“A Sign of Affection” is a patient, healing, and meditative anime that follows a romance. It’s the calmest and most reassuring show I’ve found this winter. Yuki is a deaf college student who runs into Itsuomi on the train. They’re both at the same school and have a mutual friend. They begin spending time together and he starts to learn Japanese Sign Language.
The highlight of the show is Yuki’s internal voice. It is so incredibly hard to carry a series with a character’s internal monologue – it’s too easy to go overboard with it and too difficult to make it interesting. Many anime fall into internalized over-explaining. What I like here is that Yuki’s inner voice isn’t plot-based for the audience. It’s emotionally based for herself. It perfectly captures a mix of poetry, joy, and anxiety that can define figuring oneself out at that point in life.
Yuki’s been sheltered through a mixture of circumstance and intention. She’s attended a very small school for the deaf all the way through high school. Socializing for her isn’t as accessible as it is for everyone else in college, and she’s also not extremely experienced in socializing with new people. Her parents still set a curfew on her at 19 so they’re perhaps a little overbearing in their protectiveness, but at the same time they never fully learned sign language, which feels like it doesn’t see Yuki fully if it’s the primary way their daughter speaks.
Meanwhile, Itsuomi travels around the world to hike and sends Yuki pictures of places she hasn’t even thought of going. She’s never set foot outside Japan. Much of her early internal voice contrasts her feelings for him against the worry that she’s simply falling for the idea of him and how he represents the wider world. It’s an earnest, complex line of thought to follow.
The conversations Yuki has with her best friend Rin are wonderful. They easily go back and forth between Yuki’s lip reading, the basic elements of Japanese Sign Language that Rin’s picked up, texting even when they’re right next to each other, or just showing what they’ve typed on their own phones, mouthing words silently across the room, the list goes on. It feels so natural to watch them switch between all these different ways of communicating, and it feels like a beautiful window into their friendship.
The animation of people’s hands is astounding. As Yuki tells us, people have different ways of speaking when they sign, different inflections by how they hold their fingers, ways their hands move when they’re feeling different emotions, and the animation pays such specific, careful attention to mouths and hands – the way Yuki sees communication. This isn’t Itsuomi, it’s Oushi, who I’ll talk about more in a minute. He’s not so fun:
Let’s go back to Itsuomi first. Because there’s a focus on communication and what they’re communicating is distinctly housed within Japanese culture, there are a few moments of culture shock watching as a Western viewer. A number of more contextual compliments by Itsuomi are translated as “cute”, and there’s a head pat when they meet that crosses a line – but in a very different way (a fast-forwarding of familiarity) than it would connote in a Western context. These kinds of things are pretty standard for anime translations, but most anime don’t focus on the act of communicating as specifically as this one does, so those cultural differences can stand out.
Itsuomi does ask Yuki what’s OK in terms of physical contact fairly early on. She gives her consent for him to be physically close, and that’s an element it feels refreshing to include.
“A Sign of Affection” doesn’t shy away from the fact that Itsuomi engages in things imperfectly. He travels the world and likes experiencing cultures outside his own, but while he tends to be respectful, he can also be a bit of a tourist about it. Just as Yuki worries about whether she likes Itsuomi or likes the idea he represents about accessing the rest of the world, we have to ask whether Itsuomi likes Yuki for who she is, or because she’s a new, unique experience to him and he likes that idea.
It’s not only on us as the audience to worry about this. This is a serious consideration for Yuki as she moves forward. She asks both these questions to herself and processes them as she spends more time with Itsuomi. We get to see Itsuomi’s cousin Kyoya raise this as a concern separately to Itsuomi and Rin. (Kyoya is a basket of green flags who’s awkwardly romanced by Rin.) Finally, while Yuki herself doesn’t actively raise a need to slow things down and take them carefully, Itsuomi does seem to recognize this need in their relationship and respond by doing exactly that. He comes a long way from where he starts:
There are some initial moments where Itsuomi objectifies her not as a woman, but as a deaf person. He also makes a clear effort to learn his way out of these, and wants to learn. It’s not mine to say whether they handle this entirely properly. From my perspective, I appreciate that he makes many of the mistakes a 22 year-old would make, but works to not make them again.
I also like that when he asks someone something, Itsuomi doesn’t just ask someone if they would like it. A yes-no question often comes with expectations or an assumption of a more correct answer. He asks if they would or would not. He regularly offers the two options, thereby legitimizing someone saying no. It’s a small detail arising from his communicating across the various cultures he’s lived in and traveled to, but it goes so far in legitimizing the agency and choice in the people around him. This explicit acknowledgment and legitimization of her agency goes far in Yuki feeling like being around Itsuomi lets her be seen as a full person – something others in her life can minimize.
This doesn’t erase certain problematic tendencies that are core to Itsuomi – at one point he blocks Yuki’s eyes when confronting her childhood friend turned creepster bully Oushi, which is akin to covering someone’s ears and eyes in the same situation. Regardless of whether he thinks he’s protecting Yuki, that shouldn’t be Itsuomi’s choice.
CW: I discuss the portrayal of stalking by the characters Oushi and Emma, and some personal experiences being stalked. Skip to the Content Warning end notice below if you wish to pass this topic.
This is, to some extent, influenced by Itsuomi’s experience with Emma, who stalks him and relentlessly tries to insert herself into his life and sabotage Yuki. Itsuomi struggles with allowing someone who was once a friend to stay in his life and to support her decisions, even while she tries to tear down every boundary he holds. It’s an interesting dynamic to see someone who is otherwise so confident and self-assured in Itsuomi navigate someone like Emma.
To visit on something personal, I’ve had to deal with stalkers at moments in my life. As a dude, I realize there are both physical and societal advantages I have when it comes to remaining safe, but when I was in my 20s, there was someone who stalked me and I genuinely worried was going to kill my pet. I still let her stay in my life for years after. When someone else has the ability to normalize what isn’t normal, you can start to misinterpret your own legitimate worry as an overreaction. This isn’t handled from a man’s perspective of being stalked very often, so when you’re stalked it’s easy to make the mistake that it’s something harmless you should endure rather than set boundaries on. Being afraid of a stalker is seen as a weakness in masculinity rather than a legitimate human response, so I appreciate that there is some engagement with it.
None of that is mutually exclusive to what women have to endure, nor the romanticization of stalking in narratives about male stalkers. This is something Yuki has to deal with in the form of Oushi, who grew up with her and romanticizes his bullying of her. He learned sign language to insult her and his approach to flirting is to either criticize her or cross physical boundaries. Yuki shuts him down, but grants more understanding to him than she should – that he’s being protective of her, but doing so in such a bigoted, ableist way that he essentially wants her to stay at home and never leave or take any risks for fear she’d break.
I mentioned early on that this is a show that – above all else – feels calm and healing. That doesn’t mean it’s not complex. It can be a little weird to focus on these aspects when they aren’t the core of the show, but they definitely inform the parts that are healing. Having dealt with stalking, and having worked with other people who have been stalked, it’s remarkably easy to recognize how Yuki and Itsuomi have to navigate Oushi and Emma.
To see Yuki deal with her bully and stalker in a way that sees her continuing to expand her agency, and to see Itsuomi deal with his stalker in a way that is clear-headed and continues to maintain the boundaries he needs…it means a lot. I don’t know how the show will handle that going forward, but at this point, I wish I’d seen more things like this growing up than the romanticization of stalking in media that plagued the 90s and 00s.
CW Concludes: Discussion of stalking ends. The topic is concluded from this point forward.
Yuki and Itsuomi aren’t perfect in their relationship – particularly him. They keep trying and learning, and he wants to keep trying and learning. They screw up, but they travel in the direction of improving and communicating better. That feels real, even in such a poetically delivered show. Itsuomi definitely has further to go, but you can clearly see the effort he puts into it and progress that results.
Overall, “A Sign of Affection” feels like something that’s had love poured into it. That’s hard to quantify, but it has the quality of the best romances – that more than wanting to see these people together, you want to see them grow and be happy whatever that means. It doesn’t feel like they’re shoehorned into anything. If they help each other grow and become more who each wants to be, the romance will work. While Yuki might be shy, she’s also very considerate of herself, her wants, and her pace. Even if she doesn’t know what she specifically wants out of life, she has a solid sense of who she wants to be on her way there. Itsuomi might have a better idea of himself, but he doesn’t really share that idea with others openly. With Yuki, he feels comfortable doing so, and even when they miscommunicate, they’re each considerate of what the other person wants and might be thinking. There’s still tons of room for each to grow, and the part of the romance that works best isn’t the love part – that’s there, but the part that works best is seeing the expression of that love – seeing how they each provide the other that space and support to grow.
“A Sign of Affection” is on Crunchyroll.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 