Introducing excellent things is hard. It’s hard for me because I naturally stray towards the understated or the contrary. You’ve probably heard me call something ‘boringly excellent,’ for example, and that means when I call something incredible or amazing, you might think that puts it on the same category as a really good sandwich or a really interesting academic concept, as opposed to here, where what I want to say is this romance anime is so good I find myself periodically nostalgic for the childhood it depicts that I never had even though it’s about kids with anxiety struggling to make a lot of friends.
This is an amazing story, it has lovely moments, it brings me joy, and I want to share that with you.
Spoiler Warning: I’m going to disclose some facts about the end of the series, and the nature of the kind of show it is, and what kind of show it’s not. Like, if you think ‘this series doesn’t include a mech battle’ is a spoiler, then yeah, you got me, it’s a spoiler, but I don’t plan on going deep on revelations about the eventual plot, okay?
Okay, then with that aside, this is a totally mundane anime about a normal reality. Into this we have half our main cast, Ganta, who is a boy with insomnia. It makes him bad at paying attention and socialising at school, and he winds up sloping off to the astronomy club building to sleep. There, he encounters a sleeping girl, in the supposedly haunted astronomy club room, except it turns out it’s not haunted, it’s just quiet and nobody goes there. The pair make friends and resolve to use the middle of the day and club activity room to do the thing they are actually interested in doing: Sleeping.
That’s the show, that’s the pitch. Your instigating event is a pair of protagonists finding a way to sneak off and both have a nice nap. From there, things get more complicated but never escalate beyond the level of an entirely expected consequence of a teenager trying to find some independence in a world that demands they comply with a sleeping and living schedule that they can’t.
Alright, okay, so yes, okay, with that set up, you may be afraid that what you’re staring down the barrel of is a soppy story about Two People And Their Special Interest where their Special Interest is an anxiety condition. And like, you’re not wrong. But there’s something of a tender touch on spoilers here, because I’m going to expand a little on information in the series, and you, if you’re a savvy nerd, you may be about to make a hop skip and a jump ahead of me and I need you to keep moving with me and not rush ahead.
Insomniacs After School is an episodic series. Every episode represents a reasonably similar step forward in time, paced out to represent about a single year in high school. It has its ups and downs with some good things happening and some bummer things happening and during this time, Ganta and Isaki open up to each other about their insomnia. Ganta, hey, look yeah, it’s anxiety, tied into a self-perpetuating fear and a loss of a loved one. Isaki, it’s because she has a congenital heart condition that has rendered her afraid of falling asleep in case she doesn’t wake up and –
No no no no! Stop! Stop running ahead! No, this isn’t a series about a sick girl who dies. And you know, I thought that too! I spent a lot of this series gritting my teeth bracing for if this whole story was spending its time showing these mundane and little adventures in a complicated time of life, all just to make it feel all the more awful when at the end we learned that Ganta is relating this story about the Girl He Loved In High School because she helped him overcome his Insomnia then hecking died. No! No, it’s not that kind of show, where the most interesting and important thing a woman does with her life is die.
No, this is not a story about dying. This is a story about living.
Like I said, it’s an episodic series. The series is very grounded, very normal; things that another series might smooth over because they’re inconvenient, this series instead presents as this episode’s challenge. For example, part of the premise is this pair capitalise on an abandoned club room, which in some anime, you might see as the unstated premise for the whole series. Not so here – once they realise they want to spend time together, once they have connected, the school finds out what they’re up to and now they’re on the hook for making their actual club (the association between them) into something the school recognises as a club (and therefore is allowed to use that room).
It’s wrong to say this is an anime about an astronomy club, though, even though the story absolutely follows them making the astronomy club into something. It’s not about astronomy, the astronomy could be anything else, if it let these two people with a shared struggle connect to one another and reflect on what it means to connect. Along the way there are all sorts of details, all these things that keep this story so focused on the emotional inner life of these two. There’s a part time job. There’s learning about cameras, about photography, about boundaries and about, yeah, uh, what it means to be living with a medical condition.
The nature of bodies plays into it, too. How people listen, how people fit together, how you can be close to someone, and again, intimate, and be exposed to them, but have that be not the result of a romance, but rather, the trust that builds to get to that stage of romance. Undeniably, listening to a heartbeat is an incredibly close, intimate action, as is literally sleeping with someone. Sleeping in the same room as someone is a show of trust, it’s a gift, and Insomniacs After School are people who start by being too exhausted to not have that trust. Surely we can fall asleep together without it being a thing, right?
Is it a thing?
(It’s going to be a thing.)
One of my favourite parts of this series, one of the things that sings to me with romantic charm, is when the two realise they don’t have a way to communicate outside of hours, and wind up using an app that does one-way soft-spoken radio broadcasts, telling each other story times over the phone in their beds and holy hell. Holy hell that’s so intimate and yet at the same time so g-rated and sweet and it’s so close with the distance of these things.
I think that’s the thing about Insomniacs After School that clings to me afterwards. It’s romantic, it’s about emotional love, it’s about a romance between two people, but by being so normal and so contained, and build on this shared sense of anxiety. It feels so deep and so resonant for it. I often have an empathy problem with stories about high schoolers, especially in anime, because they’re not high schoolers. They’re just not, they’re college age students with that kind of fully developed inner life and sometimes a sword or ninja training. That’s fine, but it doesn’t make me go: ah yes, high school. Plus, I didn’t have a normal high school by any measure, so what the hell do I know about how high schoolers feel about things like relationships and love and like, forming those relationships?
But I do know the feeling of being up in the middle of the night, afraid of what it means when I finish school and have no idea what to do. I know about using the internet in those tiny hours to reach out to those people who I can connect to, the people who make that anxiety, that sadness, quiet… a bit.
And that’s the kind of sincere moment that this series is built out of.
Insomniac After School is one of a small number of romantic anime I’ve watched recently that makes me proud to be a fan of the form. There are so many comedies and so many action stories with a romantic subplot, and yet there are times where a show like this manages to entertain me and get a response of ‘hey, huh, that’s pretty good.’
Insomniacs After School is a cut above. It’s a deeply personal anime that centers on some incredibly real feeling experiences, beautiful and wonderful in how it creates intimacy and free of all the things I normally have to say ‘wait, hang on, yeah the series does some weird stuff here…’ In fact, this series has a moment where a character’s disability is discussed in a particular way, and instead of showing the typical ‘oh wow this sucks we have to deal with this and we’ll talk about it later,’ we see a character standing up, and shouting it.
I love this series and I love the way it is about love.