The Meeting

It all begins on a rainy evening: Hideki, a young man newly arrived in Tokyo from the provinces to prepare for a university entrance exam, stumbles upon an abandoned Persocom on a pile of trash. With no money to afford such a humanoid computer new — a luxury item in this alternate version of Japan, where almost every household owns one — he brings her home anyway, out of simple compassion. The machine, whom he names Chi after the only word she knows how to say, turns out to be different from other Persocoms: unable to remember her past, lacking any accessible hard drive, she has to relearn everything from scratch, like an infant discovering the world. This first arc establishes the series' bittersweet tone: beneath the social comedy (Hideki juggling odd jobs, his neighbors and classmates barging into his daily life) already lie deeper questions about urban loneliness and the boundary between object and person. The cohabitation between Hideki and Chi, full of endearing clumsiness and small victories (a word learned, an everyday gesture mastered), weaves a bond that quickly outgrows the simple owner-machine relationship. It's also the occasion to set up the series' backdrop — the apartment building run by the mysterious Chitose Hibiya, the private prep school where Shinbo teaches, the café where Hideki lands a job — and most of the cast that will orbit the duo across the eight volumes.