"This Is How To Be In Love With You" by Mahiru Shiina (MILGRAM)

"This Is How To Be In Love With You" (Cover)

Mahiru Shiina is 22-year-old woman who has been imprisoned for murder. She also happens to be the oldest woman (and my favorite prisoner) within MILGRAM. (Spoilers ahead.)

Her first trial/song titled: "This Is How To Be In Love With You" opens with her sitting on a couch, in a birdcage, reading a magazine. She then looks into the camera with a scared or surprised expression before her eyes glow pink and we get sent into her blog.

Her blog has daily entries that start with her seeing this guy at a coffee shop reading a book, and she takes a liking to him. As the video progresses we watch as she goes through different ways as she tries to get closer to this guy. She even goes back to the same cafe where they met and ends up buying a bunch of bread she doesn't need because she kept waiting for him to show up. There is a lot of Japanese text that is not translated in the video, so I had to find other sources to find the translation for it.

She even takes up running, after mentioning that she does not like it, solely because she saw this guy wearing jogging pants. Later on in the video the we see Mahiru at night, and the daytime posts stop. As well as the text becoming more shaky and slanted, before eventually starting to look like cut out pieces from a magazine.

I feel like a lot of these behaviors are very reminiscent of Borderline Personality Disorder, or BPD. A lot of behaviors show in people with BPD, because they take on traits of their favorite person, and their interests in order to impress or grow closer to them. They also have cycles of mania, which usually gets worse during the night.

The chorus shows her awareness of how suffocating her love is:

"Giving you love to the point of pulling you down

It's just because I still get worried, please forgive me

Even when I test you, even the times we do the breakup ritual,

Is because I love you"

These lines show the audience that she is fully aware of what she's doing, but how she also regrets it, or at least wants forgiveness from this guy. Right after this chorus the verse shows her attachment to this person, calling him in the middle of the night and being sad or even mad that he goes to bed after her, but then worries about him getting mad at her for being mad. The final line in this verse also shows a very good representation of how someone with BPD can think about their favorite person.

"I'm going to start relying on you if you're kind to me, so please forgive me, thanks!"

Mahiru is straight up telling this man that she's going to idolize him and rely on him just because he's nice to her. This behavior is very suffocating, and in this video we don't even see the man she's talking about. I feel like MILGRAM made a very intentional decision to exclude the man she's singing about in this video, as it mainly focuses on her feelings towards him. We even see her in his apartment by herself, with a new years feast. There was nobody greeting her at the door, and the food was much more than enough for just her. There's evidence there that she was with someone else, but we never saw him in this video. This did lead some people to believe that she kidnapped and/or broke into this guy's apartment, but I don't really believe in this theory.

In her second trial/music video, we do get to see this man, and see a lot more of the manic side of Mahiru. What we get in this video is just the slow decline of her throughout the blog posts, and the shifting moods from when she gets angry on the phone with him, before calling back crying, presumably apologizing profusely.

There is cuts in the video between her blog posts and her inside this birdcage, with blue feathers falling from the sky. I think this birdcage could be representative of her past, because from her background we know that she was very sheltered by her parents, and went to an all-girls school until she was in college. Her being so sheltered also makes me believe that she never knew how to regulate her emotions when it came to romance, as such leading to these extreme feelings.

For this trial, Mahiru was voted Guilty by the audience of MILGRAM, to a ratio of 44.60% innocent to 55.40% guilty. I personally believe (after watching both trials), that Mahiru didn't necessarily commit the murder herself, but rather her love was so suffocating that her partner committed suicide. I will go more into this theory and more in my next post, which will be about her second trial. The second trial has a lot more in-depth imagery of the relationship between Mahiru and her boyfriend and what potentially happened. After she received this verdict, in between the first and second trial she was beat near to death by prisoner 10 (who I will cover later.) This leads to even more events within the canon of MILGRAM.