Shiratori loves her best friends Washio and Kotooka as friends, but she also loves Washio romantically, something she doesn’t feel like she can ever tell her. However, when Washio confides in Shiratori that she romantically loves Kotooka, the third person in their trio, Shiratori is torn over the fact that Washio wouldn’t hate her for loving women but that she doesn’t love her back.
And so this group of friends engages in a love polygon where they would rather keep their feelings separate in order to protect their friendship above all else.
Romantic drama! Nearly every friend group that lasts a certain amount of time will go through at least one iteration of this drama and, while Nameless Asterism feels a bit like a soap opera with its set-up (especially once Shiratori’s twin brother and his classmate are added into the mix), this trio of girls has already learned something that my freshman year of college group of friends didn’t: dating within a very small group of friends can lead to terrible results. I’m typically not a fan of romances where a large part of the conflict hinges on “should I, or should I not?” but since both Shiratori and Washio don’t want to potentially destroy their group’s friendship, and this would be a queer confession in a country where same-sex couples don’t have the full rights of straight couples (marriage, etc), their hesitation makes sense. This manga isn’t the most realistic in all ways — Shiratori’s cross-dressing twin brother Subaru seems more attached to her than what I would normally expect out of a sibling relationship for example (frankly it feels like manga-ka Kina Kobayashi is toeing the line between familial and romantic love from him). But the inner thoughts and feelings of the girls went deeper than I expected and really make the story.
In volume 2, the focus still remains mostly on Shiratori but the story makes room to show the point of view of her friend and her brother, Kotooka and Subaru. Subaru remains an odd character in the story, as he was fiercely opposed to the idea of Shiratori dating his classmate Asakura (Asakura has a crush on Shiratori, further complicating this love polygon) and the story makes it very clear that Kobayashi is setting up Subaru and Asakura to be in a relationship by the end of the story. Their budding friendship does work surprisingly well since both of them also embody one of the main themes of Nameless Asterism: that people have hidden depths and secrets that no one else knows, but setting them up as a couple so blatantly feels a little tedious.
Kotooka, however, turns out to be a surprisingly interesting character. Despite appearing to be boy-crazy (another reason why Washio has held off on confessing to her) Kotooka appears to be a very closeted lesbian and is also fully aware of both Washio and Shiratori’s crushes. Despite all of that, she seems to be the least likely person in the group to confess her crush since she is also the most fiercely protective of the group’s friendship. Kotooka recognizes that Shiratori is trying to give her and Washio more time together, at the expense of taking herself out of the picture, and it’s refreshing in a sense to see characters who realize that they value their current friendships more than future, hypothetical romantic relationships.
Time will tell if this holds though. Kotooka has some baggage which might change her mind on these feelings once it’s unloaded, but for the moment Nameless Asterism feels like the rare romance manga which acknowledges that friendships are as important to life as romances, if not even more so. That, plus the shape of its specific love polygon, helps to differentiate it from the ever-increasing number of yuri manga available for English-speaking readers today.