Character · Nana
Nana Osaki
Two women with the same name meet on a snowbound train to Tokyo and end up splitting the rent on a flat.
In Otakana the clue reads: Punk singer who shares a Tokyo flat
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Nana
- Letters
- 4 · Hard
Nana Osaki sings for a punk band called Black Stones, wears Vivienne Westwood, and explains herself to nobody. The other Nana on that train is a cheerful drifter chasing a boyfriend, and she gets nicknamed Hachi so the household can function. Ai Yazawa puts them in apartment 707, since nana is the Japanese word for seven, and lets one coincidence carry the premise.
The series is a shojo manga about adults, which was rarer than it sounds when it began in Cookie in 2000. Rent, bad boyfriends, a record deal that arrives with strings attached, and two friends whose lives pull apart at different speeds. Nana Osaki gets the stage and the leather jacket. Hachi gets most of the parts that hurt.
Madhouse animated 47 episodes in 2006 and the soundtrack did real chart business in Japan, with Anna Tsuchiya singing as Nana and Olivia Lufkin as her rival Reira. Yazawa stopped the manga in 2009 because of illness and it has never resumed. The story breaks off mid-scene, which readers have been sitting with ever since.
Spelling NANA
NANA is four letters and the simplest kind of puzzle: no exotic sounds, just a repeat. N and A alternate, so either letter in one position gives you the other position free. The word means seven in Japanese, which is why the two women live in flat 707, and why the title needs no translation on an English cover.