#sgrs

[digitalroot]

When things were hard for me, I wanted to hear your rakugo. All the good, all the bad... Your rakugo has given me every emotion imaginable. That's why I can't be without it.

[anisongoftheday]

Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu Opening

USURAHI SHINJUU by Megumi Hayashibara

[grassbreads]

Man, genuinely there's little that excites me more than encountering queerness in fiction where I wasn't expecting it. I'm gonna be thinking about Kikuhiko/Yakumo from SGRS for so long.

Even setting aside the subtext of his feelings for Sukeroku, the narrative around his relationship to gender norms and his own expression is so fascinating. Guy who grows up steeped in rigid 40s gender roles and actively tries to enforce them, yet only truly feels like himself when he's acting on stage as a woman. Guy who says his life would have been better if he were born a woman and then refuses to elaborate.

[tiferet]

farewell my concubine (1993) shouwa genroku rakugo shinjuu (2016)

[tomoyoo]

she’s so funny

[unfotp]

now you can't say that and.just move on

[animefeminist]

Chatty AF 181: Ace/Aro Representation in Anime and Manga – Part 1

Dee, Alex, and Cy discuss asexual and aromantic coded characters and several new manga with explicit ace and/or aro leads.

Episode Information

Date Recorded: February 1, 2022 Hosts: Dee, Alex, Cy

Episode Breakdown

0:00:00 Intros 0:02:14 Ace/Aro 101 0:10:05 Conflation with frigidity/prudishness/trauma 0:12:18 Linguistic differences between Japanese and English 0:15:50 Koisenu Futari and recognition and evolution of terminology 0:19:52 Ace coding in anime and manga 0:28:30 Favorite ace/aro coded characters 0:42:10 Our Dreams at Dusk and Sex Ed 120% 0:49:50 I Want to be a Wall 0:57:59 Outro

[pierranesi]

this was me from ages like 8 to 13 tbh, increasingly desperate as I was less and less successful

[seasaltmemories]

Another look at complicated grief and memories that haunt

[mapoeggplant]

to be born and murdered by art: is there anywhere to go if not to the stage?

like the ones who were privileged enough to hear sukeroku, with flesh and bones, tell a story we, as the audience, were privileged enough to experience a long old tale of rakugo being born.

you and a rakugo artist, facing each other in a room completely devoted from an audience. there, he tells a story about the day he met the god of death and how he killed him, years later. his candle, still glowing, takes a form of a woman from time to time. what is he hiding?

showa genroku rakugo shinju not only tells a story about the beauty of an old art, but how human experience and relationships are bound to be laced from here to eternity. solitude, even as a childhood dream, would not be fair to the ones who made your story worth reading.

it’s about passion and life, never letting the flame go out. it’s about making past transforms itself in future, about the burden left to the ones who cary an old name. about humans impacting humans and changing their lives drastically, like it or not.

because what is tradition without it shares of tragedy? what is happiness to the one who only experienced grief? what is letting go of something that makes you whole? what is love to those unworthy of it?

sgrs not only teach us about rakugo: it is raguko on itself. a story to cry and laugh of, to sit in the same room over and over again just because you found your favorite voice. it’s about finding our own rakugo, even if we could barely tell a story on our own.

[cloudbends]

It is quite insane how sgrs has both one of the best reveals I've ever seen alongside one of the worst reveals I've ever seen.

[imethirdperson]

Imagine going "I'm probably non-binary but I have a job so I don't really care about that rn" until you die of old age because you simply refuse to retire

[acryline]

Watch Fushiawase no Hate Ni - Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu Soundtrack 2 I 4 on YouTube Music

Another great ost.

[grassbreads]

The more I linger on it, the more I think this might be the most subtly unhinged thing in all of SGRS. What do you MEAN you dated for eight years and never told each other your real names???

Miyokichi talks after the breakup about how she was putting on a "professional front" with Kikuhiko. As a survival technique, Miyokichi tends to make herself into whatever she thinks the man she's with wants from her, and in this case, that means she presented herself as her idea of Kiku's idea of a "good woman" for a full eight years while they were together. She probably would have tried to go on like that forever if he didn't break things off.

Yet at the same time, I think she's rightfully upset on some level that Kiku never looked at her more deeply. We see very little of their relationship, only the beginning and the very end, but given what we do see, it seems like Kiku never quite stops holding Miyokichi at arm's length. He goes along with things and initiates some level of closeness (like leaning into her when he's upset during the rain), but he doesn't push her to get more intimate.

Kiku looks scared when Miyokichi talks about dying during their breakup, he defends her personhood to his master, and he wants to bring her back to Tokyo with along Konatsu and Sukeroku when he finds them, so it's not like he doesn't care about her at all. But while he treats her his own version of decently, he never tries to get to know her on a deeper level. He doesn't take initiative to look for who she is behind her front for him.

(Personally, I'd blame his disinterest in knowing her largely on his own fear of being known, but we don't have time to get into that right now).

The problem with Miyokichi's frustration with being taken at face value, though, is that she doesn't know Kikuhiko's real name either. She most likely never asks, just like Kiku never asks hers. I think she falls in love with the idea of dating Kiku as much if not more than she falls in love with him. He's safe and well-mannered and very handsome, and I think his distant coldness is a comfort to her on some level because neglect, though an unhappy business, is what she has experience with.

Miyokichi likes the idea of ~being the woman~ and supporting Kiku emotionally. I'm sure she encouraged some playact of emotional intimacy between them. I'm sure they found comfort in each other in a very real way sometimes. But, if she got to know Kiku too well, she would have seen things about him she didn't like. Could she have truly known him without knowing he didn't love her the way she wanted? She never quite looks deeper to see whether he's really the type of man that she needs him to be.

I think Kiku is a bit more at fault for the dysfunction in their relationship overall. Whether or not he was ever properly attracted to or in love with her, he's quite clearly an inattentive boyfriend to an egregious degree. Who the hell goes traveling for an extended period without saying a word to their partner?? But he's not the only one that lets their partner pretend to be something they're not.

Kiku and Miyokichi are both very talented actors. Boyfriend and Girlfriend are roles that they're both playing. They're the happy heterosexual couple! Miyokichi seems to latch onto Kiku in large part for the sake of her safety (and because she doesn't know how to exist without a boyfriend in her life). And however much pleasure he may or may not get from Miyokichi's advances, I think Kiku stays in the relationship with her at least in part out of a sense of social obligation. She's beautiful and hitting on him. Young men are supposed to have girlfriends. He's encouraged to date to get experience for his rakugo. Is saying "no" even an option?

But because they're both playing roles, because they're both invested in Doing A Relationship as much as they're invested in each other as individuals, both of them skim along the other's surface. Neither of them ever volunteers to tell the other their real name, and apparently neither of them ever tries to ask. They spend eight years together, but those years are spent dating the personas of Kikuhiko and Miyokichi, not daring to look at the people underneath those masks.

[pheenick]

always delighted by how universal the "and they lived happily ever after and the show DEFINITELY ENDS HERE" hits on episode 11 of sgrs

[tomoyoo]

series where gay sex would've fixed everything = berserk ≠ shouwa genroku rakugo shinjuu