Kanamemo

Kanamemo (かなめも) is a Japanese four-panel comic strip written and illustrated by Shoko Iwami (石見翔子). The strip has been serialized in Houbunsha's seinen manga magazine Manga Time Kirara Max since June 19, 2007. It is about Kana Nakamichi and her growing experience as a newspaper deliverer, cook, and orphan.

The anime adaptation premiered in Japan on July 5, 2009 by Feel Studios.

Plot
The story centers on Kana Nakamichi, a middle-school girl who had already lost her parents and just recently lost her only remaining relative, her grandmother. As a result, she ends up living and working at a newspaper delivery office. Everyone else living at the office are all charming, self-assertive bishōjo.

The manga follows Kana’s daily life in the fast-paced yet joyous environment.

Characters

 * Kana Nakamachi (中町 かな)


 * Kana is the main protagonist of the story. Kana is a young girl of thirteen years old.  She is willing to prove herself to do what she needs, but is often unsure about her abilities.  She has lost her parents prior to the events of the story, to events that have yet been explained.  As such, she has been living with her grandmother ever since she was little.  Just prior to the series, her grandmother also died, resulting in Kana living alone.  While Kana is trying to cope with the loss, collectors arrive at Kana's home and start carrying out furniture.  When Kana asks them what they are doing, they say they "were told to remove all of the old lady's things".  Kana believes this includes her as well, and she panics, grabs as many things she can fit in a backpack, and runs away.  Looking for a new place to live, she ended up at a newspaper distribution center, Fuhshin Gazette, where the series takes place.


 * Kana is a particularly soft spoken and shy girl who also gets frightened a lot, particularly in the presence of Haruka. She also tends to generally overreact to things she doesn't quite understand and frequently misinterprets them. Having lost her grandma, she sometimes gets rather lonely whenever she thinks about when she may inevitably have to leave the Fuhshin Gazette.


 * Saki Amano (天野 咲妃)


 * Saki is the assistant chief of Fuhshin Gazette, despite still being in grade school. She is the only "serious" one of the group, and frequently reprimands the other girls when they neglect their duties.  However, she often helps Kana with her problems, including stepping in when Haruka becomes too invasive, and is also prone to giving spontaneous rewards to everyone else, even though she always justifies her actions in the format of "We were (fill in the blank), anyway." Although having a mental disposition of a mature adult, she is still able to act like a child of her age when the situation calls for it; when interacting with her classmates at school, she is the stereotypical schoolgirl, usually so she can get the other children's parents to subscribe for the Fuhshin Gazette.


 * Yume Kitaoka (北岡 ゆめ)


 * Yume works at the Fuhshin Gazette. For the most part, she is carefree and consistently in a good mood, sometimes to the point of annoyance in people around her.  She is a student at a patisserie academy, and, whenever cooking, often adds far too much sugar than what the recipe calls for (such as when she added two bags of sugar to a dish of curry).  She and Yuuki are a couple, albeit an odd one.  She is obsessed with doing everything with Yuuki, and is severely disappointed when they are denied the opportunity.


 * Yuuki Minami (南 ゆうき)


 * Yuuki works at the Fuhshin Gazette. Her emotional state is usually placid, except when Yume is doing something with someone else without her.  She and Yume share an expressive yuri love, and they are never shy to show it, to the point when Kana sees them kissing, she decides to look for employment elsewhere.  When it comes to Yume's affections, Yuuki is very territorial; whenever Yume does something fun or shares an exciting conversation with someone else, Yuuki get's extremely jealous and emits an aura of dejection until Yume notices and includes her in the events. She uses Keigo excessively (even towards Kana, who is considered to be her kouhai).


 * Haruka Nishida (西田 はるか)


 * Haruka works at Fuhshin Gazette. She is an avid drinker of sake, and as such is often drunk.  While intoxicated, she will often make advances on any other woman, though she has a particular fondness for young, cute girls (such as Kana and Saki).  It is for this reason that Kana fears her greatly.  She attends college, studying bio-fermentation, and creates numerous different beverages from biologic substances (the resulting concoction almost always being alcoholic).  She frequently tests these on the others of Fuhshin Gazette.


 * Hinata Azuma (東 ひなた)


 * Hinata works at Fuhshin Gazette. She is rather carefree, and likes to gamble or invest through various means, such as Horseracing and the stock market, but is otherwise hesitant about spending money on things such as cotton candy at a festival, claiming it to be "just a bunch of sugar".  She has attempted to join a college numerous times, but has failed entrance exams twice, with a third failure being predicted frequently by the others.  She is nice to Kana, occasionally helping her. Interesting of note is her unique usage of the masculine pronoun "I" ("boku") when referring to herself, where a female Japanese speaker would usually refer to herself using "watashi" or the more feminine "atashi".


 * Mika Kujiin (久地院 美華)


 * Mika is a newspaper deliverer at another center, although she won't admit it unless directly confronted. She is quick to blame others, and frequently turns her mistakes into inconveniences.  When she becomes lost during a route, she literally runs into Kana, then forgives her by "allowing" her to escort her to her next stop.  In the third episode, she and Kana become friends. She seems to have a crush on Kana, and gets riled up at the thought of Kana having a boyfriend.


 * Marimo (まりも)


 * Marimo is a minor character who appears in the eighth and twelfth episodes. She is a former Fuhshin Gazette employee before she graduated from college, and has a reputation as the worst employee the newspaper company ever had.  Nevertheless, she was well liked by everyone.  She and Saki shared a special friendship; they were so close that Saki started calling her nee-san (big sister), which the rest of the Fuhshin staff picked up, as well.  Marimo was the first person with whom Saki had truly opened up and revealed her true feelings (and as far as the series has shown, the only person).


 * Before the events of the anime (roughly the most recent spring season), the day before Marimo's graduation, there was a snow storm with record low temperatures, and on that day Marimo was late returning home. Hinata offered to look for her, and recruited the others to do the same (although tactfully omitting Haruka from the search).  She found Marimo's bike crashed by the river, with stacks of newspaper rolls leading to the water's edge.  Saki, upon hearing this, ran into the storm to search for her, eventually getting herself lost.  Marimo then finds Saki at the place where the bike crash was, where it was revealed that Marimo was merely searching for a lost kitten.  Saki berates her for making her worry, and they share an embrace.


 * Currently in the story, she lives off of odd jobs, such as selling vegetables in the flea market for outrageously cheap prices. When she is not working, she will, according to her words, "go where the wind takes her, where her mood takes her".

Non-Human Characters

 * Bunta (ぶんた)
 * Bunta is a stray cat that hangs around the Fuhshin Gazette. She is treated as a member of the family, and is often a form of encouragement for Kana.


 * It is later revealed that Bunta is actually the same cat that Marimo was trying to find on the night she got lost.


 * Kaniko Echizen (越前 かにこ)
 * Kaniko isn't really an actual character. Really, he is a robot seen occasionally as a transition effect.  Usually comical in nature, he will spin across the foreground, with the scene changing behind him. This type of transition is also used in the OVA series Kissxsis, which is also produced by Feel (only here the transition is done by either one of the twin sisters). Some of the things he says are a parody of the previous scene, while others have no relevance with the show at all.


 * Kaniko has appeared in almost every episode thus far.

Manga
The following three volumes are released:

Theme songs

 * Opening theme: 君へとつなぐココロ
 * Performance: Aki Toyosaki, Kaoru Mizuhara and Rie Kugimiya


 * Ending theme: YAHHO!!
 * Vocals: Yui Horie
 * Performance: Yui Horie

Release
The anime adaption of Kanamemo was announced in the March 2009 issue of Houbunsha's Manga Time Kirara Max magazine, and premiered on July 5, 2009 in Japan as well as crunchyroll.com. Some segments, such as the showing of panties or nudity, were censored for the TV broadcast. The first uncensored DVD was released on October 7, 2009.