Nana Komatsu - Character

Character

Nana Komatsu came to Tokyo, looking to find her dream. Unlike Osaki, Komatsu came from a large and happy household, though her childish outlook prevented her from living on her own initially. She's the middle child of three sisters.

Her chance encounter with Osaki began a friendship which changes Komatsu's life forever. She is introduced to Osaki's band, Black Stones, and their members (initially Nobuo Terashima and Yasushi Takagi). She later even helps "Blast" to find their bassist by drawing posters to advertise the vacancy and posting one at the furniture store where she first worked and another at Jackson Hole. Much to her surprise, she also discovers that the members of Blast were friends with the members of Trapnest, a popular rock band of which she's a very big fan. After learning of Osaki's breakup with Honjo Ren, she helps the two to reconnect after realizing that they were still very much in love with each other.

In the early stages of the manga, Nana fell in love with many men at first sight. Her affair with Asano Takashi, an older, married man from Tokyo, was a brief tryst, but she believed it was her first love.

Nana's first serious relationship was with Shoji Endo, whom she met at art school through her high school friend Junko. Shoji's acceptance into art university was Nana's reason for moving to Tokyo, since her life before was centered on happiness through love. Shoji and Nana dated until he found her demands tiring and he cheated on her with Sachiko, a restaurant co-worker. After the confrontation of his infidelity, he chooses to stay with Sachiko because she stood up for him when Osaki threaten to beat him up for his unfaithfulness to Hachi. Although they may have lingering feelings for each other (as hinted from their meeting at Jackson Hole after Nana's engagement with Takumi), Nana and Shouji are already in serious relationships and promise not to see one another again, since they must move forward from their past.

After Shoji, Komatsu found herself caught between two men: Takumi Ichinose, the leader and bassist of Trapnest, and Nobu, the guitarist of Blast (Osaki's band). Nana had always been a Trapnest fan and admired Takumi from afar. Through Osaki's connection with Ren, she was able to meet Takumi in person. From their initial sexual encounter, Nana began an unstable relationship with Takumi to fill her loneliness. She is fully aware as well that someone like her could never seriously date Takumi, but she is content in knowing that she is one of many lovers. She sees Takumi fairly little, and he does not call or text while he is on tour, but she remained hopeful that they still would maintain a secret relationship.

Nobu meanwhile has fallen in love with Hachi, but is unable to "compete" with Takumi. When Nobu makes his feelings known, she decides she wants to be with him and rather impulsively breaks off her relationship with Takumi over the phone. Nana overcomes some selfishness and realizes that Nobu is the first man she would like to spoil with love. Nobu and Nana are compatible because they have similar pure and innocent personalities and are quite loyal friends.

However, Nana Komatsu discovers she is pregnant (revealed in chapters 25 and 26), and although she really loves Nobuo, she realizes that Takumi would be in a better position to care for her and her unborn child. She also chooses to be with Takumi because she knows that the only way Nobu would be able to care for it would be to give up playing with BLAST and return to his family's inn. She doesn't want him to give up his dream, plus she wants BLAST to become famous and popular more than anything. Hachi clings to Takumi's calm attitude towards her pregnancy, and she is given strength through his kindness at that time.

Because of her pregnancy, she marries Takumi (initially in name only, for Takumi delayed their wedding because of Osaki's engagement to Ren). Her married name throughout the series is Nana Ichinose (一ノ瀬 奈々, Ichinose Nana?). As the time passes, she realizes she loves Takumi. Takumi's compliments on her cooking when they first met encourages her to improve her cooking even more and take cooking classes. She makes breakfast for Takumi everyday and draws a funny face on it with ketchup, usually stating her mood to Takumi. They both seem to have a mundane marriage, with quarrels and making up due to her naive and forgiving nature and Takumi's forgetful nonchalant nature, but in fact Nana and Takumi's relationship is rather complicated. Takumi frequently cheats on Nana (first with a soap-opera actress and later with Reira). They rarely stay together and Nana senses her husband's infidelity, who dismisses it with excuses, such as his work.

She hopes that they will be able to live happily one day, although in the future sequences of NANA she lives in Japan while he lives in London, England.

Her nickname is "Hachi" - a shortened version of Hachikō because she always tries to be kind and faithful to her friends, like the dog from the Hachikō legend. (Hachi means eight in Japanese, and the kanji for seven can be pronounced as 'nana'. This also clears up confusion between the two Nanas.) A running gag in the series is for Hachi to suddenly sprout a pair of dog-like ears and a tail whenever she's very happy.

With the reporters of SEARCH (a paparazzi magazine) snapping photos of Ren and Reira together alone, Takumi decided to do some manipulating by revealing his relationship with Komatsu to SEARCH, who decided to run that news instead, and the couple formally married.

However, because of Hachi's ties with Nana Osaki, a SEARCH paparazzo was able to manipulate Hachi to find information on Nana's birth mother by showing her pictures of the woman in Osaka and threatening to print the article. Hachi travels to Osaka to discover the truth for herself, but is unable to retrieve any information from Nana's mother. SEARCH gives Hachi a choice between releasing the article about Nana Osaki's mother or a photo of Shin with Ryoko, a Reira lookalike (Hachi did not know the woman in the photo was not Reira, so she believed they were going to reveal Shin and Reira's relationship to the public). SEARCH releases the article on Osaki's mother because Hachi wanted to protect Shin.

Hachi has a maternal relationship with Shinichi. Takumi also acts as a foster guardian to Shin because of his marriage with Hachi. Hachi insists that Takumi and she must take care of Shin because Shin lacks parental figures in his life.

In future sequences, Hachi still lives in Tokyo and is already a mother to a daughter named Satsuki. Satsuki, or Sa-chan, is a six-year-old child. Satsuki is the name Ren Honjo had chosen for the girl when Hachi was pregnant. As for Takumi, he lives in London and has a fair haired half-caucasian son named Ren. Layla had mentioned before that Takumi had a British lover, a "London girl" named Stella, with whom he had a stable relationship of years. It is strongly implied that Ren is Stella's child, and that Takumi and her are living together now. Hachi is still unwilling to be divorced, perhaps for Satsuki, who loves her father and is happy when they are together. Junko is shown once trying to convince Nana to ask for a divorce (which Nana refuses, stating that there are "many reasons why not to do that"). Takumi and Naoki also have a conversation when Takumi briefly returns to Tokyo for a festival about how it must be difficult to have such a complicated family situation, and Nobu regrets that Ren is not attending the fireworks with his half-sister Satsuki. Nana acknowledges that although Satsuki wishes her family to be happy together forever, she will be unable to fulfill that wish.