Boku no Tsuma wa Kanjou ga Nai

Takuma Kosugi is an office worker who does not have enough time to take care of everything at home. To make his daily life easier, he purchases a secondhand housekeeping robot named Mina, who quickly proves her worth. One day, after returning from work and having one too many beers, Takuma somewhat jokingly blurts out that she should become his wife! Much to his surprise, Mina takes his words seriously, and the two gradually begin living as if they are married.

As the days go by, Takuma and Mina grow closer and start doing more activities together, like going on a picnic and spending a day at the beach. However, much of society still considers human-robot relationships unusual. The couple must figure out if their arrangement can succeed and how to convince the people around them of their sincerity.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Mina Main

Inagaki, Konomi Japanese

Kosugi, Takuma Main

Toyonaga, Toshiyuki Japanese

Mamoru Supporting

Wakai, Yuuki Japanese

Kosugi, Emi Supporting

Hiramatsu, Akiko Japanese

Super Mina Supporting

Serizawa, Yuu Japanese

Ootani, Tomikazu Supporting

Umeda, Shuuichirou Japanese

Kosugi, Akari Supporting

Aoyama, Yoshino Japanese

Aikawa Supporting

Hori, Soushirou Japanese

Minegishi, Koushirou Supporting

Takase, Akimitsu Japanese

John Supporting

Kawamoto, Kunihiro Japanese

Konishi, Yuuki Producer

Tsutsui, Kazuo Producer

Kishida, Takuma Producer

Yoshimura, Fumihiro Director

Reviews

Nov 30, 2024

Almus

Recommended

Super cute and wholesome! I had a low expectation for the show going in, but I was quickly swept away by the story. Solid 8/10 for this romantic slice of life anime. This is definitely worth the watch.

Also, I'm usually the type to watch the intro/outro for a show just once and then skip them afterwards in later episodes. But the outro song for this show was so good and catchy that I just had to listen to it every time.

I highly recommend this anime to watch. I binge watched all 12 episodes because I just couldn't stop once I had started.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Sep 15, 2024

literaturenerd

Mixed Feelings

Well-written

My Wife has No Emotion is a series that I watched at the behest of an offline buddy who has always fancied himself as somewhat of a contrarian. He goes out of his way to avoid watching anything popular or anything that anyone in his social group recommends to him. Instead, he searches for hidden gems that aren’t well liked but that he can try find his own value in as opposed to trying to appreciate masterpieces based on what other people have said about them. “An ounce of my own wit is worth more to me than a ton of knowledge that comes from ... others”. This quote actually comes from the narrator’s father in the novel Tristram Shandy but could easily be something my longtime friend would say. Anyways, this anime is much like the man who recommended it to me in that it’s difficult to easily categorize and also really frustrating at times.

My Wife has no Emotion is the story of a 24-year-old virgin male who slaves away at a shitty office job and doesn’t have the time to really bother with dating. Even if he tried to make time, he’s socially awkward and in the bottom 20% of the social pecking order. He’s completely given up that he will ever find anyone. So, he decides to alleviate his crippling loneliness by ordering a gynoid robot that is programmed to cook, clean, and obey his every command. However, something odd happens with her programming and she begins to show signs that she cares for him, which causes him to fall madly in love with her and marry her. The immediate assumption that one might have based on this description is that this series is a shameless fantasy for Japanese incels in their 20s. To this I would have to respond with the cliché answer of “Yes…but also no.” In a traditional fantasy for lonely guys, the robot girl Mina would be heavily sexualized, and this would lead to a lot of spicy moments. This anime really doesn’t have a sexual element. This is entirely about some form of companionship to battle against lifelong loneliness. Mina looks like a robot, talks like a robot, and acts like a robot. She is incapable of performing sexual acts and nobody would even want her to. This is a fantasy aimed at extremely lonely guys, but nobody is going to point fingers at it and call it “gross” or “sexist”. Instead, the first half of the series is best described as just…sad. Really sad. This is a fantasy in which the answer is just to completely give up and buy yourself a ChatGPT with a vaguely female shaped body and live with a mediocre imitation of other men’s fulfilling relationships rather than having nothing. We’re not that far off from having the technology where this could be entirely feasible, and this series is here celebrating it. I don’t know how to feel about that.

This is an anime that will keep you guessing, by which I mean that it never really goes the way you think it will go. There are a number of directions that the story could take with its premise. You could have a slapstick comedy with jokes coming from the fact that she’s just a robot and it leads to hilarious misunderstandings. You could have a wholesome romance that wishes to defend non-traditional relationships by teaching the audience that not every couple needs to have kids to have meaning and value. You could create a dystopian satire that skewers Japan’s work culture and the modern dating scene in the internet age. You could create a psychological drama in which the guy sees his robot as his beautiful wife, but it’s clear to the audience and everyone else in the series that the guy is completely insane. My Wife decides to go with an odd mixture of option 1 and 2. However, it doesn’t really accomplish either very well. It doesn’t succeed as a comedy because it’s not funny. It’s never funny, even on accident. It doesn’t really accomplish the second because Mina is a robot that acts like a robot. Chobits works because Hideki and Chii have chemistry. They’re actually really cute together. Chii is an actual AI that doesn’t act like a stereotypical robot. Chobits doesn’t give a shit about the 3 Laws of Robotics or the legal ramifications of owning a robot or any of the stuff that My Wife goes into detail with. That’s because Chobits is largely using human x robot relations as a metaphor for something else. Something that would have been a little controversial to outright celebrate in a 2002 anime airing on Japanese television. Japan was culturally at different place in 2002, where even the Utena manga had the cut down on the gayness since one of the illustrators was deeply disgusted by homosexuality and threatened to leave the project if Ikuhara insisted on making Utena lesbian. I went WAY off topic, where was I? Ah yes, back to My wife. My Wife really does want to be about human x robot relations, and make it wholesome, and celebrate it as an alternative to being a forever alone loser. I honestly don’t think it succeeds very well in this.

In the second half of the series, Mina buys a medical robot to take Takuma’s temperature and keep him healthy while she’s getting some upgrades at the factory. Due to a plot convenient programming error, his factory set personality is deleted and his AI learning picks up habits and characteristics of both Takuma and Mina, making this weird little bird robot their “son”. The little bastard looks and sounds like this toy called “Gotta Go Flamingo”…and yet he’s the best part of this show. Mina’s jealousy and resentment towards her “son” Mamoru offers the first bits of character drama and development in this mess. This was a show entirely without conflict or drama of any kind, so this is very welcome. The little shit is also pretty cute, which allows My Wife to actually hit some of those wholesome scenes that it’s been wildly missing up to this point. In the climax of the series, Takuma presents his wife and son to his parents. You would think that they’d be deeply disappointed which leads to a big confrontation for the finale. Nope! They are maybe just a little disappointed, but they had no hopes for the lad anyways and this is better than nothing. Um…cool? There is actually a pretty well-done scene where Takuma is talking to his father and his dad tells him that not everyone needs to have biological children to be loved and accepted. He tells Takuma that he needs to stop worrying so much about what others think and focus on living his own best life. I must give credit where it’s due to My Wife for the fact that its last episode was easily its best. It went out swinging and I have to respect that! It was sadly too little too late to save the series from a 4 rating, but it actually tried when I thought it was just going to rest on its haunches.

My Wife Has no Emotion is one of the odder entries of the season. It’s not a great anime I would recommend to people, but it’s not just pure trash. It’s certainly wish fulfillment for lonely men, but not like you would expect. It made me think and question things, but this is far from being an artsy or philosophical series. This was made by Tezuka Productions and some talented people worked on this, but most of the time it doesn’t really live up to its pedigree in the visuals department. Both the OP and ED are quite catchy as if someone really had faith in this production, but based on its visuals I don’t think it was a high budget project for Tezuka Productions. The manga this series is based on isn’t very popular or critically acclaimed on either side of the Pacific, so I’m not entirely sure how this even got made. Not only did it get made, but it aired on Japanese television on the same mainstream channel that aired all the JoJo anime and Attack on Titan! It’s puzzling, it’s bizarre, it’s…kind of meh. I’d probably just skip this one if I were you.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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Feb 28, 2025

AeroGunz

Not Recommended

“My Wife Has No Emotion” is what happens when You combine writing suited for a child with subjects and themes aimed at adults.

In 1973 “Soylent Green” was released. A dystopian, detective thriller with Charlton Heston playing an opportunistic but ultimately good detective. I’m not going to go deep into that movie but it is worth watching. In “Soylent Green” some people are considered furniture - basically enslaved poor that are “paid” in food, shelter and other things people nowadays would consider normal. The protagonist of the movie even uses one of those women-furniture to satisfy his urges. Despite being human they are treated as nothing ... more than items.
For some reason the premise of “My Wife Has No Emotion” had me thinking about those furniture and that the authors of the show just inverted the main premise of the interaction. Instead of dehumanizing a human they gave humanity to something not human.

Before we start I would like to explain something. I will be talking about “plot” and “story”. Many people use those terms interchangeably. I’m not one of those people, so to make sure everyone is on the same page…
I use the definitions for “plot” and “story” as Lisa Cron describes them:
“What happens in the story is the PLOT, the surface events.”
“STORY is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result”.

I’m gonna be honest I simultaneously like and hate the writing in this show. I like it because it touches on some pretty important and mature subjects like loneliness, morality when it comes to AI and even what are the limits of love (I was a therapist so You don’t really want to know the true answer to that one, trust me), and I hate it because in most cases it does so in a very naive and childish way with a lot of deus ex machina resolutions. Despite some pretty good setups that could lead to some really heavy hitting brain teasers, the most this show does is “It will work itself out”... and in almost all cases it does.

I’m not sure who is supposed to be the target audience. It is classified as seinen, but to be fair the writing is a bit too childish for this group. The main hero - Takuma, is an adult and not some teenager, has a job and presumably all other responsibilities that come from being a living alone adult. He even has two different sides to him. He is a pretty well adjusted young man in public, even willing to help those in need as was shown with his first interaction with Super Mina, and can act like a spoiled child when alone with his robot-wife - Mina. I actually like that. Different sides for different occasions. I would consider this pretty solid writing. Most anime and manga don’t really bother giving characters more than one side of personality, so credit where it’s due. It could give You hope that there will be more of this level of thought. Oh my sweet summer child…
Don’t get me wrong, having simple writing isn’t a bad thing, especially when You want to serve mature subjects, like this anime does, to a wider audience. There is “simple”, and there is “childish”. This show has problems balancing that. Unfortunately the pacing and messaging suffer for it immensely.

Now, there is the problem with the world itself. Despite Takuma and Mina going into public places the world feels empty. The only moment when the world felt a bit organic was when they went for a picnic and some (probably) highschool girls commented on Mina. That is the first and only moment when the world seemed, for a lack of a better word, real. Something unusual happened so of course some people will comment on that. Unfortunately no such event took place when they were at the park itself or when they went to the beach.
The beach episode is actually one of two that shows how empty the world is. Without getting into spoilers I will just say that Takuma and Mina get separated and help two different people. The problem? None of them think to ask other people on the beach for any sort of help. Why? That would probably speed up their tasks a lot. No one even comments on seeing a robot with a lot of visible metal in a swimsuit. Nothing. It’s almost like the setting was just a poor excuse to have our MCs meet some new semi useful, plot demanding NPCs.
Unfortunately that ends up being the case. Super Mina even becomes the reason for a terrible info dump about Mina’s past. The same info dump could be used as a set up for something more but it isn't. It’s not exactly forgotten, there are moments later that are consequences of it but it’s not a payoff per se.

The second episode that showed how empty the world is, showed also that the writers didn’t exactly have a solid idea about Mina herself. First the world. Mina and Mamoru (I’ll get to him) find themself in an unnerving situation. Her GPS doesn’t work and they don’t know how to get home. Now any normal person would just ask for directions. Especially that Mina knows her home address. The problem? There is no one to ask. They end up walking, for what seems like a few hours and meet no one. They live in a city. Before this incident it was even shown that there were people around. Not the case when they get into trouble. The solution that they find isn’t exactly a Deus Ex Machina since it is a logical step and doesn’t use elements that weren’t shown before, but there are some problems with the whole situation:
1. The fact that a robot that mostly acts logically wasn’t able to record it’s path, or even ask anyone for direction is just lazy writing to create a situation where Mina has to work together with Mamoru
2. Why didn't the solution come to Mina earlier? It’s logical, simple and easy. That should be, if not the first, the second option she would take into account.
The whole episode just showed me that Mina, despite being a robot is incompetent and probably shouldn't be out on her own. She’s the “wife” and yet she acted without thinking, she was worse than a child at that point. I actually liked Mina as a character up until that point but after that episode my sympathy declined.

Mamoru - the “child” of Mina and Takuma, is a good idea but with terrible execution. His eyes and reactions remind me of Inko - a parakeet from “Toradora” (not the worst association if You ask me). The idea of a “child” for Mina and Takuma isn’t a bad one. They should have something like that at some point to give Mina new challenges in her role as a wife so turning her into a “mother” is solid. Takuma also could benefit from something like that to add character development, something he really needs.
The problem? It’s way too soon. Neither Mina nor Takuma are in the state where that could be beneficial to the story. They still have a long way to develop as a couple. There is no need to add another element to that. I would first like to see some sort of crisis in their relationship. Maybe have Takuma meet a human woman and become friends (just friends) with her. Get Takuma to go with her for some drink or dinner. Normal things that friends do. Let that not sit well with Mina. Have her have a few days of treating Takuma cold and acting capricious. She is capable of that, that much was shown early in the show. Let them find a solution the adult way. By talking and explaining things.

The last two episodes really annoyed me. They were set up for something great. A real hit with reality for Takuma. Takuma visits his parents with his “wife”. The beginning is good. They don’t see her as a family member and treat her 100% as a house appliance. It was nice. I thought that maybe now Takuma will have some sort of crisis. Maybe he will rethink his “marriage” and the way he treats Mina and Mamoru. Maybe he will have a pause and think that he’s just projecting and both of them are just a pair of robots with unusual programming and that they don’t love him back. Maybe we will get a proper, meaningful conflict. Yeah… no. Everything works out great with little to no effort. The amount of potential that was destroyed within those two episodes is astonishing. That could have been an amazing ending to the season. What we got was… abysmal to say at least.

I think the best part, with the exception of that one episode I mentioned, is Mina herself. Despite being a robot with programmed functions she often acts in ways that clearly weren’t intended by the corporation that mass produces her model. That makes her unique and perfect for someone like Takuma. During the info dump with Super Mina, we get to know the reason for that but… I don’t really think it worked in the story’s favour. Without that knowledge Mina was unique, one of a kind, something that, we could speculate, happened only because of her encounter with Takuma. After the revelation… it lost a lot of its charm. Turns out that yes, she probably still is one of a kind, but it kills the speculations that it was because of Takuma.
From Takuma’s point of view very little changes, he doesn’t even get to know the info that the viewers get, Mina is still his wife and his remedy for loneliness. From the viewer pov however a lot has changed. Mina doesn’t act abnormally from her programming. She is acting like she should. Still the program has to deal with a lot of subjectivity and she’s doing rather well so maybe there is something more to this.
Nonthe less almost every episode shows some new “human” actions of Mina. She defends having a wedding ring, is fussy, gets annoyed and even gossips with the girls. It’s actually interesting and keeps You wondering what else she will do.

I really wanted to like this show. The premise is awesome, the story is good but the plot destroys much. If the show slowed down a bit and gave some more thought to the plot point it could have been a good show. As it stands… It’s just bad. I still liked the ending song and animation for it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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Certified Rotten™

by JBrual

35 Entries · 26 Restacks

Anime not dubbed in english pt 7

by Idk5008

45 Entries · 6 Restacks

They already together when the anime started

by GT3_gamer

23 Entries · 15 Restacks

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