"Let's face it, you and I aren't meant to have a dramatic death."

Welcome to the N.H.K, is about Tatsuhiro Sato,  a reclusive anti-social college dropout who had a mental breakdown and believes there is a conspiracy by an evil organization known as the N.H.K. which stands for NEET Hikikimori Kyokai (lit: Not pursuing Employment, Education or Training Anti-social Recluse Association) whose mascot is a Pururin, a cute magical heroic catgirl. According to Sato, their goal is to enslave the world by making the anime Otaku never want to leave their home. Afterwords Sato has an encounter with Misaki Nakahara and she decides to create a test to ease her own anxiety seeing Sato as the only person she's met that is worse off than herself. Soon after that Sato finally gets annoyed with the Pururin theme song being played by his neighbor and goes over to yell at him only to find out its one of his only high school friends, Kaoru Yamazaki, an anime Otaku who is considered a half-hikikimori. After an incendiary meeting between Sato and Misaki, Yamazaki forces the two to create a hentai visual novel, referred in the anime as a gal-game, together and Sato gets sucked into Yamazaki's world.

Hightlights:

My biggest highlight would have to be Sato's high school friend, Yamazaki. Of all the characters he seemed to be the most realistic to me. He functioned on a daily level and yet he also had his own dreams and aspirations. He also, unlike Sato, does not appear to be insane.  All the while Sato has reasons for his delusions of conspiracies because of his only other high school friend, Hitomi Kashiwa, Yamazaki are much more common; Yamazaki was social outcast when he was young and after confessing to a girl he was given an excuse why she couldn't go out with him only to find out later she went out with another guy. After this Yamazaki shuts himself off. Yamazaki also is probably the most tragic of all the characters as none of his dreams pan out in the end; the visual novel fails, he is forced to return back home to continue his family business which he doesn't want. He also pushes away the one girl in his college who liked him, and still did even after she found out his hobby was playing visual novels and collecting anime girl figurines. he pushed her away because he felt she wouldn't want to live with him. While Yamazaki ultimately finds a girlfriend he's attracted to through an arranged marriage and begins to like his job, I can't help but feel a bit melancholic that nothing he really hoped for truly came to pass.

Overall:

It's been a long time since I have watched an anything, anime or live-action, that has really touched me the way that Welcome to the N.H.K. has. In fact I can't remember one that I really connected to the characters as much with. The characters in Welcome to the N.H.K. are all human; they are all flawed in their own individual ways. This goes even for the minor characters. While the anime focuses on the Otaku related problems, it doesn't glorify or gloss over the problems others have.


This anime, along with Otaku no Video, is a great watch for anyone who really wants to know about the Otaku culture without glorifying it. In addition, although the terms and references are heavily Japanese-centric, the social conditions are not unique to Japan. Group suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, anti-social recluses, bullies, abusive relatives and other things are prevalent in every society, not just Japan. The anime deals with all of these aspects but focuses on the anti-social recluses as Sato and Yamazaki are both to varying degrees. The anime takes the controversial tone that to “cure” a hikikimori they need to be starved enough to want to eat as hikikimori don't really want to die, but merely fear change. In fact Sato says he finds dying to much of a struggle and would rather he could just simply fade away at one point. It also hints that friends, particularly someone who is willing to become a significant other, are also key in most cases.

Welcome to the N.H.K. was originally written as a light novel by Tatsuhiko Takimoto who has professed being a former hikikimori himself and has professed that items in the original work, which the anime is heavily based on, were from his experiences. It shows as I doubt that anyone who had not experienced this condition could write about it with such realism. The anime hypes the anime aspect while downplaying aspects like drug use and domestic violence.


While the message given by the final episode is supposed to be uplifting, I find for Sato, and particularly Yamazaki, it doesn't feel that way. Although all of them remain friends and correspond and all of them end up having stable lives with life partner they like, they all, with the exception of Sato and Masaki, move away from each other. In addition Sato and Yamazaki never achieve any of their grand ideas in life and are instead forced into conform with mundane reality. For Sato he at least broke free of his NEET hikikimori status and got the girl he fell in love with originally, but Yamazaki lost in every pursuit he tried on his own. The ending feels more bittersweet than outright happy. In spite of this, Welcome to the N.H.K is worth watching as it is among the best anime series ever.

ComicsOnline gives Welcome to the N.H.K. 5 out of 5 Pururin obsessed otaku.