The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

TsumaSho

Keisuke Niijima remains brokenhearted 10 years after his wife Takae passed away. But one day, an elementary school girl comes to his house and says that she is Takae, reincarnated as a different girl. Now Keisuke is trying to make up for lost time, while Takae struggles as a grade schooler with the mind of a woman in her 40s, trying create situations where she can meet Keisuke.

TsumaSho is based on the Tsuma, Shōgakusei ni Naru. manga by Yayū Murata. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Rather than talk about these two episodes, I'm going to focus on what I feel are the most important aspects of this show, given the reason I'm giving it the score I am. This is one of those anime that has excellent control of its tone. Because of this, it can go from lightly comedic and heartfelt to serious and dark while still feeling like the same cohesive story. This is important because this is a story about grief, and how it affects you and the people around you.

Keisuke is a man who has never managed to get past the death of his wife. He continued living for the sake of his daughter but all the joy, hope, drive, and ambition left his life when she did. He's spent a decade on autopilot, the hole in his heart a gaping wound. His daughter is in a similar position. Without her mother to cheer her on and push to do more, she just gave up on going out into the world. Instead, she lives in the same house she always has, goes through the same depressing routine, and does odd jobs working from home to bring in at least a meager amount of money.

On the other side of the story, we have Ms. Shiraishi, the mother of our titular reincarnated wife. While death is not the cause of her loss, hers is no less final. Not only has she lost a husband but she also lost him in a way that absolutely destroyed her trust in others. Yet, unlike Keisuke who has left the hole in his life open and empty, Ms. Shiraishi is doing all she can to fill it with anything she can, including deadbeat guys who seemingly only want to take advantage of her. So eager is she to fill this hole that she is actively deceiving herself, forgiving lies that hurt her and taking that pain out on her daughter.

The scenes with Ms. Shiraishi are hard to watch, showing how the pain of her loss is affecting her daughter (who is being harmed massively on a psychological level despite being a 40-year-old woman on the inside). Contrasting this, we see how the reincarnation of Takae has brought light back into Keisuke and Mei's lives. Keisuke has his happiness and drive back, and is once again a vibrant person who coworkers appreciate and even pine for. Meanwhile, Mei also wants to better herself, working to find a job she both enjoys and fits well into.

Yet, with these positive shifts comes a cloud of looming dread. At the moment, Keisuke, Mei, and Takae are experiencing a miracle. When it ends, will this second chance have helped them grow enough to accept the loss a second time and continue, or will it make their despair all the deeper? We'll just have to continue watching to find out.

There's a good sentiment behind this show. Loss is one of the hardest emotions to process, and we all grieve in our own horribly personalized ways. Grief can also linger, popping back up when you least expect it to, so it's not out of the norm that Niijima and his daughter Mai would still be deep in the throes of their grief ten years after Takae died. They probably aren't in full-on grieving mode all of the time, but the sudden loss of wife and mother hit them hard, and both are having trouble fully moving past it. She was the center of their world, and then, without warning, she was gone.

That makes it at least a little believable that when she pops up ten years later, reincarnated as a little girl named Marika, both Niijima and Mai welcome her with open arms. Their missing piece has been found, and that's all they can see. It's a dream come true, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand it. When you factor in what we learn in episode two about what Marika's life is like with her angry, neglectful, borderline abusive mother, it makes sense that she'd seize the opportunity presented by her returned memories to visit her old life. She had it all, and now she doesn't, so in many ways, she's grieving, too.

But there are still just a few too many uncomfortable elements here. Niijima's enthusiasm for his returned wife means that he often doesn't think about the fact that she's in a ten-year-old's body now; she has to continually remind him of how incredibly bad his actions could look. He also snaps out of his depression just a little too quickly, again making his actions look a touch suspicious. It makes sense if you think about it, especially since Marika is able to prove she's Takae so well, but when we get to the end of episode two, and Marika/Takae is thinking about how she wants to live with this family again, we start to raise the unpleasant issue of whether or not there'll be literal wife-raising going on. Marika definitely needs to get away from her mother, but I'm not sure this is the best solution.

I'm speculating, of course, but these episodes don't give space for much else. There are attempts to show that there's an adult woman interested in Niijima and a classmate interested in Marika/Takae, so it's not that alternative storylines aren't being given an opportunity. But between the constant reminders of how much happier Niijima, Mai, and Marika/Takae are when they're together and the very lackluster visuals, there's not much else to think about. This desperately wants to be touching with a hint of maudlin, but what we get is maudlin with a hint of creepy. Awkward vocals and bland animation and art don't help. This could be a lovely weepy if you can frame it that way, but I can't quite pull it off.

I went into TsumaSho worried that it might wreck me. I've been married to my wife for almost a decade, and we've reached the point in our lives where the question of “What would you do if something happened to me?” is not as abstract as it felt in our 20s. There is something that the father, Keisuke, reflects on in the second of TsumaSho's premiere episodes that resonated with me, and it is a lesson that the ANN community has been made keenly aware of in the past weeks: You might think that someone you care about is going to be around forever, but they can vanish from your life with no warning, at any moment.

Yet, despite how primed I am to be a blubbering mess over any show that would force me to reckon with our all-too-flimsy grasp on our mortality, TsumaSho left me feeling rather cold, and I am struggling to unpack why. The show isn't necessarily doing anything ambitious with its art and animation, which is mostly fine throughout these episodes. I usually need a bit more punch in the visual department to get really in sync with a melodrama's wavelength. It could be that Keisuke and Takae, being such excessively ordinary, everyday people, are actually working against the series, too. Y'all should know by now that I'm usually the first one to advocate for more anime about boring, regular-ass adults, and the Nijima family certainly fits that mold (aside from the whole “Mother who has been reincarnated into the body of a ten-year- old” thing), but still…there's just a nebulous lack of friction or substance that is preventing me from latching onto this story as I hoped. It's like I'm doing my damndest to clamber up a rock-climbing wall, but someone has gone and covered all the little grippy stones with grease. I can see where the story is trying to take me, and I'm ready and willing to go there with it, but the pieces just aren't coming together into a complete whole. Not yet, at least.

I will give TsumaSho credit for how serious and thoughtful it is in handling such a potentially ludicrous premise. I'm not just talking about all of the apt reminders that Takae/Marika gives her husband about how stupid it would be to add pictures of random children as his phone background and favorite contacts, either. Instead, this is one of those reincarnation stories that considers the potentially horrifying implications of waking up one day to realize that you're an entirely different person than you had been for the first ten years of your life. Marika has a family and friends at school, and all of these complicated and honestly quite sad problems would have been hard enough for a regular ten-year-old to manage. Now, though, the girl that Marika was is essentially gone, which isn't much different than what Keisuke and Mai had to deal with when they lost Takae, and it isn't like the new Takae can just up and tell her mom, “Sorry, your daughter is basically dead, and the spirit of a middle-aged wife and mother has taken her place.”

Whether or not TsumaSho will manage to pay off any of these interesting conflicts remains to be seen. This is hardly a terrible premiere, either, so I wager plenty of viewers will be enticed enough to follow the show from week to week to see where things go from here. For me, though, it's one of those anime that I will be much more interested in reading reviews and recaps of after the fact instead of following in real-time.

Whoever chose the title TsumaSho over a translated title was smart because getting Americans to accept a show called My Wife Became an Elementary School Student would be a huge uphill battle. Most people would see the title and, aware of how popular lolicon is among anime fans, make the absolute worst assumptions. I saw it myself and, to be honest, had the same first thoughts. Even after being reassured that it was actually a very sweet series about mortality and grief, I had my doubts. Turns out, I should have trusted.

One of the wonderful things about anime and manga is a willingness to entertain completely fantastical, absurd concepts. Nothing is off the table, regardless of how illogical it is. Anime tends to be relatively unconcerned with the question of “How?” On the other hand, these anime tend to have a frustrating incuriosity when fully thinking through the “What if” of these situations, preferring to sweep things under the rug. TsumaSho actually devotes considerable thought to the idea, “What if a ten-year-old girl suddenly remembered her previous life? And what if she was neighbors with her widower and daughter?”

What is it like for Takae when she's among her supposed peers? What is her home situation such that she can spend all this time at her former self's house without notice? TsumaSho thinks these things through. Whenever Keisuke tries to treat Takae as he would her adult self, she does her best to draw boundaries around what would be seen as predatory in a normal situation, like him buying her a phone so she can communicate with them when she's home. There are still things to consider, like her relationship with who she was before she recovered her memories and adult personality. Keisuke wants to pick up where they left off, but that's impossible, and Takae is a pragmatic human being. This groundedness works because, at its heart, it's a story about grief and moving on.

It is dragged down a bit by subpar production values, especially in the second episode. The characters' eyes tend to look a bit glazed over and take visible shortcuts with any animation more complex than characters walking around or talking. On the other hand, it's bolstered by a truly brilliant performance by the brilliant Aoi Yūki as Takae. Her husky voice carries the complexity of the character better than would, say, a Kikuko Inoue. Takae comes through as someone who put her whole self into caring for her family, but is still a full person.

I don't blame anyone for having trepidation about TsumaSho given the title. Heck, there are still some questionable issues, considering aspects of marital relationships the episodes touch on. But I can't lie; it resonated with me.