As many people know, several of the wonderful piano pieces which were scattered throughout Honey and Clover were never released on the original soundtrack.  This includes the single most significant musical manifestation of all that is Honey and Clover – the Waltz piano version.  But it also includes several other pieces.

This is my catch-all Honey and Clover piano post.  It contains the following:

#1) Youtube videos of myself playing a collection of H&C Piano pieces

#2) Downloadable MP3s of those recordings (high quality)

#3) Two pieces of sheet music I have written for two piano pieces (“Fugainaiya” (BGM version), and “Asa no Hikari” (this is a made up name based on a scene it was used in, as it doesn’t have an official one))

You can find the rest of the sheet music at Josh’s anime sheet music site.

I’ve done this for seven pieces: Waltz (piano), Fugainaiya (BGM-piano), Dramatic, Yamanai Ame, Yawarakana Jikan, and Asa no Hikari.  Here they are:

Dramatic

MP3

http://www.omohide.com/omohide-com_Dramatic.mp3

Waltz

MP3

http://www.omohide.com/omohide_dot_com_Waltz.mp3

Yamanai Ame

MP3

http://www.omohide.com/omohide-com_Yamanai_Ame.mp3

Yawarakana Jikan

MP3

http://www.omohide.com/omohide-com_Yawarakana_Jikan.mp3

Fugainaiya (BGM piano)

MP3

http://www.omohide.com/omohide-com_Fugainaiya.mp3

*Sheet music by me*

http://www.omohide.com/Fugainaiya_theowne@gmail.pdf

Asa no Hikari

MP3

http://www.omohide.com/omohide-com_Asa_no_Hikari.mp3

*sheet music by me*

http://www.omohide.com/omohide_dot_com_asa_no_hikari.pdf

Take note that I am clearly currently in a Honey and Clover phase. I am rewatching the series for the second time, and I think I like it even more than when I first watched it. (The first time I watched it, I didn’t watch any other anime for an year.) It remains my favourite anime, and my current posts will probably be a stream of Honey and Clover related material. As I just finished the series (again), I’ll write some general thoughts that are coming to me now, and probably will put a full review (be prepared for tons of gushing) later on.

I think the most important reason for the success of Honey and Clover, at least to me, is that it simply has fantastic, believable and complex – but likable! – characters. There have been many anime which have similar characters, yet none have been filled with them to the extent of Honey and Clover. Almost every significant character who appears on screen is a realistic and multi-faceted individual. I can’t help but think back to the anime I finished just prior to rewatching Honey and Clover – Kimagure Orange Road. Certainly there were characters who had depth to them. But many of the side characters, such as the school friends, were just cardboard cutouts, cliches with a single shallow purpose in the story. This isn’t always a bad thing – not every anime has to explore multiple characters and their background, yet the way this is done really makes Honey and Clover as enjoyable as it is.

There’s also something else – I believe the reason Honey and Clover strikes me as deeply as it does is because it is the closest representation of my idealist tendencies. Here you have a large group of people who are all fundamentally admirable and kind-hearted. Even characters who start out as jerks, like Nomiya, in my opinion, eventually soften and become more likable. Their friendships and love interests are always based on deeper concepts instead of the more shallow things which are probably more common in real life. Back in the good old days when Honey and Clover was still airing, I had an interesting discussion over at animesuki about realism and Honey and Clover. Someone there was discussing how, after watching NANA, he thought that Honey and Clover wasn’t realistic.

The points that this individual made were that Takemoto, as a young adult, “realistically” should have been more lustful and couldn’t hold onto an unrequited love for years. He says that Mayama “realistically” would have considered taking advantage of Yamada. That “realistically” the characters would have been more obsessed with lust, etc. That a real self-realization journey for college students is going to a bar and getting drunk, rather than riding your bike across the country.

If that’s “realism”, then send me to a looney bin because I’m obviously living in a dream world.

Maybe the majority of people act that way. But that’s why Honey and Clover is as effective to a certain small group of people – because it perfectly hits the idealistic notes that we haven’t seen elsewhere. Are we “unrealistic” people? It isn’t a question of realism. It’s a question of personality and background. There are more than enough shows out there for the people for whom getting drunk and having “one night stands” is indicative of realistic behavior. Honey and Clover, though, is perfect for the people who think a bit differently. And maybe those people are a less common in the real world – which is why it’s all the more satisfying that we have something like this series to enjoy. It isn’t perfect. For example, sometimes the Rika/Yamada/Mayama/Nomiya storyline may seem like it isn’t too different from what you may expect from a more typical “dorama” or prime time relationship drama. Sometimes. Yet……it’s different. It may share elements of those lesser stories at times, but when it’s at its best, it rises far beyond any of them.

Anyways, my next topic of discussion is the ending of the series. The discussion forums back during Honey and Clover’s run were probably at their most hostile right around the ending, because there were a few people who said they were so disturbed by the ending that they ended up hated the series. Of course, not necessarily the ending as a whole, but one aspect of it (clearly, I am just about to post a spoiler here). I’m talking, of course, about the whole possibility of Shuuji having romantic interest in Hagu. I haven’t read through the manga, so I don’t know if the mangaka explicitly said this about him. The anime seems to imply that very strongly based on the things he says. However, I don’t believe that’s the case, simply because it doesn’t match at all with anything that has happened prior to the moment in the series. So in this case, I take my own interpretation of events which make more sense in the context of where the story has gone up until that point.

So removing that romantic element, the remaining portion of the ending is that Hagu basically “chose” Shuuji (although it is technically a love triangle, it’s much more complicated than what that term implies) because she wanted to recover and continue to create art and knew that Shuuji was the person who could help her do that. Morita is highly talented and also highly mobile – despite the fact that he is much more of a “soulmate” for her, he can’t be the the dependable support that she needs. Neither can Takemoto. I remember one complaint behind the ending being that the scene where Morita takes Hagu away and they have a “moment” was too out-of-character (saying that Morita shouldn’t be the one telling her to abandon art) . I think it was brilliant actually, and I think the people who complain about it weren’t paying attention to Morita’s later monologue. There, he admitted that he had been blinded by his desolation because of Kaoru’s disappearance. It makes sense that Morita would have felt such a resentment towards his talent, the very thing which drove Kaoru away, that he felt like he had to try and “save” Hagu from her talent as well, thinking it would only cause her pain in the end. Of course, in the end he realized that Hagu had done the right thing, and also that she had seen through him and known that something was wrong.

Speaking of Kaoru, he’s probably tied as my favourite character in the series. From his first appearance until the end, he is a compelling and eventually very sympathetic character. I thought the scene right after he gets his revenge was well done – the emptiness, the hollow feeling, all of it was captured perfectly. Then, finally, it was seeing that cycle of revenge broken (when Morita and Shiroyama gave their childhood home to the President he had exacted revenge upon) that cured him and allowed to break free of that cycle himself.

The story closed with Takemoto – he’s the character who grew the most throughout the series. Although Takemoto’s the main character, at certain times it doesn’t seem that way, especially in H&C II, but that’s simply because H&C isn’t like most other anime where you have very dominant main characters with a lot of weak supporting characters. In episode 7, when the story shifted to Kaoru, it was as powerful as if it had been with any “main” character. But anyways, Takemoto underwent most of his development at the end of the first season, during the infamous bike road to the northernmost point of Japan. These episodes were the absolutely high point of the series – only Honey and Clover has managed to produce so many genuinely moving monologues that never cross that line of overt, manufactured sentimentality from which there is no return. I think Takemoto is probably the best main character I’ve ever had watched in an anime series (for films, it gets more debatable). But maybe that’s only because I can completely understand and relate with the character and everything he goes through.

And, like most other Honey and Clovers, I am very partial to Morita, or Morita-sama as his fans affectionally call him. I do think that Morita is one of the most well-conceived characters in manga/anime. In the beginning, the viewer may be led to believe that he is not much more than comic relief, yet throughout the series we get a glimpse of a truly interesting and complex character. What adds to this is the fact that we aren’t allowed into Morita’s mind with the same frequency that we are with Takemoto or Yamada. Morita remains a mystery to the viewers a lot of the time because we, like the on-screen characters, can’t truly understand what he’s thinking. In the beginning he seems like a shallow character, throwing away his education and schooling to earn money, yet we discover later that he did those things only to help Kaoru. It’s the fact that Morita so often hides behind his comedic exterior that makes his serious scenes all the more dramatic. I’m sure we can all think of people we’ve known who so consistently have an air of humor to them that it’s hard to imagine them acting serious. Observe the scenes between Morita and Yamada, for example, which many people say are highlights to them because you get to see a completely different side of Morita. The climactic scene between him and Hagu near the finale of the second season is another example – both the viewers and Hagu have never seen Morita in a state as he is now, completely devoid of any humor, his comedic wall completely shattered. That is why it was so obvious to Hagu that something was deeply wrong.

I think that this is enough droning on for this post. The purpose of this post was mostly to get a lot of these sort of opinions and reactions out of the way so that they won’t clutter my review, which I’ll try to keep spoiler-free.

I have watched quite a few well-made anime series and they have had their fair share of beautiful, emotional, or simply well-done episodes and scenes. Yet, somehow, I can say with utmost confidence that the single greatest chapter of any anime I have seen is the seventh episode of the second season of Honey and Clover. It’s a bit strange, because on the whole, I prefer the first season. The coming-of-age story of Takemoto is the most significant aspect of the entire show. And the main cast of characters and their friendship is a fundamental aspect as well. Yet the most powerful episode is H&C II – 07, which lacks both of these. The focus is shifted away from the main cast. Morita is present – but the focus is on Kaoru, as well as Morita Sr. and his best friend, Tatsuo. And this episode completely sheds any romance or romantic overtones. Many people complain that H&C II lost a delicate balance the show once had because it brought the romantic overtones too much into the forefront. I tend to agree, but this episode showed us how powerful Honey and Clover can be when it deals with pure human emotion.

But the episode isn’t standalone, is it? The themes which pervade this episode have been with us for a long time – they are a variation of what both Takemoto and Shuuji both have mentioned. In the episode, Tatsuo asks, “Why is the world split into those who are talented and those who are not? Those who are loved, and those who are not?” He watches from the sides as Morita Sr., his friend, seems to do all the things that he cannot, and he struggles to understand why it is so. Think about those words, and the characters we’ve seen thusfar. Takemoto looks in from the outside at Hagu as she paints, realizing that it is a world that he is unable to enter. Shuuji thinks to himself that the three friends he was once a part of was, in reality, one and a pair. Although they were the best of friends, he was always separate from the other two. They seemed to posses something which he could never attain.

We see Kaoru, as a child, beginning to feel the same way. Morita Sr. did not intentionally favour Shinobu – yet in the end, Kaoru felt neglected, and couldn’t understand why. All he saw was that Shinobu could so naturally do things that Kaoru wanted to be able to do as well, but couldn’t. Is it jealousy? Perhaps, yet that word seems inadequate. At the end of the episode, Tatsuo betrayed Morita Sr., but it wasn’t out of hatred. He says himself, that he wanted to truly understand if Shinobu was a mortal human, as he was. It sounds silly when I write it out like this, but it is easy to understand. He saw this man who seemed to posses the things that Tatsuo yearned for, through no fault of his own, and wanted to know what the difference between them was. Was it even possible for Tatsuo to understand Morita Sr? Or was he on a whole other level that Tatsuo could only dream of looking into?

When Morita Sr. calmly tells his two sons to harbor no hatred for Tatsuo, Shinobu agrees immediately, but it is Kaoru who cannot forgive Tatsuo. It is because he sees in Tatsuo a reflection of himself, a confirmation of the very things which Kaoru has been feeling. The scene where Tatsuo looks forward at the split in the road is the message which Umino Chika has engraved deeply in her story. “Why is the world split….?” There are many people for whom a message like this barely registers, and yet there’s some for whom it will be a heart wrenching thing to hear. There are some who can drift through life easily and successfully, while others are cursed from the beginning. That “curse” can be in many different forms, yet they exist through no fault of the victim. That is simply how it is, and nobody can change that. It isn’t merely a question of talent, but a variety of factors that affect one’s life. So Tatsuo ponders this question, and then asks himself that if it is true, what was the purpose of his life? And that is an utterly tragic thing to hear and to see, but what’s worse is how genuine and realistic it seems. It doesn’t feel like the pen of a mangaka, it feels like the thoughts of a real human being. This is a feat that only the rarest of anime manage to accomplish.

As for my own reaction to Tatsuo’s questions…..I do not know.  Often I find myself thinking the same things he does.  There are many skills and abilities for which I have been praised for since I was small, many good qualities I believe I have, and yet there are also many things which I do not have, things which make a difference in one’s life, things which cannot be ignored.  Often, like Tatsuo, I begin to think about the harshness of reality, that some people are born with innate qualities that will give them benefits in life, while others are dealt different hands through no fault of their own and are forced to live out an existence which can never reach that same level.  Is life merely a predetermined set of paths that arbitrarily rewards some and punishes others?

It is perhaps futile to even attempt to describe the emotion and the power behind this episode. In fact, maybe I’ the only one who has such a pronounced reaction to it.  I certainly know many people who have seen this anime but don’t understand why I consider it my favourite.  In the end, it’s about whether you can relate with Tatsuo or not. All I can say is that I have never been as affected by any other episode of anime, nor series in general.

Honey and Clover represents absolute perfection when it comes to the use of music. Okay, maybe I’m being too excessive, but it really is a shining example of music, both vocal and score, done right. Before Honey and Clover, I paid very little attention to vocal music of any kind or language (I mostly listened to classical music, film scores, or similar), but Honey and Clover really showed me how powerful vocal music can be when used properly (although I am referring more towards the opening and ending songs – insert songs just don’t do it for me).

Anyways, as I said, both the score and songs in this series are top notch. Although many people go on and on about the insert songs, personally I think the opening and ending songs are far more important to defining the story. Dramatic and Waltz are Honey and Clover, period. Everything about the series is manifested in these two songs, and you cannot help but connect the two immediately. Of course, some people will say this about any anime series, but I don’t usually find that OP and ED songs affect me in any real way. Honey and Clover is the only series which held my attention from the very beginning of the OP, through the episode, until the final note of the ED. Everything is so seamless that these songs feel like a part of the series itself, not just bookends. And no matter how much I heard them over and over, they never became repetitive in that context, because they just became a necessary part of the show.

I’ll delve into the instrumental background score later, but first let’s go through the vocal music:

Dramatic

I think this is a song which really has to grow on the listener. The first time I saw it, in the original episode, I thought it was mildly interested, but by the final episode it had become such an important of Honey and Clover that I can’t imagine it being replaced by anything else. A lot of people complain about the singer’s slightly mousy voice, but it never really bothered me. In fact, the way that the singer puts so much effort into delivering the vocals (almost screaming, technically) gives the song a very nice touch. There’s also something rather unique which I enjoy about this OP, and that is the way that the vocals give way in the end for the strings to come to the forefront. As if reinforcing the lyrics and general theme of the sing, the strings follow the vocals to close the song, soaring up to the high registers and providing a burst of hope and optimism. It’s a nice change to the typical formula, where after the vocals end, the song simply fades away or concludes, here, the instrumental actually forms the climax of sorts, and the vocals build to it.

The opening song never changed in the first season, but the visuals did. At first, it was a changing series of clay-like animations of food. It was certainly unique and a great representation of the art themes in the series, but it was also very satisfying when the OP changed to a more general collage of various images (including real-life shots). That’s because the visuals finally could really soar along with the audio – plus, the ferris wheel and cycling imagery were reinforced.

Waltz

While it’s hard to make this decision with Dramatic being such a strong contender, Waltz in my opinion is the song which is most strongly identified with the series. In fact, I would say that the relationship between the song and the anime represents the strongest use of vocal music in an anime I have ever seen. There is such a dreamlike and expressive quality to this song, both the music and lyrics. “sore wa waltz, no you dane, fushigi sa….”. And what is not to like about the charming and optimistic (I need to buy a thesaurus, eh?) musical accompaniment? H&C viewers will fondly remember the way the sudden appearance of those opening chords of Waltz at the end of each episode, signifying the end of another chapter of this story. This allowed the song to really become an inseparable aspect of the show. Those fans will also remember the phenomenal ending. Many people complained about how Waltz was replaced with Mistake for the second half of the show, but in my opinion it only strengthened that wonderful effect in the final episode when that nostalgic song returned once more and we reflected on everything that has changed – and so the wheel turns.

Mistake

It’s hard to objectively discuss this song without comparing it to Waltz, and without noting the fact that it took the place of Waltz. Indeed, many people hate it for that very reason. My opinion? Musically, I think it is an enjoyable and fitting piece of music. The lyrics though, simply don’t do anything for me. They’re kind of superficial, the sort of trivial stuff that was the reason I never had much interest in vocal music in the first place. It’s kind of a shame because I think the actual music here has great potential, especially in the middle portions where there is a very distinct, almost ethereal quality. And I think the opening is wonderful, meandering along lazily, a slight hint of the seventh chord.

Split

Like with Mistake the trouble here is trying to objectively evaluate the song without referencing Waltz. They are somewhat similar, but Split is a bit more sober, without the overt enthusiasm of Waltz. An overall theme of H&C, 2nd season, was the idea of coming to a crossroads in life, where you would have to say goodbye to things you know and approach the unfamiliar. A bittersweet feeling is expressed in this song too, and the gently “walking” rhythms make me think of moving forwards without wanting to stop for regret – well, I might be stretching a bit here. It isn’t Waltz (darn, I did it again), but I think it is very fitting.

And now, the instrumental music of Honey and Clover:

Honey and Clover is a slice-of-life comedy/drama. Obviously, you will not find any grand symphonic themes. But there are some wonderfully nostalgic and introspective pieces of music which play throughout the series and truly do add to it’s atmosphere in tangible ways. Many series simply use stock music – the same old wandering piano themes. While Honey and Clover also has plenty of piano music, it never feels as standard or dull as what I typically hear. The best and most representative piece of score is the Waltz Piano Version, which for some crazy reason never appeared on the OST, though you can find a version I uploaded right here on my blog. This piano version played many times throughout the series, and it simply has a fantastic, bittersweet but hopeful tone. It is, of course, based on the Waltz ending song which also gives it an added weight.

Mawaridasu Sharin is a very simple piece, and a great example of how Honey and Clover uses score so well. Composing for film or media isn’t like composing art music. When you compose art music you are trying to engage your listener with the music alone, and it needs to be meaningful and sophisticated enough to do so by itself. With film or anime, you need to compose music that will reflect and heighten the audience’s reaction to what is on screen. So many anime composers completely ruin emotional scenes by padding them with arpeggiated piano phrases with overtly sugary melodies on top, most of which sound similar. Here, instead, Yuzo Hayashi uses a very simple soundscape – soft pads which envelope a soft piano which slowly descends the scale one note at a time. Simple, yet effective in producing some of the most memorable scenes in the anime.

Yotsuba no Clover gives us a lovely melody, one of the “themes” of Honey and Clover in my opinion. It is such a sweet and idealistic melody, carried by a cello over a piano accompaniment. It makes me wish I knew a cellist so we could reproduce this fine music. Yamanai Ame plays during several of the more sympathetic moments – again, a simple piece musically, used in an effective way to underscore scenes and bring out the emotions when needed when being overtly sugary or sentimental.

Yawarakana Jikan…..is it even necessary for me to write about this piece? This piece embodies the yearning of all the characters so well. Note the use of the major seventh chord – which also plays a role defining “Waltz” and “Fuganaiya”.

I think I’ve rambled on long enough, haven’t I?

Just like the series itself, the music of Honey and Clover hits all the right notes when it needs to and never lets itself wallow in excess melodrama.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever enjoy an anime as much as Honey and Clover.