing forward on writing the work.
Nakatani: My memories get hazy very quickly, so I don’t really have a defined memory about what was decided at which time. In any case, I set out to create a yuri manga from the start, so I had to first figure out what made the yuri genre itself interesting, and what are the necessary elements to create a yuri work, before actually taking things seriously. For example, the editor-in-chief said things like, “If it’s yuri, then it has to be a secret love.” A secret is one thing that makes a story interesting, right? In yuri, there are a lot of stories in which the relationship has to be kept a secret because the characters are girls. However, I wanted to make a story where, instead of that, the relationship had to be a secret specifically because the characters were who they were. For example, Yuu feels like she’s doing something she’s not supposed to be doing, but it’s not because she likes another girl. It’s because Yuu cannot convey her honest feelings of love for Touko, and must lie to her. Following those guidelines, I exchanged the element of “it’s a secret because it’s between two girls” that makes yuri interesting and replaced it with “it’s a secret because it’s between these two specific characters.” That was how Yuu and Touko’s story was born.
– When you wrote doujinshi, you didn’t especially intended to write yuri, but when you started a serialization, you studied the yuri genre and thought about it carefully, huh.
Nakatani: At the beginning, I thought about yuri a lot. But at the same time, I think my editor thought about it even more rationally than I did. To be honestly, once the story began, I didn’t think about the genre itself all that much.
– It seems like Touko’s character was conceived before the protagonist, Yuu. Could you tell us some of her characteristics that were very clear from the start, and some of her characteristics that you were unsure about from the beginning to the end?
Nakatani: Touko can be described as the epitome of the type of heroine I really like. I just really wanted to make a troublesome girl a main character, haha. In truth, I wouldn’t be able to handle such a high-maintenance girl like Touko, but a story protagonist would be able to help her. I love that sort of setup, so I began by thinking about what kind of person she’d have to be for that to happen. I said this before, but she had to be a character that the protagonist couldn’t tell her love to, so taking the concept of “a person who doesn’t want others to fall in love with her,” I built a character around it. Even in the real world, there are people who grow a bit colder if someone who’s affectionate to them tell them they love them. I wanted to make a more character-like version of that type. I then came up with a backstory where the character wants to take the place of her dead sister, and I thought I could use that as a base. I was able to write the story from there.
Don’t view Yuu and Touko as destined for each other
– Yuu is a protagonist who helps the problematic heroine. Which of her traits are set in stone?
Nakatani: Once I established that Touko would be the character who needs help, I started thinking about what kind of character could help her. Touko, while simultaneously saying she doesn’t want someone to fall in love with her, should say, “I love you,” to someone. So I tried to think about what kind of psychology a character would have to have in order to receive that with neither happiness nor rejection. That’s how the idea of a character who can’t fall in love with others, but desires to, was born. To be honest, I didn’t use them as a model or anything, but I do have an acquaintance who told me before, “I don’t really understand the feeling of romantic love.” Using that, I was able to establish Yuu’s character.
– It must’ve been hard to draw a character who doesn’t understand love, which is an emotion that most people understand without needing to be taught. When you were writing her, did you have any especially important points to keep in mind, or did you ever think, “I don’t want people to see her in this particular way?”
Nakatani: I felt that Yuu could easily become a difficult character that readers couldn’t sympathize with, so I tried to write her with the intention of making her interesting to others. But that was only something I paid special attention to in the beginning. In the middle of that, I realized she’s actually an extremely good person, so others would be able to like her easily, and continued drawing with that in mind.
– Yuu doesn’t understand that love, but she isn’t cold or anything. She was a very kind, adorable protagonist.
Nakatani: She might not understand love, but her other emotions aren’t weak or anything. When I was drawing her relationships with her friends and family, I made sure to show that she was a girl brought up in a loving environment.
– Were there other important parts you drew extremely carefully outside of Yuu and Touko’s relationship?
Nakatani: I decided from the beginning that Yuu and Touko’s relationship would be the main focus. But I also really didn’t want people to think I was making characters act only for the purpose of pushing their story along. I kept that in mind constantly. Also, I was sure that I didn’t want Yuu and Touko to be seen as “destined for each other.”
– They suit each other so well, you almost want to say that they are destined, though. Why do you feel otherwise?
Nakatani: It’s true that their personalities really suit each other, and you might see them as two people who could only end up with one another. But I think that, through various events like the culture festival and the student countil play, they change a lot. And after they changed, they became people who might’ve been able to choose others to fall in love with. That’s why, from the very beginning, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t portraying Yuu as only being able to be with Touko, or Touko as only being able to be with Yuu. Among many different possibilities and choices, the two actively chose each other.
Please think of Sayaka as an extremely cool girl
– After you came up with Yuu and Touko, the next character you had to have come up with was the girl who has a forever unrequited love for Touko, the girl who is also wrapped up deeply in the story – Saeki Sayaka, right?
Nakatani: My memory about that time is a little hazy…. I came up with the other characters pretty much at the same time – or at least, their positions and roles. For example, Touko is the student council president, so I thought she needed a close friend who loved her as the vice president. I also thought that Yuu should have around two friends, and there should be boys in the student council, and other roles. After deciding that, I worked on their personalities, so basically after Yuu and Touko, I created the other characters at roughly the same time with each other.
– So, ultimately, you started off with the idea that the vice president would be a girl who’s in love with Touko, and from there Sayaka’s entry and story became more and more defined.
Nakatani: That’s right. Sayaka ended up being a more active part of the story than I’d originally planned.
– Sayaka stayed by Touko’s side, keeping her feelings a secret, ever since entering high school. But in Chapter 38 (volume 7), she finally confesses. Did you decide how and when Sayaka’s love would end up from the very beginning?
Nakatani: I knew that I definitely wanted a scene where Sayaka confessed to Touko and got rejected, and I knew I wanted it to happen after the play, so I did have a very defined timing for when it would occur. So if you’re asking whether it went according to plan in terms of timing, then it certainly did.
– When you were drawing Sayaka, did you have any things you consciously wanted to convey?
Nakatani: I wanted her to be thought of as an extremely cool girl. The reason why she wasn’t able to confess to Touko wasn’t because she didn’t have courage. She chose not to at the time because she thought that path would lead to the best possible result. Hypothetically, even if Sayaka did confess to Touko at an earlier time, there wasn’t a point in time where she could’ve succeeded. Saya understood that and made the best choice she could, but even so, nothing could come of it. I didn’t want to give off the impression that she failed or lost just because she got rejected by Touko.
In reality, it’s okay if you can’t fall in love with someone else
– Among the other characters, there was the student council member Maki Seiji, who, like Yuu, doesn’t understand what it means to fall in love with someone else. There were also the fan favorites, the student council sub-advisor Hakozaki Riko and the cafe owner Kodama Miyako. I’m interested in how you came up with their roles and characters.
Nakatani: Maki-kun could be described as Yuu’s foil. Yuu is bothered by the fact that she can’t fall in love with others, and in the end she’s finally able to love Touko. But in reality, it’s totally okay to not be able to fall in love with anyone else. That’s why I the message of this series isn’t “falling in love with others is good.” Because of this, I knew I needed a character like Maki-kun who wouldn’t ever fall in love but is still able to enjoy himself. In addition, he’s also able to advise Yuu and help her out, so I think his role in the story turned out quite nicely.
– In chapter 39, Yuu, who knew Touko wouldn’t accept an “I love you” at that point, casually said to Maki that it was fine if they didn’t understand what love was. In that moment, he got angry and scolded, “You and I are not the same.” In other places as well, Maki says encouraging words to her that push her forward. I was surprised by his role and how active he is in the story.
Nakatani: In truth, in that situation I don’t think Maki’s behavior was very good or anything. At that point, Yuu’s feelings were that it’d be okay if she really never fell in love with anyone. She was saying it from her own point of view, so honestly it was fine.
– So that was how she felt at that particular moment in the story.
Nakatani: At the time, Maki was saying that Yuu was already capable of falling in love at that point. But if we’re discussing whether he was wrong or right, then I think he was wrong. What I wanted to show, though, was that Maki-kun was capable of getting angry from time to time as well. More than whether he was right or not, I wanted to show his personal feelings emerging, since there aren’t many opportunities for that.
– This is a bit of a spoiler for the last volume, but much later, Maki does apologize to Yuu about what he said.
Nakatani: I feel like I was trying to make excuses a little in that scene, haha. Because really, I didn’t think that was very good behavior from him.
– Regarding Riko and Miyako, when I read the story, I felt like they were a glimpse into what Yuu and Touko could be like in the future, or they were the ideal image of what a same-sex couple’s happiness was.
Nakatani: I don’t know how Yuu and Touko’s relationship will be like in the end, but as you guessed, I wanted to protray Riko and Miyako’s relationship as an image of what Yuu and Touko might possibly be like in the future. And in the end, I was glad that Miyako was able to help Sayaka as well.
TL note: This is the end of the first half of the translation. The second half will be published at a later time. Once it has been released, I will translate that as well.
Wolf Translations 