Columnist Andrew Osmond weighs up two impressive anime series about ‘rakugo,’ a venerable kind of Japanese storytelling.
Last year, I wrote about two anime series driven by voices. One was Flower and Asura, about school students honing their dramatic readings. The other anime, much better, was Wave, Listen to Me, about a woman’s spontaneously unfiltered rants on radio.
This week, I’m looking at two more series about voice artists. One is a current show, Akane-banashi, streaming weekly both on Netflix and on an official YouTube channel. The other is a decade-old series from 2016 called Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, and you’ll find it on Crunchyroll under that name. The translated manga adds “Descending Stories” to the title, which is what I’ll call it from now on.
Each series is very different, yet they overlap greatly and make a rewarding double-bill. They’re not just about the art of speaking, but about a very specific form of Japanese performance with a centuries-old heritage – rakugo.
You might describe rakugo as an elaborately formalized Japanese stand-up. “Kneel-down” would be closer, though – one of rakugo’s defining features is that it’s delivered while the speaker kneels on a stage. There’s no scenery, and props are limited to a small fan and a cloth. The speaker’s challenge is to perform a short story, usually comical, sometimes bizarre and bawdy, and often rooted in the nineteenth-century Japan when rakugo flourished.
Readers of AWN may have encountered a rakugo story without knowing it. That story is “Mt. Head,” which was animated as an Oscar-nominated short in 2002 by Koji Yamamura. (The below video is an official copy, though you may find it’s auto-dubbed; you can go to settings to fix that.) Yamamura updates the tale to a contemporary Japan, and his depiction of the absurd scenario keeps the narrator off-screen, but the voice-over’s in the traditional style.
One way in which rakugo differs from stand-up as we know it is that many performers tell venerable, well-known stories, passed down through the generations. The challenge is to give them a new, individual life. When it comes to Western analogues, you could compare this to the challenge of performing a new Hamlet. But given that I’ve already mentioned stand-up, I can’t resist citing the notoriously filthy “Aristocrats” joke, which could be the antithesis of rakugo’s refinement. By that argument, America’s anti-rakugo master might have been Gilbert “the parrot in Aladdin” Gottfried.
A literary anime
Akane-banashi and Descending Stories each treat rakugo in wholly contrasting ways. Akane-banashi, which I’ll discuss lower down, is the new show. It’s based on a strip in Japan’s top-selling Shonen Jump magazine and it’s down-the-line “genre” Shonen Jump fare. It’s a cheerful tale of a plucky hero youngster who’s determined to excel in their chosen field. To call it genre fare is no diss; it’s a smart, enjoyable show.
Descending Stories, though, has a literary scope and themes. Broadcast in 25 parts through 2016 and 2017, it’s adapted from a manga in a woman’s magazine by Haruko Kumota which debuted in 2010 and ran for six years. Following the anime, Descending Stories also became a live-action Japanese series in 2018 (trailer). The anime was directed by Mamoru Hatakayema (aka Shinichi Omata), who’d later adapt the school romcom Kaguya-sama: Love is War.
The anime’s two seasons are distinct halves. The extended first episode, set around 1980, has a bumptious young man, Kyoji, showing up at one of the last remaining rakugo theatres where he buttonholes its most respected performer, Yakumo. Despite being an ex-con with the tattoos to prove it, Kyoji demands to become the great man’s apprentice. Remarkably, Yakumo takes him on, apparently as an indulgent joke, and the episode follows Kyoji’s early fortunes.
However, the rest of the first season is a flashback, spanning the past decades from the 1930s. The word “showa” in the Japanese title refers to the long reign of Hirohito, from 1926 to 1989, and the story is partly a state-of-the-nation commentary on how Japan changed in that time. We see Yakumo’s boyhood, as a miserable misfit with no enthusiasm when he’s apprenticed to a rakugo master himself. But there’s a random factor; an unkempt, filthy little boy called Shin who appears from nowhere to be apprenticed too, bursting with confidence that he’ll be a master performer. (His parallels with Kyoji decades later are obvious.)
The anime’s first season follows Shin and Yakumo growing up, and their odd-couple friendship: Yakumo reserved and cautious, Shin undisciplined and irrepressible. One of the best episodes shows what happens where they’re forced apart by war; Yakumo’s emotional privation at losing his friend is as intense as any material suffering. But they find each other again, and their story continues post-war. Even when a geisha woman enters the scene, who’s plainly interested in Yakumo, she struggles to compete with the male characters’ bond.
This strand connects to the wider historical narrative. The geisha’s living is threatened by changes in the law in postwar Japan, which the story suggests are breaking the country’s links with the Japan of rakugo’s bawdy stories, of pleasure districts and the women on sale there. (If that sounds provocative, it’s nothing compared to what comes later.) Less contentiously, the character dynamic – two attractive men and the woman between them – recalls another period anime, Shinichiro Watanabe’s Kids on the Slope, about musicians in 1960s Japan. As in that series, you can see the men’s relationship as gay or queerbaiting, or else as a tender male friendship. I’ve gone into such questions elsewhere.
The anime’s second season resumes Kyoji’s apprenticeship to the older Yakumo in the 1980s, by which time the story has taken on dynastic proportions. Descending Stories is also unusual in its extended focus on one character – Yakumo – in two very different guises; the trepidatious young man of Season 1, who has hopes and ideals that he fears to voice, and the stern old master in the 1980s storyline, now willing for those hopes and ideals to die with him.
Animating rakugo
Descending Stories has none of the ornate absurdism of Yamamura’s Mt. Head. When its characters kneel and speak, much of the “animation” comes from a simple device. It’s the editing, letting the speaker’s expression and posture change instantly from one shot to the next, as he swaps between the different characters, talking and arguing with one another. (Many rakugo stories are 90 percent dialogues, though delivered by one person.) Animation fans may well think of a landmark scene in CG history – the conflicted Gollum in 2002’s The Two Towers, below.
Is this approach enough for an animated series? For some aesthetes, I know, it will be a waste of the medium, a symptom of anime’s live-action literalism. Within anime, you could compare Descending Stories’ approach unfavorably to the work of the director Satoshi Kon. Kon also showed Japanese history through the life of a performer in his film Millennium Actress, but that’s not why I’m bringing him up.
In another Kon film, 2003’s Tokyo Godfathers, a character delivers an extended monologue, mostly in one extended shot, his face bulging and grimacing throughout. Viewable here, this remarkable scene was animated in 280 drawings by Shinji Otsuka (he also drew a lot of the girls in Totoro). Kon’s subsequent TV series Paranoia Agent had a character (Kawazu) whose face changed in a magic-realist way, conjuring lipstick and eyeliner in the blink of an edit. You can argue that rakugo should be animated like that, even if Kon’s characters weren’t rakugo performers.
All I can say is Descending Stories’ plainer approach worked for my audience of one. I found many of its performance scenes electrifying, the kneeling speakers deploying the stagecraft of pop performers, the expressions cumulatively powerful without needing cartoon stunts.
Some of the best performances are of ghost stories. Rakugo is usually linked with comedy, but it can invoke the magic and terror of campfire spine-tinglers in the dark. Descending Stories suggests they infect the rakugo storyteller more profoundly than the audience he’s scaring. But the scares can be followed by a louche tale of sex and scamming, like a 19th-century Lupin the Third. During Season 2, one character’s refined telling of a ghost story turns into a “real” life-or-death crisis, which another character deflects by telling a bawdy sex comedy. High and low, the stories sustain us.
The show’s wider look changes impressively too. It’s always a handsome series, but Episode 11 of the first season suddenly bubbles over with a new cartoon vibrancy as the child version of a key character is introduced. The same episode includes a hair-cutting scene that’s just beautiful.
I was impressed by the series from the start, though my enthusiasm sometimes faltered, especially in the first season. Some of the characters’ devout eulogies to perfecting their rakugo become robotically repetitive, deadening our sympathies. More seriously, there are couple of on-the-nose coincidences that pull the show’s literary aspirations down to the level of cartoon pulp. Yet the series also pulls off a storytelling coup; it involves a carefully-seeded lie to the audience, which is justified dramatically and emotionally.
And then…
Some oblique end notes
In this column, I try to avoid unnecessary story spoilers. That puts me in a hard place, as much of the discussion of Descending Stories revolves around the end of the series. It’s an ending that trips you like a horror film. I was applauding through the last episodes, especially the tender character work with multiple generations of the show’s dynasty. Then the closing minutes put me into open-mouthed shock.
I have no choice but to be oblique, though readers who’ve watched the series through will know what I’m talking about. Almost at the end, there’s a suggestion that the series has played a last trick on the audience – a skillful trick, but one that’s revolting in its implications. Crucially, there’s absolutely no acknowledgement that it is revolting, even in a deadpan “so it goes” way. It’s not just a (seemingly) terrible ending, but it retrospectively ruins the whole story we’ve spent 10 hours watching. That in itself is horribly fascinating.
Descending Stories’ ending raises issues of viewer reception, and specifically of foreign reception. Plainly, Japanese media often has vastly different standards of acceptable content from those in America and Britain, especially in anime. In the case of Descending Stories, I won’t pretend anime hasn’t gone there. The ending reminded me of two mainstream titles in manga and anime that did very similar things. A Japanese friend of mine claims that the device is a veritable trope of women’s manga.
Rakugo is a specifically Japanese art form. Through Descending Stories, Westerners are seldom mentioned, except as scourges of traditional Japanese life and culture. You could see Descending Stories’ ending as an unintentional statement to us. Like rakugo itself, it’s from a foreign culture with foreign values; we’re not the target audience. If we want to enjoy the story, there may be no alternative except to edit (Disneyfy?) it in our own heads.
Perhaps all that’s true. And yet… call it denial, but I don’t buy the anime’s shock suggestion on its own terms. It comes at the end of a show which has attuned us to look for unreliable narratives. I’d argue there are swathes of contrary evidence throughout the series, too many exchanges and interactions that don’t make plausible sense if you buy the “twist.” The twist itself is described as a fan theory by a character who’s seen none of the moments we have. He knows the plot, but not the myriad human details. Does that refute the twist being “real”? Heavens, I hope so.
Akane-banashi
Over to Akane-banashi on Netflix, which surely won’t plumb such murky depths. As noted above, it’s a typical “youngster on the road to glory” story; it debuted in 2022 as a strip in Shonen Jump magazine, drawn by Takamasa Moue.
The anime is directed, somehow, by Ayumu Watanabe, the director of Children of the Sea and Summer Time Rendering. He’s also helming another TV anime this season, the resplendent Witch Hat Atelier, which I covered recently. Judging by reports, much of Atelier’s production was finished well ahead of broadcast, which presumably let Watanabe handle Akane-banashi as well.
For my Japanese friends, though, there’s a bigger name attached than the director – the 70-year-old rock singer Keisuke Kuwata, who provides the anime’s opening and closing songs. With his band Southern All Stars, Kuwata’s been a giant presence in Japan since the 1970s. You can judge his opening number below.
Netflix has rated Akane-banashi “PG.” So far, it’s been an almost wholly wholesome series, save for a “comic” early misunderstanding when one character gets the wrong idea about why a middle-aged rakugo master is hanging round with a teenage girl. Actually, the girl is the show’s heroine, the titular Akane, and the master is secretly mentoring her. Like Descending Stories’ principals, Akane is drawn to rakugo for selfless reasons. One is her love for the medium. The other is her need to avenge her father, who was shockingly expelled from the rakugo world by a monstrous aged master who may as well be a demon sorcerer.
I started watching Akane-banashi when I was midway through my viewing of Descending Stories, and it was a whiplash. If the rakugo performances in the older show can feel sparse and simple, then Akane-banashi blares with the bells and whistles of a Shonen Jump production. Its rakugo storytelling is riddled with subjective freak-outs, flashbacks and commentaries on the performers’ strategies, which stretch moments into minutes. Shonen Jump’s usual, in other words.
Akane-banashi also gives us high-speed CliffsNotes summaries of the stories being told, when the performers have barely started telling those stories on screen. In Descending Stories, you were led to engage with both the story being told and the performer challenged to tell it well; each of these things drove the other. In Akane-banashi, the girl loves the rakugo stories, but the target Shonen Jump audience is just there to see her conquer them, or else be conquered.
It’s crass and brash, but as I said earlier, Akane-banashi is also smart. When Akane’s dad embarks on his (doomed!) performance in Episode 1, we get the perception of a rakugo judge. At first he’s startled that the father has skipped a highlight of the story he’s chosen; then it turns out that the canny storyteller is tailoring the tale to his own talents. If the performers in Descending Stories are pop stars, those in Akane-banashi are sports prodigies with strategies planned out like diagrams.
But Akane-banashi’s strategizing is interesting to the kind of viewer who couldn’t care less if a ball hits a net, and the show pictures the tactics interestingly. There are creative visuals amid the bangs and flashes, such as a glimpse of the cartoon figures that the dad conjures up with his words. Meanwhile, the series retains the devices that were fundamental to the rakugo in Descending Stories. The characters have solid expressions that become cumulatively powerful over the length of the performance, and funny switches in character aided by Two Towers editing. The substance goes with the flashy style.
For a long time, it seems that nothing in Akane-banashi has the ambition of Descending Stories, but it surprises on a human level. In one charming early episode, Akane performs to the residents of a care home. It foregrounds how she must play not just to individuals but to a group, a demographic, which was something Descending Stories didn’t articulate. The care home setting also feels like a wry acknowledgement of how rakugo is commonly seen in Japan today, a museum piece for OAPs which no teen could like.
That connects to a mini-argument set up between two of Akane’s fellow performers (she’s too selfless to see them as rivals, even when she competes against them). One of them assiduously studies Japan’s history, so that he can explain the old rakugo stories as he goes, making them comprehensible to his audience. Another performer modernizes a story completely, changing the characters and setting while keeping the old story plainly recognizable. The underlying story in this case is a gross poop joke.
As of writing, I’ve seen the show’s first 10 episodes. The later ones comprise a tournament arc, setting Akane against a range of competitors with their own wily techniques. A moonlighting anime voice-actor gives the characters in her stories extra lines to show off her range. It’s a face-off that’s a long way from anything in Descending Stories, and yet the characters often perform the same stories, making the shows themselves two contrasting rakugo acts.
Incidentally, both anime give a central place to perhaps the most famous rakugo story of all, which has an appeal as broad as a Disney film. Called “Jugemu,” it’s the supremely silly tale of a baby who has a long name, so long it becomes a mad tongue-twister, which the rakugo performer must recite many times over without stumbling. In Descending Stories, there’s a wonderful scene in which a character’s spirit is lifted by performing “Jugemu” to a hall of cheering children.
In Akane-banashi, the protagonist must perform it while facing down her arch-enemy, in a battle to decide if her hero’s journey ends here. It couldn’t be more generic, yet the result is a triumph. The show’s visual trickery becomes a reality-crossing lyricism, while the “competition” format is subverted with a grace which reminded me of Masaaki Yuasa’s Ping Pong The Animation. Ironically, I think this is where Akane-banashi crosses the line; its “Jugemu” set-piece beats the one in Descending Stories.
