Tag: japan

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Pining For Those SAKAMOTO DAYS

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Picture a killer of legend. The kind of man whose very presence makes the blood of his foes freeze in their veins. Picture an unstoppable, elemental force of violence. Add gray hair and a pair of round spectacles, and you’ve got Taro Sakomoto [Sugita Tomokazu]. Now, picture what it would take to tame that man. Picture what could remove him from this life of ceaseless bloodshed. What could that be? What could possibly get him to hang up his gun?

Well, a pretty store clerk with a winning smile is probably a good start.

This, the tale of an ostensibly-retired uber-hitman, is Sakamoto Days. It’s a member of a particular genre that’s found increased purchase in recent years, a kind of post-Spy x Family melding of action anime with the domestic comedy. Usually involving a fundamentally good natured protagonist who can, nonetheless, throw down with the best of them. Spy x Family has the likable but duplicitous Loid Forger. Kindergarten Wars has its single woman—seeking good man—in Rita. And of course, Sakamoto Days has Sakamoto himself. Sakamoto Days has been a favorite among Jump readers in the know for a good while now, and thus this adaptation comes with a pretty weighty set of expectations placed upon it. For my purposes, I’m not super interested in engaging with that, although I will say this is the rare case of a shonen manga I actually follow somewhat regularly getting adapted into animation, so I’m happy for the series if nothing else. (It’ll be joined in this category by Witch Watch, also from Shonen Jump, later this year.)

Our story really begins when Shin [Shimazaki Nobunaga], formerly one of Sakamoto’s partners-in-crime, is tasked with killing the man. He left “the organization” which he and Shin both belonged to without permission and thus, he’s gotta die. Shin is initially perfectly willing to go along with this, and when he first sees the retired Sakamoto, he’s upset by what comes off to him as weakness. Most obviously, Sakamoto has put on quite a lot of weight in the five years since he retired, and we should take a quick detour to talk about this.

So! Fat jokes! There’s quite a few of them in Sakamoto Days. In the anglosphere, these have generally been considered in poor taste for a good 20 years now, but obviously, this isn’t the case everywhere. I reiterate all this basic-ass explanation of cultural differences just to say, as someone who’s also fairly big, I am not super upset by how Sakamoto Days handles its main character in this regard, even later on when we get into less-jokey but arguably dicier territory. I also think it helps that the character himself seems to have a good sense of humor about it (check the “Slim” shirt in the picture above). But if you are upset by it, I get that, and I’m also not going to tell you you Need To Get Over It or whatever other piece of canned finger-wagging rhetoric a certain kind of anime fan is sure to lean on when people want to discuss this subject. This is an area on which people will understandably be pretty polarized. So at the risk of making it seem more serious than it necessarily is, I think it’s important to just acknowledge that this specific subject gets under some peoples’ skin, and that’s fine. I have a very live and let live approach to arguably-problematic material in the arts, and this is no different a case than anything else, it’s just somewhat new territory for anime I’ve covered on this site specifically.

It is worth noting though, that Shin’s initial judgement of Sakamoto is wholly incorrect. He sees Sakamoto, now grown happy and fat and the proud proprietor of a small konbini with his wife [Aoi, played by Touyama Nao] and their adorable daughter [Hina, played by Kino Hina, no relation], and assumes he’s grown soft in a metaphorical sense, too. This is not so.

Despite some reluctance once he senses that Sakamoto’s killer instincts haven’t actually dulled terribly much—he’s an esper, and can read minds, and is thus treated to Sakamoto’s amusingly gory idle fantasies of stabbing him to death—Shin is eventually convinced to try taking him out. This goes poorly for him, and this is where we get to the anime’s biggest strength.

All told, it is simply just a solid, good translation of the manga’s inventive action scenes to animation. Sakamoto immediately gets to flex both his wits and his still-sharp combat skills here, deflecting a pistol bullet with a gumball and using various other random objects around his store to render Shin harmless. There’s too much slow-mo, and the presence of merely some traditional sakuga instead of wall to wall sakuga will leave some unhappy, but so far, there’s really not a lot to complain about. (I’ve seen some scuttlebutt about the color palette, too. But honestly I think the gritty, somewhat dingy look works well for this series.) The vibe is captured pretty much perfectly.

These setpieces are what Sakamoto Days is about. There is a story, to be sure, a decently interesting one at that, where various characters are torn between the sprawling assassin underworld and the call of a normal, quiet life. There’s comedy, which is amusing if rarely laugh-out-loud funny. And there are also some quite sweet domestic scenes, as well. But the real main concern of Sakamoto Days are these setpieces, wild everything-but-the-kitchen-sink affairs that grew only moreso as the manga went on, and which make a good first showing here. There’s an escalation in the first episode already, even, as Sakamoto opts to rescue Shin once his employers try to take him out for not fulfilling his contract. This second scene is even flashier, all glinting gunmetal, roundhouse kicks, and taser lightning as Sakamoto cuts through a warehouse of goons with ease.

The sell is simply this, if you liked those scenes, you’ll get a kick out of Sakamoto Days. If you like the scene afterward, where Sakamoto hires Shin as an employee at his store, since the esper has nowhere else to go, you’ll like Sakamoto Days a lot. What you see is what you get. I think what we see is pretty cool.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Dead or Alive 1333 – In Search of THE ELUSIVE SAMURAI

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

The opening few minutes of The Elusive Samurai are mostly setup, to establish our feudal Japanese setting, and some basic character humor. I must stress, not very good character humor. These are all cracks at the expense of one-note stereotypes; an ableist caricature that serves as a puppet ruler, a greedy, homely girl who hounds our main character because she has Mon signs in her eyes over the idea of marrying him someday, etc. I bring this up first not to criticize a Jump adaptation for having Jump manga humor (it’s an unfortunate reality of most things that run in the magazine, honestly), but to point out that Elusive Samurai pulls off a pretty nasty little trick with it, one that I can only respect. By the end of the episode, no matter what you thought of these characters and their flat interjections of comedy the first time around, you’re going to miss them, and appreciate the stabs of comedy that remain, no matter how out of place they’d otherwise seem.

The Elusive Samurai is interesting as an adaptation, essentially holding the manga open and bleeding it. The resulting effect is a series of incredibly strong tones, moods, and single scenes that work excellently in of themselves but only cohere if you take a step back. This isn’t a major departure from the manga, to be clear. Both feature a wild tonal seesaw. But the manga’s visual experimentation in the first chapter is constrained. Panels align to grids, pages are more or less orderly. Ambitious, but typical. The anime, meanwhile, is a shattered, slivered kind of chaos. Everything clashes with everything. All abrupt jolts. A procession of staccato jumps. It’s abrupt. Percussive. An analogy: Elusive Samurai is a song. Its plot beats, the rhythm. Tokiyuki, our lead, is the melody. When the action follows him, it sings and soars. He’s like a rabbit; nimble, ferociously committed to his own survival, and so cute you can’t help but be on his side. Yuikawa Asaki gives him an endearingly boyish voice, which goes a long way to elevating his already strong characterization from the manga.

I’m not trying to downplay that manga; it still does quite a lot with the 50ish pages of its opening chapter. But one gets the clear sense that it’s straining against the format a little1, which simply isn’t true of the anime. Every hook and jab designed to throw you off kilter feels intentional. Around the episode’s halfway point, Tokiyuki and his older brother—the child of a concubine—are playing with a kickball. It ends up on a roof, and it never comes back down. Instead, an ice-cold match cut turns it into a severed head, and from then on, Tokiyuki’s idyllic life is over.

Let’s rewind a little. Hojo Tokiyuki was a real person, a member of the Hojo, a house in 14th century Japan who were, in loose terms, nominal rulers of the country but several steps removed from any actual power. (The Hojo were, and Tokiyuki is the heir of at the start of the story, something absurd like the regents for the shogun for the Emperor. In turn, they, via Tokiyuki’s father, who is here the ableist caricature mentioned up at the top of this article.) The Elusive Samurai is thus, very loosely, historical fiction. Its events comprise the leadup to, and depending on the time period this series spans, possibly the actual events of, the Nanboku-chō Wars.

This friendly-looking tale of straightforward heroism is presented to us at the start of the series as an example of what we will not be seeing here.

This setting contextualizes all of these tone shifts somewhat. On the one hand, Tokiyuki is a child. He’s a boy of scarcely 8 whose tutors, throughout the episode’s bright forehalf, chastise him for being lazy, for running away when he doesn’t want to do something, and just generally being too carefree. But he is also a noble, and while his father’s position is that of a puppet, it is still a position. These expectations must weigh on him, and we get some sense of how when we’re introduced to our other main character.

Suwa Yorishige [Nakamura Yuuichi], a priest, is introduced to us, to Tokiyuki, literally beaming. The boy-prince finds himself in a tree and Yorishige appears suddenly behind him, offering portents of glory and doom in an extremely overbearing, forceful fashion.

A divinity dwells within him and seems to spill out of the screen; when he’s “on,” he emits radiant lights, dimmed somewhat only by his snarky assistant Shizuku [Yano Hinaki], who explains he’s a sham of a priest, but a real oracle. When Yorishige proclaims that Tokiyuki will, in a few years time, be a war hero beloved and feared in alteration, the prince is skeptical, and he promptly darts off once again.

Returning to his castle, we return to the scene of he and his brother playing. We return to the ball, and to the severed head.

When the violence intrudes in the episode’s second half, it is immediate, overwhelming, and oppressive. Like the smoke from a fire, but not like the smoke from a fire, as the city burns in very literal flames. The betrayal of Takauji [Konishi Katsuyuki], a vassal of Tokiyuki’s, marks a massive and irreversible turning point in the individual lives of not just Tokiyuki and every other character, but history itself. The two are juxtaposed; big, white text pops up like news headlines, proclaiming mass death, including of characters we met in the lighthearted first half of the episode. Tokiyuki’s archery teachers? Dead. His father? Committed suicide alongside his retainers. Kiyoko [Matsuda Satsumi], the girl who teases him in the very first main scene of the episode? “Violated and brutally killed,” per the sub track. These things aren’t dwelled on, exactly. They’re just presented as cold facts as the city of Kamakura burns to cinders. (Although it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that many of these characters are the very same who offhandedly called him cowardly in the episode’s first half.) The pounding drums of what’s become a war song.

One can hardly blame Tokiyuki for being completely devastated. When Yorishige appears to rescue him, he initially rejects the offer. He wants to die alongside his father. What’s more surprising is that the sham shaman obliges, pushing the displaced prince off of a cliff and alerting a group of samurai to his presence. In this hopeless situation, does the rabbit lay down and die?

Of course not. The running, ducking, bobbing, hiding, and dodging of the first half of the show comes flooding back. This time, with consequence. The samurai hack and cleave at him, but only hit each other. They go from an indistinct, merged smear of viciousness to cutting each other’s limbs off; both senses of the phrase “bleeding together” bleeding together. Improbably, Tokiyuki escapes. He, Yorishige, and Shizuku retreat into the night. The composition of the show has flipped around; now, Tokiyuki is the percussion, and the melody are the smoldering flames reaching into the night sky as he flees.

Yorishige lays out a plan. Tokiyuki can’t defeat Takauji alone, he must hide, he must flee, he must court allies and deceive his enemies. Tokiyuki must become El-ahrairah; cunning, full of tricks, listener and runner. That’s just how it goes for a prince with a thousand enemies. If it feels hard to read any glory into such a tale, that’s probably the point. A story where the hero is a coward and the villain sends armies to rape and murder townsfolk isn’t the cheeriest thing, no matter how much cheesing for the camera Yorishige might do. Then again, brutal violence is hardly a foreign element to this kind of historical fiction. That’s probably part of the point, too. The show spells it out directly; Tokiyuki is a hero of life. Takauji, his nemesis, one of death.

The series asks us to take on faith that this will be worth it, in the end, that it will tell a satisfying story. It’s a fair point to raise! All of these visual tricks are great and lovely and engaging, but does this story come together? If you take a very big picture view, you can read its dizzying fractiousness as intentional, as I’ve chosen to do here, but we’re in for 11 more episodes of this stuff, so it’s fair to ask what it will all add up to. And there is always the temptation to try to be definitive. If you forecast that a show will do this or that, and then it does, you look like a prophet. (Or, at least, someone who knows their Japanese history, in this case.) The honest answer though is that we won’t know if it feels “worth it” until we get there, and I think looking to divine the future is, in the case of something so freewheeling, probably doomed to frustration. The Elusive Samurai‘s visual element alone gives me more than enough to chew on to want to come back next week, but combined with the plight of Tokiyuki, fleeing into the night with his whole world in smoldering splinters behind him, it becomes magnetic. I have to know more.

1: Although it does experiment in its own way, eg. a raised sword jutting through one panel to pierce another on the opposite page.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.