⚠️ This post contains spoilers for the full Given series.
If you’ve watched Given and found yourself most tangled up by Akihiko Kaji’s storyline, you’re not alone.
He’s the character who keeps slipping out of easy categorization. Not the protagonist. Not quite a side character either. And his love life is — to put it plainly — a lot.
This post answers the question directly: who does Kaji end up with? And then, because the “who” without the “how” misses everything that makes this story worth following, it explains the full shape of his arc.
The Short Answer
Akihiko Kaji ends up with Haruki Nakayama — the drummer in the same band, and the person who has been quietly in love with him for years.
But if you only take that answer and leave, you miss what Given actually did with this storyline. Because the more interesting question isn’t who Kaji ends up with. It’s why it took so long — and what had to change before it was possible.
✅Haruki Nakayama from Given: The Person Who Always Put Everyone Else First
First: Who Is Ugetsu?
Before Haruki, there’s Ugetsu Murata.
Ugetsu is Kaji’s ex — a violinist, extraordinarily talented, difficult in the specific way that people with rare gifts sometimes are. He takes up a lot of space. He’s volatile, unpredictable, alternately magnetic and draining.
And Kaji, for a long stretch of the story, is still caught in his orbit.
Their relationship isn’t romantic in a warm or stable sense. It’s something messier — a pull that Kaji can’t quite name and can’t quite quit. They’ve been in each other’s lives long enough that separating feels like removing something structural. Even when things are bad. Even when Kaji knows, somewhere, that it isn’t working.
This is the situation Haruki has been watching for a long time.
What Was Happening With Haruki All Along
Haruki Nakayama is the kind of person who holds things together without making it obvious that he’s doing it.
Steady. Reliable. Almost always fine. The person you’d turn to in a crisis — not because he’s unaffected, but because he has a particular capacity for absorbing difficulty without showing it on the outside.
He’s had feelings for Kaji for a long time.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t make it uncomfortable. He kept showing up as a friend, as a bandmate, as someone Kaji could lean on — even while watching Kaji stay tangled up with someone else.
That takes a particular kind of quiet endurance. It also, eventually, takes a toll.
There’s a moment in the story — one of the most honest moments in Given — when something finally breaks through Haruki’s composure. He doesn’t make a speech. He doesn’t give Kaji an ultimatum. But the feelings that have been sitting under the surface make themselves visible, briefly, in a way that can’t be unseen.
Given treats this moment with care. It doesn’t push Haruki’s feelings as a device to accelerate the plot. It just lets them be there — acknowledged, real, and still not immediately resolved.
The Break With Ugetsu
Eventually, Kaji ends things with Ugetsu.
And it matters how he does it — because Kaji’s problem throughout the story isn’t that he’s cruel or deliberately inconsiderate. It’s that he lets things drift. He’s someone who can recognise, intellectually, that a situation isn’t working, and still not act on it because acting feels harder than staying.
With Ugetsu, he finally acts.
He doesn’t keep things vague. He doesn’t hold on as a safety net while edging toward something else. He makes a real ending — not a clean one, because there’s no clean ending to something like that — but a clear one.
That clarity is new for Kaji. It’s evidence of something shifting.
The Ending — And What It Means
By Given: To the Sea, Kaji and Haruki are together.
The moment that marks this most clearly — the one that stays — is quiet, as most of Given‘s most important moments are.
Kaji turns to Haruki and asks:
“May I touch you?”
Four words. But if you’ve followed the arc, they land like something much larger.
Because the Kaji who appeared earlier in the series would not have asked. He moved on feeling. He let his own momentum carry him without checking whether anyone else was ready to receive it. He assumed, without meaning to, without malice — but he assumed.
This Kaji asks.
He slows down. He makes himself wait for an answer. He gives Haruki the choice. His composure — the carefully maintained surface he usually presents to the world — is temporarily gone, and he lets it be.
That’s where all of Kaji’s growth lives. Not in a declaration. Not in a dramatic turn. In one small, careful question, asked to someone who had been waiting a long time to be asked.
And Haruki, who spent years making his own feelings small so they wouldn’t inconvenience anyone — gets to simply say yeah.
Why This Pairing Works
Kaji and Haruki work because of what they’re each learning.
Kaji is learning to slow down. To ask. To move toward someone with intention instead of just impulse. To stop treating emotional situations as things to navigate around rather than through.
Haruki is learning — or perhaps more accurately, finally getting to experience — what it’s like to be moved toward carefully. To be chosen not as the stable option, but as the wanted one.
Their relationship doesn’t resolve everything for either of them. But it gives each of them exactly the thing they most needed — and it does it without rushing, without over-explaining, and without softening what either of them had to go through to get there.
The Full Picture of Kaji’s Arc
If you want to understand not just who Kaji ends up with, but who Kaji is — why he was such a mess underneath the composed exterior, what the Ugetsu relationship was really doing to him, and why that four-word question was the most important thing he said in the whole series — that’s what the companion essay covers.
✅ Akihiko Kaji from Given: Why the Most Put-Together Person in the Room Was Falling Apart
Same character, different angle. This post answers “who.” That one answers “why.”
Quick Reference
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who does Kaji end up with? | Haruki Nakayama |
| What was the previous relationship? | Ugetsu Murata (long-term, unstable, complicated) |
| When does the resolution happen? | The Given film |
| What makes the ending meaningful? | Kaji learning to ask instead of assume; Haruki finally being received |
Given doesn’t give you easy love stories. It gives you real ones — the kind where the right ending requires the right change first.
Kaji and Haruki are worth the wait. But only because neither of them arrived there unchanged.
I also share the small manga moments that stay with me long after reading—the pauses, glances, and choices that never fully leave.
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