The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
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- This article covers the first Haruhi Suzumiya novel and the anime series. For an overview of the rest of the series of light novels, see Suzumiya Haruhi (series).
| The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya | |
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| 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 (Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu) |
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| Genre | Comedy, Philosophical, Postmodern, Psychological, Science Fiction, Seinen, Supernatural |
| Light novel | |
| Authored by | Nagaru Tanigawa |
| Artist | Noizi Ito |
| Publisher |  Kadokawa Shoten  Kadokawa Media (Taiwan) DaiwonCI (Korea) |
| Publish date | June 6, 2003 |
| No. of volumes | 8 |
| Manga | |
| Authored by | Mizuno Makoto (art) |
| Publisher | Kadokawa Shoten |
| Serialized in | Shounen Ace |
| Original run | May 2004 – December 2004 |
| No. of volumes | 1 |
| Manga | |
| Authored by | Gaku Tsugano (art) |
| Publisher | Kadokawa Shoten |
| Serialized in | Shounen Ace |
| Original run | November 2005 – |
| No. of volumes | 2 |
| TV anime | |
| Directed by | Tatsuya Ishihara |
| Studio | Kyoto Animation |
| Network | Various Japanese Broadcast Networks |
| Original run | April 2, 2006 – July 2, 2006 |
| No. of episodes | 14 |
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu?) is the first of eight volumes in the Suzumiya Haruhi series written by Japanese author Nagaru Tanigawa and illustrated by Japanese artist Noizi Ito.
The story of Haruhi Suzumiya initially appeared in The Sneaker, a seinen novel magazine by the Japanese publishing company Kadokawa Shoten. Since then, the story has spanned a range of media, all based on the earlier novels. Two separate manga series were created, though the first was discontinued shortly after it started production. The second is still currently running in Japan.
The anime, which shares the same title as the first novel, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, was later created, incorporating elements from the first three novels. The series started airing in Japan on April 2, 2006 and contained 14 episodes. Though the anime series has no license overseas, numerous fansubs have been released. It has also been mentioned that Kadokawa Shoten has received various offers from companies in regards to licensing the anime, manga, and novels. [1] There has also been news about a possible second season to the anime series set for a fall 2007 release.[2]
The latest incarnation of the Haruhi Suzumiya series is a series of radio dramas based on the anime version. The first volume was released on July 5, 2006 by Lantis with the second volume having been released on September 21, 2006. There will also be a drama CD released on January 24, 2007.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya follows the high school life of Haruhi Suzumiya and those who are caught up in her antics. While Haruhi is the central character to the plot, the story is told from the point of view of Kyon, one of Haruhi's classmates.
Kyon is a first year in high school who has just recently been able to leave his fantasies of espers, time travelers, and aliens behind him along with middle school. However, when he chooses to speak to one eccentric girl by the name of Haruhi Suzumiya on the first day of high school, he unwittingly sets off a chain of events which drags him into situations entirely different from the real world in which he had convinced himself he was a part of. This turns his world nearly upside down as he is drawn further into a world eerily like the fantasies he had just managed to outgrow, with Haruhi Suzumiya at the center of it all.
Searching for a group that interests her, Haruhi joins and quits every club in school finding only dissatisfaction. Kyon makes a snide remark about her actions and accidentally provides Haruhi the inspiration to create a club of her own. To help start the club, Haruhi forcefully drafts Kyon, who only stays in the club to protect (or try to protect) other helpless victims of Haruhi's "voluntary arrests". However, as the story progresses it is revealed that each of these supposedly "helpless victims" has a specific reason to be there.
Except for Kyon, all the students in the club are secret agents of various organizations who are sent to observe Haruhi. They gradually explain that Haruhi has superhuman control over every aspect of the universe - an ability she is unaware of. Whenever Haruhi becomes bored or otherwise dissatisfied with reality, she unconsciously creates a new universe - one more to her liking - and attempts to switch over. This leads to the destruction of the current universe. To prevent this, the members of Haruhi's club spend most of their time trying to keep their god-like leader entertained, hold her powers in check, and maintain the illusion that she is living a normal life. Their adventures often lead to humorous results.
The show never clarifies whether the club members gathered around Haruhi by their own free will, were drawn together by her subconscious, or were simply created out of thin air for Haruhi's amusement. The question of their origin is an ongoing theme in the series.
[edit] Characters
In the series, the story centers around the five members of the SOS Brigade. The founder of the club, Haruhi Suzumiya, is a very energetic and often eccentric girl who began the club after talking with the only other person that would converse with her, a fellow classmate named Kyon. Her main purpose to start the club was to be able to find aliens, espers, time travelers, dimensional travelers (specifically sliders), and other oddities so as to alleviate some of her boredom.
Kyon, a cynical classmate of Haruhi's who began talking with her out of curiosity alone, is dragged into the club, though is unsure what will come of it. When two other members are "recruited" by Haruhi to join, Kyon decides to stay in order to make sure no harm comes to them per Haruhi's wacky ideas. He serves to stop Haruhi from going too far most of the time, but is not always able to stop her.
The third member of the club is Yuki Nagato, a very silent bibliophile who usually wants to simply be left alone to read. Without Haruhi knowing of it, Yuki is in fact a "humanoid interface", or artificial human, created by the Integrated Data Entity. The fourth member is the shy and timid Mikuru Asahina, who happens to be one year above Haruhi. She is actually a time traveler. The final member of the SOS Brigade is Koizumi Itsuki, who is almost always smiling and more than willing to give in to Haruhi's strange demands. He turns out of be one of many espers. All three of these members were sent by their particular group to investigate Haruhi Suzumiya, who appears to all three of them to have extrodinary powers equivalent to that of a god, such as the power to remake the world into anything she desires. However, Haruhi herself does not realize she has such power and additionally does not realize her own club contains the very people she is searching for.
Of the remaining characters, a good amount of them are other schoolmates such as Tsuruya, one of Mikuru's good friends or The Computer Research Society President, whose clubroom is unluckily right next to the SOS Brigade. Additionally, there are many more characters featured in the novels than are found in the anime series.
[edit] SOS Brigade
The SOS Brigade (SOS団 エス・オー・エスだん Esuōesu dan?) is a club that Haruhi started shortly after entering high school. The club name is actually an acronym of: Haruhi Suzumiya's Brigade to greatly enliven the world (世界を大いに盛り上げるための涼宮ハルヒの団 Sekai wo Ooini moriagerutame no Suzumiya Haruhi no dan?). An alternative adaptation into English can be given as Save the world by Overloading it with Fun: Haruhi Suzumiya's Brigade, in order to retain the acronym. Haruhi initially received the club idea when Kyon lectured her about how meaningful inventions throughout history were created by geniuses: that technological advancements in the world were wrought by a limited number of lucky individuals. Inspired by this speech, Haruhi decides to create a club to address the woeful lack of aliens, time travelers and espers in her life.
The goal of the SOS Brigade is to "Bring More Excitement to the World." The club's main contribution is a film intended for the High School cultural festival entitled Episode 00: The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina starring Mikuru, Yuki, and Itsuki as the main characters. It was filmed and narrated by Kyon and directed by Haruhi. Kyon edited the movie during an all-nighter, which resulted in poorly edited work and story incoherence. The film's plot consists of a number of meta-fictional parodies of anime clichés.
In addition to the movie project, Haruhi involves the club in various activities such as participation in a baseball tournament and a summer trip to a tropical island owned by one of Itsuki's acquaintances. All such activities prevent Haruhi from boredom.
[edit] Affiliations
There are three organizations who have taken an interest in Haruhi and the SOS Brigade, which ties all three of them together. Each has their own reasons, most of which stem from one single incident three years prior to the storyline. Each has managed, half through coincidence and half through design, to have a representative within the SOS Brigade.
[edit] The Agency
- Translations have used "The Agency", however the term used in the anime is "機関" meaning "The Organization"
Three years prior to the storyline, a seemingly random selection of people in the world were given abilities that could only be described as those of 'Espers'; they were able to enter new Sealed Realities, which they could instinctively feel and of which they were given innate knowledge. These select few banded together, numbering ten in total. They managed to single out the epicenter, the source of their powers, Haruhi, and now seek to protect and appease Haruhi without letting her know of their existence. They fear that if anything were to happen to her, or if she were to become displeased with the world, that she could simply wipe it and start it over. Itsuki Koizumi is their member in the SOS Brigade, there to prevent that from happening. This trend of thought often leads to seemingly harmless situations becoming something on which the fate of the world hinges.
"Sealed Realities", or "Closed Spaces", are odd occurrences in the cross-dimensional faultlines catalyzed by Haruhi Suzumiya, a sort of practice round for godly powers. Though they are normally impossible to enter, those people like Itsuki Koizumi and others in "The Agency" have the ability to both enter and to sense the creation of these places. Within a Sealed Reality, the powers of members of "The Agency" are made apparent; they may take the form of a large red ball of energy in which they are capable of red laser-like attacks and flight. "The Agency" uses these abilities to hunt the Shinjin, in order to keep the Shinjin from spreading the Sealed Realities over the world.
From the inside, if one were to try to leave the confines of a closed space, they would find a forcefield - impenetrable except by espers; that resistance marks the boundaries of that dimension. The world within the Sealed Reality is almost identical to a corresponding area of the world, but is grey and devoid of people.
When Haruhi's frustration reaches a certain point, it manifests itself in a large monster, a Shinjin, contained within a Sealed Reality, where it wreaks havoc harmlessly, unbound by the laws of physics. The more a Shinjin destroys in the Sealed Reality, the more it grows, enveloping, and eventually replacing the world, if left unchecked. When the Shinjin is destroyed, so is the Sealed Reality.
[edit] The Integrated Data Entity
The Integrated Data Entity, also known as the Data Integration Thought Entity (情報統合思念体?), as explained by Yuki Nagato, was born from the sea of data which covers the entire universe. As this data accumulated, the data gained consciousness and continued to evolve while obtaining more data until it met its own evolutionary dead-end. Data lifeforms themselves possess no physical body but are highly intelligent. This entity grows with the expansion of the universe and the addition of more data.
Much of the data manipulated or utilized by the data lifeforms cannot be observed by humans by ordinary means. The exact nature of this data usage remain too nebulous and abstract a concept for Kyon to understand and is also presumably impossible for even most humans to grasp. In spite of this, The Integrated Data Entity took a particular interest in humans over any of the other sentient creatures in the universe because of their unprecedented ability to seek and obtain data, or knowledge.
The Data Entities originally regarded humans and all other organic creatures as a primitive form of life. Until humanity had acquired the unique ability to gather and collect information, the Data Entities believed that organic lifeforms were incapable of evolving past a certain plateau of development and would never be able to utilize data the way Data Entities could. While sentience in organic beings was relatively common, the human race was the only organic lifeform that evolved rapidly enough to indicate an unknown climactic potential.
Three years prior to the storyline, an extraordinary explosion of data came from one of the islands of Japan. At the source of this odd, spontaneous generation of data, they found Haruhi Suzumiya. In order to observe this phenomenon firsthand they created a number of "humanoid interfaces," in the hope that they could find a way to break through their own evolutionary dead end. Two of these humanoid interfaces, Yuki Nagato and Ryōko Asakura, were introduced to Kyon. Yuki became a member of the SOS Brigade, effectively being pulled in by Haruhi's strong wish for aliens to exist. Humanoid interfaces are able to reprogram or react with their environment in ways that would seem spectacular or magical to most humans. In addition to this, humanoid interfaces are capable of superhuman feats of logic, hand-eye coordination, agility, memory and perception.
There are conflicting voices within the Data Entity. The dominant mindset wishes to simply leave Haruhi undisturbed and provide minimal interference so as to observe her under controlled conditions. The dissenting voices within the Entity wish to provoke a reaction from Haruhi; with the goal being to motivate Haruhi to gather information and generate data faster, regardless of the possible negative consequences. The latter course of action was attempted when a rogue agent, Ryōko Asakura, assaulted Kyon in the hopes of killing him.
[edit] The Future Humans
Time travelers from an unspecified time in the future were surprised to find, like the other two groups, that a ground-shaking incident had occurred three years before the storyline began centering around Haruhi Suzumiya. From their perspective, a timequake had occurred, fissuring the time-space continuum in such a manner that time travelers were rendered incapable of traveling further back in time than that event. In the novels, it is suggested that three years before the storyline begins Haruhi actually created the current version of the world - which included espers, aliens and time travelers - meaning no time exists to travel to before the event.
In order to investigate how and why this event occurred, they sent their very own time agent Mikuru Asahina to observe Haruhi. However, she could not bring anything more advanced back with her, such as a weapon, because it would be too dangerous. This society tends not to give much information away in terms of future happenings possibly to avoid temporal contamination and changes in history. In effect, nearly anything that pertains to the future is dubbed "classified information".
[edit] Media
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is presented in a range of several different media including the light novel series, two manga series and an anime adaptation. Additionally, the series has even traspired to include radio dramas and a drama CD.
[edit] Light novel
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya light novel, written by Nagaru Tanigawa and illustrated by Noizi Ito, was first published by Kadokawa Shoten on June 6, 2003, and is the basis for the bulk of the anime incarnation. This is only the first novel in the Suzumiya Haruhi series which currently has eight volumes, and is still running in Japan.
The novel contains a prologue, seven chapters, and an epilogue. [3]
[edit] Manga
There are two manga adaptations of the Haruhi Suzumiya light novel series, both having been published by Kadokawa Shoten. The first one, illustrated by Mizuno Makoto, ran from May 2004 to December 2004 and the second, illustrated by Gaku Tsugano, started in November 2005 and is still in production, with the first two volumes currently released. Their target age group is younger than the original novels to expand the series's fan base.
Both manga adaptations were published in Shounen Ace, but the earlier one was cancelled after the first volume. The reasons for this stem from the fact that the manga was considerably different from the novel and had little input from the original author. In addition, the mangaka was producing a related side H dōjin at the same time, which unsettled the publishing company. They canceled the manga, denying its existence. [4]
[edit] Anime
The anime series of Haruhi Suzumiya, which aired in Japan from April 2, 2006 to July 2, 2006, had a total of 14 episodes. The anime was mainly based on the first novel in the Suzumiya Haruhi novel series of the same name, but there are also small references from the third, fifth and sixth novels, The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮ハルヒの退屈 Suzumiya Haruhi no Taikutsu?), The Rampage of Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮ハルヒの暴走 Suzumiya Haruhi no Bousou?) and The Agitation of Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮ハルヒの動揺 Suzumiya Haruhi no Douyou?) respectively.
The first DVD, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya The Adventure of Mikuru Asahina Episode00 Limited Edition, debuted at #1 on the daily Oricon DVD sales charts on June 23, 2006.
[edit] Episodes
[edit] Trivia
Trivia found in the anime is listed in SOS-dan Wiki. (There may be some speculations from fans.)
[edit] Series setting
The anime is set in Nishinomiya, Hyogo, as it is the site of the Kwansei Gakuin University, where Nagaru Tanigawa studied. Names of real train stations and baseball teams were altered in the anime, for example:
- The Kitaguchi Station seen in the anime is actually the Nishinomiya Kitaguchi Station.
- The Kōyōen Station (光陽園駅) is named after the real Kōyōen Station (甲陽園駅), only the kanji is different.
- The rival baseball team featured in Episode 4, Kamigahara Pirates (上ヶ原パイレーツ), has the same name of its real life counterpart, Uegahara Pirates of the Kwansei Gakuin University, only the pronunciation is different.
- North High School where Kyon, Haruhi, and the rest of SOS Brigade member attended is the real life location of Nishinomiya kita High School.
In addition, several scenes in the anime include faithful portrayals of the scenery in and around Nishinomiya. [5]
[edit] Theme songs
Opening themes
- The Mikuru Legend of Love (恋のミクル伝説 Koi no Mikuru Densetsu?) (Episode 1)
- Vocals: Yuko Goto
- It's an Adventure, Right, Right? (冒険でしょでしょ？ Bōken Desho Desho??) (Episodes 2-13)
- Vocals: Aya Hirano
Ending themes
- Sunny Sunny Fun (ハレ晴レユカイ Hare Hare Yukai?) (Episodes 1-13)
- Vocals: Aya Hirano (Haruhi Suzumiya), Minori Chihara (Yuki Nagato), and Yuko Goto (Mikuru Asahina)
- It's an Adventure, Right, Right? (extended) (Episode 14)
Insert songs
- God knows... (Episode 12)
- Vocals: Aya Hirano
- Lost my music (Episode 12)
- Vocals: Aya Hirano
Chart history
- Hare Hare Yukai debuted at #15 on the daily Oricon charts (which tracks the best-selling singles in Japan) on May 10, 2006; peak of #1 reached on May 12, 2006. On the weekly Oricon charts, it debuted at #5 with sales of 34,881 copies of the CD. [6]
- Triple A–side single Suzumiya Haruhi no Tsumeawase (涼宮ハルヒの詰合?) debuted at #9 on the daily Oricon charts on June 21, 2006; peak of #5 reached on June 24, 2006. On the weekly Oricon charts, it debuted at #5 with sales of 32,499 copies of the CD.
[edit] Radio drama
A series of radio dramas have also been released. The first volume entitled SOS Dan Radio Shibu Bangai Hen CD Vol.1 is based on the anime version of the series and was released on July 5, 2006 by Lantis. The second volume was released on September 21, 2006 while a third is still to be released on December 21, 2006.
[edit] Drama CD
A drama CD based on the series will be released on January 24, 2007 published by Lantis.
[edit] Reception
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Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. |
From TV Asahi's online poll, this series placed fourth on a top 100 anime list for 2006. [7] According the Newsweek, video material from this series became an Internet phenomenon in YouTube with over 2000 video clips including parodies. [8] DVD sales in Japan have been strong with 70,000 Episode00 units sold and 90,000 DVD 1 units sold as of August 2006. [9]
[edit] References
- ^ Announcements from the Kadokawa Shonen panel at Otakon 2006
- ^ Kurogane Anime Blogger news on possible second season
- ^ Baka-tsuki article for the Haruhi Suzumiya light novel series
- ^ Japanese Wikipedia entry for the Haruhi Suzumiya series
- ^ Reference pictures to actual places
- ^ Oricon listing for Hare Hare Yukai
- ^ Anime News Network article on top 100 anime
- ^ Haruhi on Newsweek. Retrieved on 2006-11-25.
- ^ Anime News Service
[edit] External links
- Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu Official Site (Japanese)
- Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu Kyoani Site (Japanese)
- Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu SOS-dan Radio Shibu (Japanese)
- The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (anime) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia
- 聖地巡礼 - Comparing anime scenes with real life counterparts (Japanese)
- Translation Project of the light novel
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Haruhi Suzumiya
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| Series: | Light novel | Characters | List of anime episodes | Radio drama |
SOS-dan Wiki |
| Soundtracks: | Bouken Desho Desho? | Hare Hare Yukai | Character song albums | Saikyo Pare Parade | Suzumiya Haruhi no Tsumeawase |
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