Ah, young love. Young crazy, confusing, stilted, awkward, mysterious, lustful love. Could anyone tell the difference between true love and a rampant desire for sex back in high school? And that’s enough of a concern for those who are single, to say nothing of actually getting into a relationship. Coming from middle school, the incoherent mess of hormones and learning to socialize all over again, no one could really be faulted for going about a relationship like a blind person in a corn maze, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that the other party is just as blind. Predicated on this notion, Mysterious Girlfriend X brings us the story of this type of love, in all its viscerally confused glory. Following the young boy Tsubaki in his first ever relationship, his partner Urabe is shrouded in mystery, impossible to read, and doesn’t obey any familiar social customs. She is truly the girlfriend from outer space, and Tsubaki is forced to process her as a human, the subject of his love, and the target of his lust. For all the high school romances out there, few evoke as confused and honest an image of young love.
Make no mistake; Tsubaki’s love for Urabe is fraught with sexual tension and layers of anxiety regarding their boundaries, creating a very dimensional and real personality appropriate for a seventeen-year-old boy socialized in today’s society. The show opens not with love, but with lust, with a dream-like image of a flower and butterfly, of him peeping through a hole in the background with guilty fascination as the nectar drips over, as he wonders who his first sexual experience will be with. Urabe, with bangs going over her eyes and a blunt manner of speech, has an impenetrable aura about her, and her declarations of love bely her inapproachability. Even as they go on dates and learn more about one another, Tsubaki can rarely tell when it is appropriate to hug her or even speak his mind, and develops a hair-trigger sensitivity to overstepping his boundaries.
Yet Urabe herself reinforces those boundaries at times, and breaks them down at others, being no less invested in the relationship than he, and only a touch less sexually inclined in daily life. They keep their relationship a secret, but for little apparent reason; maybe it just feels inappropriate to both them in some ways. Tsubaki’s best friend also gets a girlfriend named Oka, who is outgoing and mischevious and manages to befriend Urabe and cut through her aura. In fact, some of the best scenes are at lunch, as Oka and Urabe engage in a fairly normal high school friendship, and we see Urabe having the same concerns and sexual inclinations as Tsubaki. These scenes are well lit, and we either see Urabe’s eyes or see the embarrassment on her face as she hides them. We start to feel like Urabe is a normal, relatable high school girl, and it is simply through the lens of her relationship with Tsubaki that everything becomes unclear, mysterious, and even dangerous.
The use of symbolism through absurdism is perhaps the strongest way in which Mysterious Girlfriend X brings confusion and anguish to the forefront, making them palpable for us. The primary symbol, which may serve as a turn-off to most viewers—no pun intended—is how Tsubaki and Urabe communicate their feelings through eating each other’s drool off their fingers. It is outlandish, bizarre, and incredibly uncomfortable for most people raised normally in society, although the obvious parallels to kissing shouldn’t be ignored. Their spit communication borders on the supernatural, as different emotions give rise to a variety of flavors, and at times they literally read each other’s thoughts with just a little sip. It reinforces their feelings of secrecy towards the rest of the world, of their bond and depth of connection, of their confusion towards the relationship and awkward inability to share certain feelings in words. Put short, their saliva captures the essence of their love in all its components, and those who went through a high school relationship may strangely be able to associate with these scenes, despite presumably never having swapped spit this literally before.
Another symbol, possibly even more palpable, is Urabe’s pair of scissors, which she keeps tucked in her panties and uses to unleash a flurry of precise cuts when angry. Tsubaki is never physically touched in the process, but there is an overwhelming sense of danger that eminates from her as a result, which leads him to be afraid of overstepping his boundaries, and to regret it when he loses control and goes for it anyway. Again, you would be hard-pressed to find a high school couple who engage in similar practices, but the danger of the scissors and the eroticism of their holster has clear parallels in how couples rebuke one another for transgressing the boundaries of the relationship, and the sense of the other person’s power and control. We find later that Urabe herself can lose control of her preciseness, and when she accidentally endangers Tsubaki and scratches him she goes into a fit of apology and cares for his minute wound, a clear indication that she can go too far even with trying to communicate her needs.
The common thread of dreams ties many key emotions together, rendering the truly undirected and erratic nature of dreams while also serving as a subconscious outlet for Tsubaki’s worries and desires. The whimsical soundtrack, playing much like a carnival theme, is often heard teasing him in the background, to the point where it could easily be diegetic. The wonderland effect is masterful, and clearly in line with anything that can be seen in his day to day life, or at least as far as his emotions are concerned.
While the show occasionally compartimentalizes their emotions and relationship milestones in different episodes that are clearly streamlined towards exposition, the bulk of the episodes themselves are devoted to just watching their ordinary school life, their relationship, and all the weird spit exchanged between them as they navigate this new unknown. Dialogue is crisp and rarely canned, and their dates and other outings are very down-to-earth and believable. The comedy between Urabe and Oka offsets the bizarre romance of Urabe and Tsubaki, while other minor interactions maintain the mood without forcing their way in. Save for a weird side-tangent towards the end about Tsubaki’s middle school crush, the show plays out with clear purpose, and for all its outlandish imagery it creates an increasingly realistic, engaging experience. It is anguishing to watch Tsubaki sort out his romantic and sexual feelings, all in the face of the seemingly impossible Urabe, and even harder to realize his image of her is unnecessarily mysterious. The title indeed says it all; it could have been Couple, but never Girlfriend, because if we're qualifying Urabe from Tsubaki’s perspective as her boyfriend, then Mysterious is a must. In high school, there isn’t much to be done about that.