#clearly the experiment went incredibly weird. the shinigami is SO annoyed

[mixelation]

But how can she be reborn if shes immortal??

as i have stated before, i have removed all evidence she was "born" at all 0:)

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Rakugo v1 [Manga]

So I recently got this in the mail, and just finished it last night. I’ve been really, really excited for this release since it got announced, and I’m definitely planning to collect the rest, and post my thoughts on them. Rakugo is one of my favourite anime of all time [I guess I’d class it as my ‘objective favourite’, with Yuri on Ice being my undisputed ‘subjective favourite’, if that makes sense], so I’ve been wondering how the manga version works.

These posts are just going to be my initial thoughts on the volume, probably without much structure or anything. Once the manga’s finished coming out in English I might do a more comprehensive review.

I should specify that basically every post I make about the manga is going to be 90% me comparing it to the anime. It’s really difficult to talk about this sort of thing on it’s own terms.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

Just to get it out right at the start, I knew from the start that the manga wasn’t going to be quite as fantastic as the anime. I could guess in advance that the rakugo performances wouldn’t be as engaging. And even though it hasn’t become incredibly relevant yet, I know that Miyokichi’s character in particular is more flat and one-dimensional in portrayal in the manga [which still makes me sad to hear].

I might be getting ahead of myself in talking about stuff from later in the volume, but I can at least say for sure that, thus far, the performances really aren’t as engaging as in the anime. Though really the only proper performance we got was Dekigokoro/On Impulse. I guess there was also the one performance Yakumo gave about the ghost painting, but that was sorta skimmed over. It feels weird to call it a proper performance. I did appreciate getting a scene that at least focused on Yakumo’s capabilities at playing female roles, though. I forget exactly when that first came up in the anime, but seeing it shown so early in the manga is nice. I can’t really compare that scene to the anime, though, since they just . . . didn’t adapt it at all, so there’s nothing to compare.

The Dekigokoro performance felt really disappointing, though, even if it was only because I’m comparing it to the anime. I should have guessed that the performances would be heavily edited down in the manga, compared to how lengthy they can be in the anime, but man was it still jarring to see that entire performance go by in like three pages. It felt so lackluster. It’s hard to judge this sort of thing on it’s own terms, but it really did feel like it didn’t do as good of a job at portraying the physicality of the performance, the body language, and Yotaro’s repressed but frantic nervousness. It all kinda went by too fast. We also obviously didn’t get anything like the whole back and forth talking between the robber, the home owner, and the landlord, which in the anime did a fantastic job at showing how a single performer can move fluidly between different roles and simulate an entire conversation on their own. The manga mostly focused on parts where just one person was talking at a time. It’ll be interesting to see how the later performances are done. [I swear to god, if they don’t do justice to stuff like the Shibahama or Shinigami performances I might just lose my mind]

Getting back to earlier in the volume, it surprised me that the first chapter actually makes up like half of the first episode of the anime. In general, the anime only really adapted chapters one and four, and completely skipped over two and three. Which is a bit sad, but eh. I think the extended blu-ray version of episode one probably covers most of it, but that’s not been subbed at all. It was also a bit odd how, since v1 ends on the note of Yakumo seeing Sukeroku’s ‘ghost’ in the car, then I think the only v2 content that made it into the first episode would be Yakumo’s performance, the drama of Yotaro getting nearly expelled, and Yakumo starting his story. I wonder how much that covers of v2, and how much got cut. We’ll see.

Most of chapter one [and four, from what I remember] got adapted pretty faithfully, but certain things didn’t quite make it. Which is fine. The only part that really stuck out to me in this sense was the part where Konatsu literally says ‘oh yeah, he’s gonna try and die and take the art form down with him in a ‘rakugo shinju’‘. That . . . surprised me. I’m pretty sure that’s only vaguely alluded to at best in, like, the entire first season of the anime. We just see him being a grumpy old man. But I forget. This scene was definitely not adapted, though, that’s for sure. I feel almost disappointed that it’s so explicitly spelled out to the audience in the first chapter [the official translation even literally uses the term ‘rakugo shinju’ just to make it even more obvious that it’s a title drop]. I really liked getting to the second season and being like ‘oh hey they finally explained the title, that’s neat, that sure was a bit of a mystery for ages’. But that’s not really an objective judgment of anything.

I can see why they cut chapters two and three entirely for the TV version of episode one, since they’re mostly just slice of life character introductions as we see more of the day to day lives of the characters as they go about their jobs. It’s still sad that they cut it, though. It would have made the presence of certain characters in season two WAY more natural. It was also nice to get to see more of Yakumo doing his thing, as said above. We also got a more clear note about how he spends time each day practicing different art forms, which I don’t quite think was said quite so clearly in the anime, at least not this early. It’s nice to get a bit of a deeper look into the day to day lives of everyone.

It was also pretty nice to at least get one or two new scenes of Yakumo and Konatsu being on bad terms with each other. Just to help hammer that in even more. There’s also a few new scenes with Konatsu in general, like when she’s, I believe, flipping through old scrapbooks to do with her dad while Yakumo and Yotaro are out of the house. I also feel like she wasn’t quite as explicit in the anime about saying that she practices rakugo each morning while Yakumo is asleep. I think she just vaguely references the fact that she practices it often.

There was also one . . . interesting scene where Yakumo is, I think, at a theater on his own and sees Sukeroku’s ghost sitting in front of him silently. Not sure what to think of that. Mostly because it was pretty short and not a lot happened beyond Yakumo being all ‘so you’re still haunting me’ or whatever like he usually is. It mostly just feels weird that this is the first time we see the ghost in the manga, and not at the car scene like the anime. Something about this scene here feels sort of . . . unnecessary, almost? But that’s mostly because it feels so similar to later moments in the story, and it obviously lacks any sort of surprise element for me. If I didn’t know to expect something like that, it would have been more meaningful, I imagine. I still feel like the car scene is a more interesting place to see the ghost for the first time, though.

And on that note, it kinda saddens me how the little moment of Yakumo teasing Konatsu about her crying to herself, and her defensively denying it, feels WAY more short and comedic in the manga. It’s literally just one panel long. I’m pretty sure that, even if it wasn’t very long, it at least felt a bit more genuinely emotional in the anime. Part of it’s also that in the manga we just get an exaggerated chibi face of Konatsu crying, whereas in the anime I feel like it doesn’t even fully show her face, which made it feel more personal and private, in a way. It came across way differently when it was shown in such an upfront, silly way. Not to mention Yakumo’s cartoonishly evil expression in the manga, compared to his more casual smirk in the anime. The more silly version isn’t necessarily BAD, it’s just . . . different.

I can’t help but be a bit worried that that might be indicative of at least some element of the female characters in particular not seeming as deep in the manga. If we’re going to potentially keep getting moments like this where the manga opts for comedy where the anime opted for subdued emotions and realism. It’s at least clear that that’s a bit of a blanket statement in general across the entire thing. The manga is way more heavy on the low-detail, ‘cartoony’ faces and reaction shots than I expected. Probably because this is the first Haruko Kumota manga I’ve actually read, so her ‘style’ is new to me. I think I was expecting something, well . . . closer in tone to the anime, which isn’t quite the case here. I expected it to feel fundamentally different, but it still felt pretty damn different. Yotaro in particular has a LOT of specific sorts of silly faces that just don’t quite make it into the anime, and I already thought he had lots of silly faces there. Wow. It’s kinda hard to describe, but it’s really noticeable.

As a whole, this is really making me appreciate and understand just how much the anime added to the experience, and to what degree it handled things in a different sort of tone entirely. I obviously expected stuff like the background art or the character designs or the performances to be less detailed in the manga, but it was certainly a surprise to see that most of the anime’s overall atmosphere and mood was mostly new. And yeah, we’ll see how later performances go, but this is making me appreciate the anime performances even more than before, since they’re clearly almost entirely original content. It’s one of the elements that clearly hinged largely on the director’s vision and his talents.

It makes me wonder if any manga readers felt annoyed or put off by the more ‘serious’ tone of the anime, or the notably extended performances. I just wonder if it’s a case where you naturally prefer the version you experience first, and anything different you see after that feels weird.

I might sound really critical of the manga, which I sort of am, but I still greatly enjoyed it, if only as a way to re-experience such a beloved story. For the most part I really, honestly enjoyed the different atmosphere, if only because it made it feel different and fresh. And there’s a LOT of ‘manga-only scenes’ that were really good content-wise and helped flesh this part of the story out a lot. I’m interested to see how the later volumes go. I imagine that the amount of cut content will probably notably drop as we get further in. I mean, if I’m guessing it right, with how many chapters this volume had, then episodes 2-13 of season one probably covered like thirteen or fourteen chapters, so I could see that feeling very 1:1 in content if not tone. Which would be nice. I’m less sure how the pacing of season two will feel, though. All I really know is that, across it’s twelve episodes, the final three adapted v10, aka the last volume. So that’s probably pretty 1:1 as well, adaptation-wise. I’m less sure how the first nine episodes of it adapted v6-9, though. That definitely feels like there may have been a lot cut. We’ll see.

I’m not really gonna bother rating these individual volumes, if only because I just can’t really judge it as it’s own thing. I might give the entire manga a raitng if/when I review all of it, but we’ll see.

Before I forget, I did enjoy the bonus thing at the back where the author explained a bit about how rakugo theaters operate. You can tell how enthusiastic and informed she is about the entire topic. It was also interesting to see her explicitly state that Yakumo’s whole ‘Rakugo is DEAD’ attitude is completely divorced from reality, and that real-life rakugo is still mostly fine. I do feel like it almost sort of diminishes the pull of that entire central conflict of the rush to preserve a dying art form that Yakumo wants to destroy, to know that it’s exaggerated for drama purposes and isn’t really realistic. But the core concept still holds. Especially in terms of how it’s discussed in the flashback story. Still.

ALSO, as another side note, I was sorta surprised at how certain elements of the translation were handled. Mostly it just felt jarring how basically all of the honorifics/terms/etc were kept in Japanese [ie: ‘shishou’, ‘yose’, ‘hanashika’, etc], but the names of the actual rakugo stories were translated [ie: ‘God of Death’, ‘On Impulse’, etc]. It’s basically the opposite of how the anime was translated, where we had English translations like ‘master’, ‘theater’, and ‘storyteller’, versus Japanese names like ‘Shinigami’ and ‘Dekigokoro’. It was kind of bizarre and took some getting used to. I’m less annoyed at them preserving a lot of Japanese elements, and more surprised that, if they kept all THAT in Japanese, why they bothered translating the rakugo story titles. Feels like a slightly inconsistent decision. They’re obviously not trying to avoid ‘overwhelming’ or ‘confusing’ readers by using Japanese words, so why not leave the story names untranslated, with translator’s notes in the margins [which they used for whenever any given Japanese term was first used]? Oh well. Not my place to nit-pick, I guess.