Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You.

The Quarantine of the Heart

It still feels a little early to turn the summer of 2020 into something wistful. We are not that far removed from lockdowns, canceled graduations, and the dead air of those first COVID-19 months. And yet *Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You* goes straight at that idea. By dropping a familiar shoujo reverse-harem setup into the suffocating uncertainty of July 2020, director Junichi Yamamoto finds something gentler and more affecting than I expected. I did not think an anime about four absurdly handsome childhood friends circling one girl’s love life would end up feeling like a genuine time capsule. But sometimes pastel packaging hides a sharper cultural memory.



The framing device is a little awkward. We first meet Mizuho Nishino as an exhausted adult manga editor, looking back on the supposedly "sparkling" days of her youth. I’m not convinced that part works. Ben Morris at *The Contending* was right to say the setup leaves viewers "uncertain where it was going," and the repeated cuts back to her drained present-day life can flatten the tension at the wrong moments. But when the series stays in the past, it finally breathes. The visuals slip into a faded, humid palette. The world narrows to a suburban neighborhood. Adolescence already feels claustrophobic, and here that pressure gets intensified by the simple fact that nobody can really go anywhere.

Take the inciting incident: Mizuho’s 17th birthday. It’s 95 degrees. A radio mutters in the background about an "infectious disease." She is stuck in her bedroom. Her father brings her food with that painful kind of awkwardness that comes from forgetting the day mattered. School trips are gone. The older boy she likes barely notices her. It is a small, crushing sequence. The camera sits on empty streets and deserted swimming pools, drawing out the eerie sense of a life paused in mid-motion. You can almost feel the thick summer air trapped against her window.



Then Kizuki breaks the stalemate. He is the youngest of the boys, the one long filed away as the group’s resident crybaby, and he suddenly asks her out. Kazuki Ura plays the confession beautifully. He drops the softer, boyish sound you expect from that type of character and replaces it with a strained, almost forceful sincerity. He wants to be heard as an equal, right now. Sakura Shinfuku meets him with exactly the right mix of panic and irritation as Mizuho. You can hear her recoil in the line readings. She does not receive Kizuki’s confession as some romantic breakthrough. She hears it as a threat to the one stable arrangement she still has while everything else is coming apart.



Whether that arrangement survives becomes the engine for the full 24-episode season. It is not a flawless series. The pace sags whenever the script dutifully pushes the other three boys into romantic competition, because that widens the love polygon but weakens the emotional center. Still, what stays with me is how honestly the show captures teenage claustrophobia. *Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You* gets that when the outside world closes down, the people nearest to you start to feel like the whole map of your life. It is messy, melodramatic, and unexpectedly warm, a story about trying to grow while time itself seems stuck.