OK, going to finally stop being lazy and restart these weekly anime reviews. Enjoy!
---
22-year-old Tatsuhiro Satou is an unemployed college dropout who spends his days cooped up in his apartment, living off the meager allowance he receives from his parents. Satou's refusal to face the outside world has reached the point where he has delusions of an all-powerful conspiracy, the NHK, keeping him from venturing outside. One day, however, a young girl, Misaki Nakahara, declares that she has a project that will cure Satou of his fear of society.
Welcome to the NHK has a well-deserved reputation as the first (and best) anime to deal with the hikikomori phenomenon. Unlike many anime series that almost cynically coddle their anime- and manga-obsessed characters (because those same types keep the industry afloat), Welcome to the NHK pulls no punches in its depiction of a man who has retreated from society and immersed himself in a world where he feels neither pressure nor pain. There are no expectations; no fear of judging eyes.
Satou is at once sympathetic and profoundly unsympathetic. The former because, I think, most people probably cannot help but wish even a little bit that he finds some way to overcome his psychological disease. The latter because Satou is the rare character who truly earns his self-loathing. He's a desperate, pathetic man who breaks his promises, leeches off anyone and everyone possible, and contributes nothing positive to the world or those around him. He admits to himself often that he is an eminently selfish man.
What keeps Satou from being truly unforgivable, however, is that the anime does such a fantastic job at highlighting the psychological terror of his condition. Much of what Satou does is of his own will. He knows that he is obsessive and easily addicted, but that does not stop from playing vast amounts of eroge, filling his hard drive to the brim with pornographic pictures and spending all his free time playing MMORPGs in a hopeless attempt to make a living. But there are points where Satou genuinely tries to break free from his awful lifestyle, only to find that there is something in his mind holding him back. His psychosis has an iron grip that Satou is too weak to break.
Surrounding Satou is a cast that is scarcely better than he is. His next door neighbor, Kaoru Yamazaki, is a meek man with a streak of hypocritical misogyny. Satou's former best friend, Hitomi Kashiwa, leads an unhappy life as a public servant and is addicted to drugs. Even Satou's tutor, Misaki, has her own demons she must slay before she can even think of curing Satou. Welcome to the NHK has one of the most screwed up casts of any anime. They're all quite selfish people who rope others into their personal worlds at their own convenience.
But something else that Welcome to the NHK successfully does is turn the problem around back on society itself. It's an indictment of a society so focused on work and fitting in to specific roles that some people are almost destined to fall through the cracks. While Welcome to the NHK never absolves its characters of responsibility for their actions, it also does not pretend that conformity is the solution to their problems. The ultimate ending feels a bit too happy at first, but the implications behind it make it bittersweet at most.
Welcome to the NHK is a rough series to watch. It's anime's equivalent to something like Requiem for a Dream, a harrowing experience that must been seen but probably cannot be watched more than once in a lifetime. But it seems to me to be a rite of passage for fans who may be getting into anime (or any of the subcultures within) just a bit too much.
If you like this, then watch ... : I honestly cannot think of a series that is similar to Welcome to the NHK. Genshiken is too light. Chaos;Head sucks too much. Maybe Neon Genesis Evangelion is the closest I can get, but it's not quite the same either.
