Nanashi no Asterism (Nameless Asterism)

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Japanese: ななしのアステリズム

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Information

Type: Manga

Volumes: 5

Chapters: 23

Status: Finished

Published: Jun 25, 2015 to Mar 16, 2017

Genres: Romance, Slice of Life

Theme: School

Serialization: Gangan Online

Authors: Kobayashi, Kina (Story & Art)

Statistics

Score: 6.89¹ (scored by 1,458 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #10696²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #5623

Members: 3,841

Favorites: 63

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6.89

Ranked #10696Popularity #5623Members 3,841

MangaGangan OnlineKobayashi, Kina (Story & Art)

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Volumes: /5

Chapters: /23

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Synopsis

Tsukasa, Nadeshiko, and Mikage have been inseparable since they began junior high, but Tsukasa has a secret she's been keeping from her best friends—she actually has a big crush on Nadeshiko. Not wanting to risk their friendship, she planned to keep it a secret forever, but when Tsukasa learns that Nadeshiko has a crush on Mikage, her desire to support her friends now conflicts with her own feelings. First love blossoms in unexpected ways for these three young women and their circle of friends.

(Source: Macmillan Publishers)

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Background

Nanashi no Asterism was published in English as Nameless Asterism by Seven Seas Entertainment from January 30, 2018 to April 28, 2020.

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Characters

Shiratori, Tsukasa

Main

Asakura, Kyousuke

Main

Kotooka, Mikage

Main

Washio, Nadeshiko

Main

Shiratori, Subaru

Main

Reviews

Apr 15, 2018

Groenboys

Recommended

''It's a secret'' - literally everyone in this book

Love triangles can be something wonderfully dramatic (and thus entertaining) or completely pointless. So when you make a story that revolves around a love triangle, you have to put effort in it to make the triangle seem interesting. Nameless Asterism manages to do that… actually it does it too much, but I will get into that later.

The love triangle is simple:
Tsukasa likes Nadeshiko,
Nadeshiko likes Kotooka,
Kotooka likes Tsukasa
What's the problem?
They are all really close friends and they don't want to ...

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Dec 11, 2016

Torra27

Recommended

Preliminary (11/23 eps)

To clarify, before I start, I usually hate love-triangles. I feel like in many mangas they are a cheap plot device to create drama - you have the love triangle where you have the two main characters who are the obvious couple, and then that ex who won't leave/that unrequited love/the clingy other love interest who guilt trips one character to be with them.

Not in Nanashi no Asterism, though!

The three are all friends who all platonically care about each other a lot. Without spoiling too much, all I can say is that the love triangle is a *proper* love triangle. Not one of ...

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Jan 27, 2025

scaps

Not Recommended

Spoiler

FULL SPOILERS

I had a rollercoaster of thoughts grappling with Nameless Asterism. I came into it expecting a messy yuri love triangle (i.e. my kind of junk food), came out betrayed by the lack of any romantic resolution at all, considered the potential artistic intention of avoiding catharsis in writing a story, sought out opinions from online Japanese readers, found one (a blogger on “note” named Aria) that described Nameless Asterism as a “relationship information card battle”, felt motivated enough to give Nameless Asterism another go, reread it, and hated the experience even more than the first time. Oops.

Let's get into Nameless Asterism, ... starting with what I liked. I thought the character writing was very solid, and the author showed capability in planning ahead (which isn’t always common in manga). However, my favorite thing about Nameless Asterism is how it captures that social pressure in middle school to start dating. The main narrative engine of the first couple volumes is provided by a boy from another school, Kyousuke, confessing his love to Shiratori despite never having met. On my first read, I never took this plotline seriously as I assumed that, this being a yuri manga, Shiratori would get with one of her female friends, Washio or Kotooka, in the end anyway. That didn’t happen. Anyway, on my second readthrough, I tried to examine Shiratori’s feelings with clearer eyes. Part of her is just afraid to cross the threshold. She characterizes her friends gathering intel on Kyousuke as “making decisions for her”, which is a stretch. Part of her is excited, and even flattered, to be confessed to at all, but I think an element of social accomplishment—of successfully fulfilling the script provided by society—also contributes to her happiness in this case. It’s natural to rely on a roadmap when internally you have no idea what to feel about anything. And then, the most strongly felt part of all, Shiratori has her crush on Washio, which not only reasserts itself whenever it damn well pleases, but which she is afraid will fade away if she involves herself with a nice, hot boy. She values her feelings for Washio so much that she ends up rejecting Kyousuke just so she can hold onto them. Acting as a foil to Shiratori in this sense is Kotooka, who conforms to that social pressure to date with unfeeling nihilism, getting with and dumping boyfriend after boyfriend in a fruitless attempt to extinguish her crush on Shiratori. As for the third girl, Washio, unfortunately she isn’t as well-defined as the other two, and I don’t have any special comment regarding her other than that too much of her character is defined by her troubled dynamic with Kotooka.

While there is inherent intrigue in seeing what happens with this friend group, the story itself starts to stumble as early as volume 2 of the manga, but you wouldn’t know it until after the fact. See, the beginning of volume 2 has Shiratori rejecting Kyousuke, and while the yuri fans will rejoice at that moment, they will later wish that she would have gotten with him instead, at least temporarily. Because without Kyousuke as a focal point, the rest of Nameless Asterism has our three girls spinning their wheels, sometimes threatening to upend the status quo, but always interrupted or foiled before they can upend it. Either that, or we spend chapters centering on Kyousuke’s relationship with Shiratori’s crossdressing brother Subaru. Those chapters are fine, and Subaru almost manages to substantially affect the A-plot by pretending to be his sister on fake dates with Kyousuke, but everyone dutifully makes sure nobody knows anything they aren’t supposed to... Anyway, the problem is that these B-plot chapters, along with backstory chapters for the main girls, take up big enough chunks of later volumes that the A-plot barely progresses the way it needs to. The worst of it happens in volume 4, which has two chapters of Washio backstory, two chapters of Kyousuke/Subaru stuff, and just one chapter of A-plot which is just a calm-before-the-storm fluff chapter. By the time volume 5 begins, the mind struggles to remember exactly where the characters were mentally so that their current behaviors make sense.

Which leads us to discussing the dreaded volume 5. In this volume, Kotooka spitefully refuses to help a group of girls out with an issue and insults them for good measure. When Shiratori and Washio call her out for going too far, she insults them too and even slaps Washio in the face. While Nameless Asterism attempts to justify her extreme behavior with an admittedly sad backstory, I would instead sum up the writing decisions here as propping up Kotooka as a strawman villain. See, what Kotooka did was so bad, the secret crushes that have been plaguing our main characters suddenly don’t matter anymore because the friend group is already broken, and it must be fixed at all costs. Shiratori confronts Kotooka and causes her to realize that she never actually cared about other people (an extreme idea I have trouble believing and which is hardly supported by the story). With Kotooka’s psychological issues resolved, the group patch things up via baffling dialogue about how they don’t have to be perfect to be friends (when was this a narrative throughline?) and promise to be together from now on. Everything’s fine now! Oh, they’ll reveal their crushes to each other, our characters promise themselves. Only, they’ll get to it "someday", and off the page. You can see why some people weren’t happy with the ending. What can I even say? To even debate whether the decision to not have any of the girls get together is artistically sound or misguided assumes that the ending is coherent to begin with. It feels like the author couldn’t come up with a real solution to the love triangle and instead had to think of another way out of it. Who knows. A few readers speculate that the series was canceled before it could be finished properly. But as I said above, the cracks were showing even before the ending.

The only reason why I wanted to write this review was because I thought I had made a mistake in my evaluation of Nameless Asterism the first time, which could have yielded an interesting review. I did make a mistake: I criticized the wrong thing, and I wasn't harsh enough. And what's yielded is just a cold evaluation. As for score, Nameless Asterism averages out to an empty feeling, and for me, that's right down the middle.

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Poll: Nanashi no Asterism Chapter 23 Discussion luinthoron - May 26, 2017	9 replies	by razisgosu »» Mar 25, 2024 12:36 AM
Poll: Nanashi no Asterism Chapter 5 Discussion vanillaskynet - Jan 27, 2017	2 replies	by razisgosu »» Mar 24, 2024 8:32 PM
Poll: Nanashi no Asterism Chapter 1 Discussion cowfeenmoosic - Apr 24, 2016	6 replies	by Liddo-kun »» Aug 22, 2020 1:42 AM
Poll: Nanashi no Asterism Chapter 19 Discussion LeeTailor - Sep 18, 2017	1 replies	by Phaetons_Folly »» Jul 7, 2020 3:27 PM
Poll: Nanashi no Asterism Chapter 17 Discussion Phaetons_Folly - Jan 15, 2020	0 replies	by Phaetons_Folly »» Jan 15, 2020 12:23 PM

Nanashi no Asterism
Nameless Asterism
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