Around this time last year, I started watching ようこそ実力至上主義の教室へ, titled Welcome to the Classroom of the Elite or just Classroom of the Elite in English, and sometimes shortened to よう実 in Japanese.
The anime takes place in a high school with peculiar rules and a seeming love of tormenting its students with bizarre special tests, and centers on Ayanokoji (綾小路清隆, Ayanokōji Kiyotaka—Kiyotaka is his first name; most characters are referred to by each other with their last name) and secondarily on Horikita Suzune (堀北鈴音) who sits next to him in class in their first year.
Both Ayanokoji and Horikita are fascinating characters, and as the anime progresses, Ayanokoji is revealed to have a troubled and superhuman backstory. They aren't really friends, so they appear to be endlessly renegotiating their cooperation and machinations. Ayanokoji deliberately aims for an appearance of mediocrity at school and in the anime he is voiced with a completely flat affect, even when he is forced to reveal the extent of his talents.
The anime is based off of a "light novel" series of the same name, and after devouring the three seasons that had been released last spring, I wanted very much to read the books and see what on earth is going on with this story. Almost a year later, I've acquired enough knowledge of 漢字 to make the going not quite as desperately slow as I feared at first.
Light novels are maybe most closely paralleled by YA novels and certain kinds of "genre fiction" in the US. They are printed as series of small paperbacks and new volumes may come out every couple of months. Like many light novels, Classroom of the Elite has some illustrations, but it is by no means a manga. Also, unlike most of the manga I've read, furigana are used very sparingly.
Initially the lack of furigana was really disheartening: it's a pretty unique experience to be chugging along in a sentence only to run smack-dab into word after word which you can't even sound out. Actually that challenge doesn't go away entirely. So far I mostly have just gotten used to it, and with some knowledge of about 1000 漢字, I'm a little better at guessing how to pronounce unfamiliar compound words.
When I started this post, I had just started reading, and five or so months later, I finished the first volume and have started the next! I'm loving it. The first novel starts with a monologue about equality, most of which also starts off the first episode of the anime. In the anime, the monologue is juxtaposed with an adaptation of the third scene of the novel, where Ayanokoji and Horikita meet and which takes place on a bus on the first day of high school.
In the novel, however, the monologue is revealed to be something like a daydream, which is interrupted by Horikita waking up Ayanokoji, who reacts melodramatically in the narration as follows.
来た。やはり来た。恐れていた事態が。さり気なく眠ったフリをしていたオレの元へ、ヤツがやって来た。内なる心と現実社会について向き合っていた（うたた寝をしていた）オレを呼び覚ます悪魔の登場だ。
It's happening. It's actually come, the circumstance I so dreaded. There I was, sleeping carefree and she came up to me. As I was pondering the things of my heart and facing off against the state of the world (having a nap), the devil who awakened me takes the stage.
This teenage melodrama is exactly what I'm putting in the hours and hours of Japanese study for, folks.
The story is set in a fancy high school established by the Japanese government. The students will spend all three years of high school with the same teacher and classmates, the teacher explains at their first meeting. While at school, they'll live in dorms, and they aren't allowed to leave the campus or contact anyone from outside without special permission.
Additionally, the school has a point system; their teacher explains「学校内においてこのポイントで買えないものはない」("at this school, there is nothing that cannot be bought with points"), and lets them know they have received 100,000 points for the month. One point is equivalent to one yen. The conversion rate I keep in my mind is that 1,000 is about $6, so they've been given $600 for the month. Some of it they'll spend on food and dorm-life necessities, but given that they don't commute and don't pay rent, this is a lot of money to give a high school student.
In the anime, you rarely hear Ayanokoji's thoughts, and his flat affect makes it easy to project onto him but difficult to really gauge how he feels about a situation. In the light novel, things are quite different; you get a running commentary from him on more or less everything he sees happen. At the beginning it was quite difficult for me to gauge tone from these comments. Here's one about Hirata Yousuke, a student who is sort of the leader of Ayanokoji's class, at least at the beginning.
そんな中スッと手を挙げたのは、如何にも好青年といった雰囲気の生徒だった。髪も染めておらず、優等生そうだ。表情にも不良のそれは感じられない。
Raising his hand while [speaking to get everyone's attention,] now here's a student with "nice young man" energy. He doesn't even dye his hair; total honors student. No air of the delinquent at all.
Hirata gives what I would call a solid, normal self-introduction.
「僕の名前は平田洋介。中学では普通に洋介って呼ばれることが多かったから、気軽に下の名前で呼んで欲しい。趣味はスポーツ全般だけど、特にサッカーが好きで、この学校でも、サッカーをするつもりなんだ。よろしく。」
My name is Hirata Yousuke. In middle school, lots of people called me Yousuke, so I'd love to be on a first-name basis. I like all kinds of sports, especially soccer, and I plan to play on the soccer team. Nice to meet you!
And here's how Ayanokoji reacts.
非の打ちどころがない自己紹介をする。ほんと大した度胸だな。そして出たよ鉄板のサッカー。爽やかなフェイスにサッカーが合わさることで途端にモテ度が２倍、いや、４倍アップする。
[An] impeccable self-introduction. Very gutsy. And out comes soccer, that iron plate. Mention soccer with a refreshing face like that, and your sex appeal doubles, no, quadruples.
In my initial draft I called this fawning, but I think now that there's probably at least a little bit of sarcasm here. In terms of character archetypes, I guess you'd probably wind up putting Ayanokoji in the same bucket as Saiki K in manga, Dexter in comics, or Artemis Fowl in YA. Some amount of his superiority comes out in being (internally) judgey, standoffish and, in his words 事なかれ主義 (having a policy of letting sleeping dogs lie). There are peculiar moments when he judges that he should intervene and then acts with almost no accompanying witty internal monologue, and most of his meddling with people in this first book is confined to Horikita, whom he tries to make see that her fiercely independent attitude is preventing her from achieving the greatness that her older brother has.
But I think what's really compelling to me about Ayanokoji as a character and his relationship with Horikita is how alongside his extreme talent, he does just honestly give a terrible, boring self-introduction. Over the course of the first month of the term, he kinda finds himself falling into a half-friendship with some of the other boys in the class, but although he's inwardly very grateful to have made friends at all, he judges those same boys the most harshly of anyone in the class. With Horikita, neither of them can seem to avoid pushing each other's buttons. As much as their relationship appears to need constant negotiation, alliances and payments and so forth, they do get along (unacknowledged by either of them) well enough that half the class thinks they're dating.
That theme recurs a lot in the anime (and I expect it to in the books), what you can see in and about yourself, and what you hide from others and yourself. When you work on yourself, what is it that you think you need to do? What is it that you might actually need to do?