Read this on one of the countless Nodame forums I venture into. I just love reading the different takes of my fellow otakus on different topics. especially this one. Mainly because it answered the question that has been etched on my mind ever since I watched the beloved dorama. So the topic was: When did Chiaki fell in love for Nodame? As expcted the forum was a smorgasboard of biases, but I particularly fell in love with this one because it made me realize 2 things. For one thing it made me realize why I love this dorama so much. On the surface it may seem wacky and unrealistic, but if you look closely, you'll see it's totally grounded on reality. Secondly, it made me wish I was as lucky as Nodame and have my own Senpai... So a big Kudos to you fellow Otaku!
"It's an interesting question. Chiaki starts as such a chill, hyper-critical person, so that I would often ask myself "What, if anything, does Chiaki love?" And in the beginning, the answer is pretty much confined to Vieria-sensei and conducting, though at first, both of these are all about love of a dream. Chiaki starts this story as someone who seems confused about and sometimes isolated from many forms of love. He can love Saiko's voice, her instrument, but he seems to think of that as separate from Saiko the person.
I think this is how it starts with Nodame. Chiaki falls in love with her piano playing, despite it's messy and technically 'not good,' because through her playing, Nodame expresses the essence of pure, strong emotions, and I think Chiaki is starved for that. But he quickly realises he can't separate Nodame from her playing as he can with other people. Quirky, right-brained Nodame pours her love of life into her music, and this is the piece that has eluded rigidly left-brained Chiaki.
To me, Chiaki fell in love with Nodame's music first (nobody becomes self-aware overnight). The love Nodame poured into her music bound him to her in ways his logical self fought, even to the point where he tried to get her to approach her relationship with music in the way he did (which, in its judgment of what music should mean to her, was not the most loving thing to do). I think Chiaki believed, for a long time, that to actually acknowledge the person (perhaps any person) behind the music was terribly risky, and yet he intuitively knew if you couldn't acknowledge the person, you didn't really have music (this was his take-away from S-Orchestra). He wasn't just fighting loving Nodame because she was weird and hentai and didn't fit into his left-brained mode; he was fighting love (which, to my way of thinking, is all about acceptance).
I don't think there was a particular moment where Chiaki's love for Nodame became distinct from his love for her music. Rather, because this is a more realistic story about love that is not exactly 'first sight,' I think their love has developed just as a composer would develop a concerto: it's there as a motif at the beginning, it has its ups and downs, it grows and matures as it goes, until at the end, it is all one glorious expression of all the things that make up love.
So, if the essence of their love has been there since the beginning, the question is, when does Chiaki acknowledge the magnitude of Nodame in his life and start letting go of his internal struggle? When he internalises that Mozart is 'pink'? When he asks her to come to Europe with him? When he realises she, more than anyone else, has been the one to bring so many good things into his life? When he returns to Paris because he is worried about her? Certainly the necklace is a tangible symbol of his coming to terms with his weighty questions, but I think through his actions, he began letting go earlier. Like, maybe, when he took that first, enormous step out of character and started to cook for her.
And even in this, Chiaki is standing toe to toe with what it means to love. We get a laugh out of disgusted Chiaki cleaning her flat, but really, it's an example of Chiaki trying to impose his sensibility on Nodame. He thinks her flat should be clean, that nobody should live in a messy place. Nodame could care less. She's basically a person for whom life is big and clutter is comfortably part of the deal. Chiaki can't change that, and I think he comes to realise, for all he disparages it, he doesn't want to. He's able to let go of it and accept that part of Nodame pretty early on. Whew! Because love doesn't live in trying to make someone into a person she is not, especially when aspects of Nodame's big, cluttered life are essential to Chiaki.
The cooking is different, though. In a way, this is Chiaki's first real gift to her. Not that food = love, but that extending yourself to give someone something she loves is definitely an act of love."
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