March Comes in Like a Lion and a Good Depiction of Depression

March Comes in Like a Lion is an anime adapted from a manga of the same name. It's not a story of big adventures or tragedies, it doesn't contain any flawless, formidable character that figured out life, and nobody ends up solving all their problems or finding the meaning of life when the story ends. Everybody's struggling, and nobody knows the true answer to situations in life. It's just a poetically written story that follows our protagonist Rei when he's lost in life.

The anime opens with an ordinary, yet painfully relative scene with our protagonist Rei, a young and professional shogi player, waking up in his messy small apartment. He gets out of bed only because he does it every day for no reason ahead, he dresses up, eats, and drinks only out of obligation. He walks by beautiful scenery every day on his way to the shogi center, yet he never looks around to appreciate any of it. His whole existence seems fragile like he will be broken with a slight push. It's as if he lives with a massive hollow in his soul that will never come back, that the part of him who is capable of being happy and appreciating anything beautiful has perished long ago...

Rei is a person whose adolescence was stripped away from him. He never got to experience the silly excitements and endeavors that adolescence brings naturally. He had to mature quickly and skip the idle and fun steps of life after becoming an orphan at a young age. Shogi was and is everything to him, his only achievement, his only way to gain a place in his adopted family, the only part of himself that is worth showing others. He is nothing without shogi, or so he thinks... As a viewer, you might not have gone through such ordeals, but the feelings of constant numbness and living as if you're only observant of your own life are so familiar and resonant for the ones who tasted the bitter taste of the depression. The show captures what it's like to live with depression ironically beautifully. Living with the constant cycle of self-pity, hugging that excuse so that you won't feel guilty for not trying anymore, thinking that your life is already doomed anyway. The constant voice in your head that humiliates you, reminds you to never hold onto any hope or any warmness, but to stay in that fallen state. Its ugly whispers scare you away from any warmth of human contact, and the untrustful riskiness of trying anything new. It tries to restrain you to that ever-fallen state, it wants you to embrace the familiar failures while pitifully trying to protect you from meeting any new form of pain that you will not be able to fight. The feeling of never belonging somewhere yet constantly yearning for that place. All these feelings... are bottled up in Rei.

He meets with three sisters who bring him the warmth that he never felt after the death of his parents. Yet...he cannot allow himself to feel deserving of their love, feeling like he belongs near them. The more he eats their warm food, laughs together, and looks out for each other, the more he feels the harsh loneliness that welcomes when he gets back to his apartment building.

So he always feels out of place, sitting and eating with them in a family-like environment, yet hearing the bells of danger ringing in his head constantly. It's ringing and warning him; the warmness of others is a sweet trap, one that strips away your most precious part after they eventually leave you, remember that they will always leave. We should stay in our comfort zone, with ever-familiar coldness and pain, it says. And so, Rei cannot allow himself to love them, or to be loved by them completely. Living with this self-protective and tired self, he still keeps going for no reason ahead. He resembles living to constantly swimming to an island that you will never reach. We humans think that we will reach a final destination and settle once we achieve something. As for Rei, he thinks that he swam so much to arrive at that island by becoming a professional shogi player and started living alone, so he could settle down and rest, but no. Now he has to keep swimming and needs to reach another island, he needs to elevate his ranking, earn more money, learn to open himself up, and deal with more and more ordeals... He realizes that he will never be able to reach that one island and always has to keep swimming similar to life. And he just cannot accept that. Why should he even keep swimming, for what reason, what does he even have to hold onto?

Watching Rei figuring out that life is just a never-ending battle, and struggle to find any reason to keep fighting feels so familiar. His depression is not romanticized like some other shows do, and his healing path is non-linear. He lives drawbacks and ends up coming where he started sometimes. But slowly, at some point, he learns to value and appreciate himself. He manages to accept other's love and learn to give love to others by abandoning his self-pity cycle and leaving his comfort zone. He comes to terms with the complexity of human relationships. He knows that loving means showing vulnerability, and the risk of hurting. And yes, you will be damaged because of others, but that's the only way you will ever feel the wonders of human connection.