Nichijou
8The Ledger · 44日常 · My Ordinary Life
Three schoolgirls, a robot girl, an eight-year-old professor and a talking cat live a daily life in which absolutely anything can happen.
- Published
- 2006–present
- Demographic
- shonen
- Magazine
- Monthly Shōnen Ace
- Status
- ongoing
Created by
8An 8 by its title: visionary & achiever, and therefore the ledger.
What it is
Keiichi Arawi's Nichijou, meaning "everyday life", began in Kadokawa's Monthly Shōnen Ace in 2006. It paused in 2015 and resumed in 2021. Yūko, Mio and Mai are high-school friends in a quiet town. Nearby lives Nano, a robot girl with a large wind-up key in her back, who wants to be ordinary, built by the Professor, a genius who is eight years old, and their cat Sakamoto, who can talk thanks to a scarf the Professor made.
How it works
The series is a collection of short sketches, some only a page or two long. Most begin with something very ordinary, such as forgetting your homework, buying a snack or trying to make a joke, and escalate into absurd catastrophe: a fight that turns into a martial-arts epic, a fall drawn as a cosmic event. Others are deadpan and almost nothing happens.
The humour
Arawi's comedy depends on timing, scale and contrast. A tiny misunderstanding is treated as a disaster, and a real disaster is shrugged off. His clean, simple drawing and large empty spaces make the explosions of absurdity land harder.
Why it matters
Its 2011 anime by Kyoto Animation, famous for its inventive animation of the gags, made it a cult classic. It is one of the purest examples of manga absurdist comedy, and many fans consider it one of the funniest manga ever made.
The title by its numbers
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 44 across 1 word, reducing to 8.
What the 8 brings is power. The reference files it as a reckoning. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 8's concern with power, money, and who is really in charge.
Heart's Desire 9, Personality 8: reckoning underneath, power on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
It does not rest on the letters alone. 総画 strokes is 15, a 6 and debut year is 2006, an 8 — and the 8 arrives there too, by a route that owes nothing to the alphabet. A title can be translated; debut year cannot.
The 8 asks you to follow the money before you judge the decision. The 8 measures what is countable and calls the rest noise. Several entries record industries that optimised themselves into exhaustion. The other entries that reduce to 8 are collected on The Ledger.
Quick answers
- Is Nichijou finished?
- No. Nichijou began in 2006 and is still being serialised.
- Who created Nichijou?
- Nichijou was created by Keiichi Arawi.
- Where was Nichijou serialised?
- Nichijou is serialised in Monthly Shōnen Ace.
- What kind of manga is Nichijou?
- Nichijou is a shonen manga, published for a readership of teenage boys. Its genres are comedy and slice of life.
If you like Nichijou
- Silver Spoon2011 · shonen · slice of life, comedyA city boy escaping exam pressure enrols at an agricultural high school in Hokkaido, and learns where food comes from.
- Azumanga Daioh1999 · shonen · comedy, slice of lifeFour-panel strips following a group of high-school girls and their teachers through three years of school, in a comedy built almost entirely on timing.
- Spy x Family2019 · shonen · action, comedyA spy assembles a fake family for a mission, not knowing his adopted daughter reads minds and his wife is an assassin.
- Yotsuba&!2003 · seinen · slice of life, comedyA small adopted girl encounters ordinary things — a swing, a bicycle, rain — for the first time, in a comedy about noticing the world.