The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, originally published in 2003, is a sci-fi romantic comedy about a quirky afterschool club. It’s also one of the most influential light novels from the heyday of otaku culture. Although I can’t say that all of its humor has aged well, it’s a quick and fun read, and there’s a good reason why it’s still in print.

Kyon is an average high school boy who’s assigned to the same homeroom as Haruhi Suzumiya, a beautiful girl who has a reputation for being weird. True to everyone’s expectations, she marches into the first day of class and introduces herself with the declaration that she’s not interested in speaking to anyone who isn’t an alien, an esper, or a time traveler. When Kyon tries to strike up a conversation with Haruhi, he gets roped into joining the SOS Brigade, an afterschool club that Haruhi has created to research supernatural phenomena.

The plot twist is that, with the exception of Kyon, every member of the SOS Brigade is indeed an alien, an esper, or a time traveler. They gradually reveal themselves to Kyon, insisting that they’re posing as high school students in order to observe Haruhi, who unknowingly has extraordinary powers capable of restructuring the universe. If Haruhi becomes bored with the current universe, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she might inadvertently destroy it. It’s therefore imperative that Haruhi remains entertained and blissfully unaware of her power.

As you might imagine, this scenario has a number of unsettling implications. Is everyone in the story merely a figment of Haruhi’s imagination? Does anyone in the universe she created have free will? If Haruhi created “this” universe, what happened to the universe where aliens, espers, and time travelers don’t exist?

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya goes right to the edge of these darker implications but ultimately backs off in favor of light comedy and mild teenage romance, a tonal balance that undoubtedly contributed to its popularity.

This light novel was adapted into an anime that aired in the Winter 2006/07 season. I admit that I’ve never watched it from start to finish, but the show was ubiquitous in Japanese pop culture fandom communities for years. The ending theme, “Hare Hare Yukai,” became a meme that spawned countless flash mobs of cosplayers recreating the iconic dance at anime conventions.

Due to its prominent place in mid-2000s otaku culture, I was considering including The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya on the syllabus of a college class about Japanese science fiction and fantasy. I think it would be a good choice, but I’m still undecided. My hesitation is mainly due to the fact that one of the early chapters includes light elements of goofy sexual comedy that made sense in the cultural atmosphere at the time but might read a bit differently today.

To give an example, in order to blackmail the members of the computer club into giving her a PC, Haruhi takes someone’s hand and places it on the breast of one of the female SOS Brigade members before asking Kyon to take a photo. To me, this scene reads as the sort of stupid but harmless fantasy that might appeal to the book’s target readership of teenage boys, but I understand how it might be interpreted as sexual harassment (because, undeniably, it is).

Still, light novels are filled with this sort of thing, and I tend to think that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is on the “unproblematic” end of the spectrum. To be fair, it’s not anything worse than what’s in most Haruki Murakami novels.

I don’t read many light novels these days, but I enjoyed The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The pace is brisk, the writing is snappy, and the story offers a nice treatment of its speculative worldbuilding without getting too deeply into the weeds of hard science fiction. Looking back on this book from twenty years in the future, I found myself waning a bit nostalgic for an earlier (and, I think, more lighthearted) era of otaku culture. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is an interesting cultural artifact, but it’s also a fun story that I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t yet encountered its particular flavor of high school comedy.