Episode 10 of Akane-banashi serves up the show’s central thesis on a silver platter.

What a tremendous twenty minutes of television. I think one of the marks of great fiction is the ability to draw the audience into a secondary world and forget about the real one, even if only for a brief moment. That experience of being completely immersed in another time and place is uniquely powerful, and this week’s Akane-banashi succeeds brilliantly. For a few minutes, I was no longer in my present context but rather sitting amongst the crowd, fully engrossed in the tale being told. That’s special, and a sign of how deftly the anime team has brought this manga to life.

Part of what makes this narrative illusion possible is the multiple layers of narrative ensconcing the core story. Obviously, we have the present-tense of Akane at the Karaku Cup, and all the elements therein. And we have the Jugemu story itself, too. But we get additional layers as Akane flashes back to her mother asking how she got her name, which then prompts yet another flashback to the day Akane was born. At this point, that puts us about, uh, three or four layers deep within the narrative, depending on how you slice it. This matryoshka stacking doll of stories pulls us deeper into the emotional thread that ties them all together, all the while obscuring our day-to-day concerns in the real world. In short, it achieves harmony with the very concept of a rakugo performance, and the anime audience and viewing audience become the same.

What a powerful impact this all has when brought together. Jugemu is nominally about parents who want a long and happy life for their child and try to choose an auspicious name. But in choosing all of them and making a comically long name, they ultimately are not thinking very carefully about him at all. They are not being selective or careful enough, and it ends up having comedic (and nearly drastic) consequences. This is juxtaposed with the story of Akane’s birth and how, even though she wasn’t named until the day after she was born, her parents thought carefully about what she should be named. Then, once we zoom back out, we realize just how special this young lady is, where she no longer belongs alongside the grandstanding of amateurs but rather among the professionals as her rakugo talents have achieved something quite great: the ability to convey many meanings from even a single tale oft-retold. Akane can do more than impose her will on these old tales – she can remind us why they still resonate with us today.

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Akane-banashi is currently streaming on
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