Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Certain typographical features of the below post are intentional.

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The uneasy thickness of a nightmare permeates the scene, and a synthesized voice pushes a dinner tray into view. Singed metal and corrosion lay on a plate, served like a tidy meal. It’s a head; a human head, or at least something in the shape of one, smoldering and smoking, a revolting bon appetit for an unwilling customer. This is the kind of thing that would send anyone screaming awake, so when Takuma [Toyonaga Toshiyuki] does, it’s no surprise. For him, jolting awake is a moment of relief. Proof that he was just dreaming, that this jarring and disquieting interlude wasn’t real. That’s the problem though; with Takuma’s thoughts and with My Wife Has No Emotion in general. I’m not sure he’s right about that. (edited) [4:02 AM]

This moment, a surreal and genuinely disturbing dream sequence, is hidden in the middle of My Wife Has No Emotion‘s first episode like a knife between book pages. It colors everything that follows, and makes us see what came before in a different light, its influence spilling out from both chronological sides of the event. Look carefully, though, and it’s clear that the seeds for it were planted before the footage even began rolling. Go look at that key visual; note how Takuma’s eyes are closed and his hands squeeze his robot-wife in an apparent expression of domestic bliss that is nonetheless decidedly paternalistic and controlling. She, meanwhile, stares out at us. It’s a cold, creepy stare, but not necessarily a judgmental one. It almost seems like she just really wants to know. “Do you like this? Is this what you’re here for?”

In a sense, all of this is subtextual. Run the tape back and revisit our basic setup and you’ll see the familiar ingredients of a friendly rom-com with a sci-fi twist. Even then, though, simply describing the premise raises alarm bells. Lonely salaryman buys—has bought, this happens before the start of the show—an “appliance” as he calls her, a human-shaped robot to cook and clean for him. He is an overworked, pitiable mess of a man inhabiting a desolately empty apartment, and Mina [Inagaki Konomi], the robot maid in question, responds to him with, accordingly, pity, but also a towering amount of passive aggression. Assuming that’s not just me doing what Takuma may very well be doing: projecting our own thoughts onto a being that is, at the end of the day, not actually sapient. Akin to trying to “date” ChatGTP. In a show presented even slightly differently, I would have no trouble at all thinking this was supposed to be straightforward wish fulfillment despite all of these complications. Maybe it is, for a certain kind of person, but the second the show raises the possibility that this entire domestic setup is cover for something sinister, it’s impossible to stow the notion away, even if the anime itself might like to.

My Wife Has No Emotion should not, by all rights, be causing me to have these thoughts. Questions of meant—is this what the author meant to do here, is this how the author meant to make me feel—can be a trap. Without speaking to the original mangaka directly, we cannot know for sure what is meant by any single thing in this show’s first episode. Previously, I’ve treated questions of whether or not a show is Doing Something as a puzzle to be solved. We can do that here, too. We can observe how, despite the ostensibly simple setup of boy-meets-robo-chef, there is a strong air of the denpa all over this thing. A pronounced unease, a sadness that is at one point said aloud but is obvious from the outset. We can look at Takuma’s mostly-empty apartment. We can nod thoughtfully at his drinking problem and Mina’s attempts to curb it later in the episode. (Out of genuine concern, or is she just obeying her programming?) We can consider this setup in the context of the oft-slandered “rehabilitation” genre (I’m hardly a fan myself). We can compare it to past works in the medium to tackle the sapience of artificial, robotic humanoids; Chobits, Mahoromatic, Time of Eve. All of this, ultimately, might be like trying to search for sharks in a swimming pool. [4:13 AM] Speculation is speculation. We’re not going to know for sure if My Wife Has No Emotion will go there unless it does.

The nightmare in the middle of this first episode is strange, but to even go so far as to say it’s intentionally disturbing is to speculate. This is ultimately a work with an ambiguous, or more charitably, a very multilayered tone. Takuma lives alone and openly laments being lonely, so he projects this loneliness onto Mina. (Since the entire show is wholly from Takuma’s perspective we don’t know, and maybe can’t know, if she reciprocates.) He mentions having once had a girl over, but that this did not work out. We can make the reasonable assumption that being shot down made him not want to even try anymore. He’s clearly also at least a little scared of Mina, though. Is that a fear of the unknown—of not knowing how much agency truly lies behind those big, cameralike robotic eyes—or is it a much more basic fear of women? Is it both? Conflating the two wouldn’t be out of character, given what we learn of him here. [4:16 AM]

There’s also the presentation to consider. Mina’s character design is decidedly in the uncanny valley, even by the bug-eyed standards of moe designs, a feeling only reinforced by the moody staging, lighting, and backgrounds, and ramped up even further by the in-spots minimal, all-Casio-presets soundtrack. It switches to a fuller, more traditional romcom OST late in the episode, and that somehow feels even more artificial. Likewise, that scene sees the show gets “raunchy” in its final few minutes, and in doing so, it feels even more awkward. Like an intentional bit of self-sabotage. Message #anime-notes

My Wife Has No Emotion is a weird series that may or may not at some point bring that weirdness to the forefront for an extended time. But ultimately, that’s a gamble, and it’s going to be difficult to not feel suckered if this uneasy tone is a fakeout, bar an extreme strengthening of the series’ writing chops. Usually, I end these articles by offering a pithy summary and a blunt “should you watch this” yes/no recommendation. I’m not going to do that here, I think you already know if this bet is one you’ll take.

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