Mayo Chiki is never going to be considered a great anime, moderately entertaining and amusing – yes, but great – no; however, even for an anime like Mayo Chiki, being aware of classical Japanese literary works can come in handy. My own knowledge of classical Japanese literary works is very, very limited but I happened to have the required knowledge to understand the joke in the final scene of episode 10 and to find it hilarious.

For those that haven’t seen Mayo Chiki, the scene in question starts out with a character named Usami (the one letter difference her name and bunny – usagi – has been used for humorous purposes already) who is playing a video game given to her as a “present”. The game features a chibi version of herself trying to catch a carrot. This appears to be a simple joke until Usami catches the carrot and a pyramid of creepy characters latch onto her as she’s being drawn up. This tickles my memory; I’ve seen this before. My suspicions are confirmed when the “angelic” character cuts the string holding the carrot and Usami falls into a pool of blood straight out of Hell.

Like I said, I’ve seen this before. I wish I could say that I’ve taken to reading classic Japanese literature because it probably would be helpful in understanding Japanese culture but I haven’t.  Instead, I remember an anime that aired a couple of years ago by the name of Blue Literature (Aoi Bungaku). Animated by Madhouse and watched by almost no one, it featured several critically acclaimed, well-known works in 20^th century Japanese literature adapted to anime form. It was a really great anime and one that I wished more people had watched. One of the tales used was a story written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa – The Spider’s Thread which was published in 1918.

The Spider’s Thread was written as a children’s story and the anime version features an evil thief  who finally gets what he deserves. Right before his death, he happened to spare the life of a spider and for that one good deed he is given a chance to leave Hell and enter Heaven. This chance comes in the form of a spider’s thread that is hung down allowing the thief  to climb out of the pits of Hell. Of course, there are many other people in Hell that would like to leave Hell and these people try to climb out as well. The thief, fearing the thread would break and not caring about the others, tries to physically stop these people from climbing up too. This compassionless behavior seals the fate of the thief  and he falls  back down to Hell after the spider cuts the thread to Heaven and walks away.

By the way, the thief was fabulously voiced by Mamoru Miyano who’s now well-known for voicing Okabe Rintarou, the mad scientist from Steins;Gate.

Even though I happened to get the reference this time, I was reminded that anime does, in fact, come from a foreign culture and even relatively well-versed individuals in a foreign culture are lacking in so many of the areas that native viewers just know.

So, that was the joke to that scene in Mayo Chiki. I know a joke is not funny if it needs explained but next time it’ll be funny (especially if you go back and watch Blue Literature or read the original work).

The initial idea of creating an anime series based on famous Japanese literature isn’t the kind of premise that usually generates intense interest. Probably, this series would appeal to people interested in the horror/psychological genre of anime. However, this series could be easily used to introduce someone to anime whom isn’t readily familiar with Japanese culture or the typical anime fare. Also, it is intensely interesting to someone with a literature background, such as myself.

Aoi Bungaku – aka Blue Literature

“No Longer Human”

The first work of classic modern Japanese literature animated in this series is “No Longer Human” by Osamu Dazai, the second-best selling novel in Japan. This is a great introduction to Japanese culture, particularly parts of the dark side of Japanese culture: suicide and fear of female sexuality. The main character is the son of a well-to-do businessman, who finds himself struggling with the stereotypical Japanese malaise. He feels detached from humanity and cold. He is unable to relate with people and especially not women, and considers suicide at many different points of his life.

This novel demonstrates that the psychologically dark story has been alive and well in the Japanese consciousness for over a half-century. There is a very interesting chicken-egg debate: did he become a sociopath because of his trauma from early sexual experiences, or was he a sociopath prior to those experiences. Each of the female characters embodies an archetypal woman: mother, girlfriend, wife, or daughter. Each time, he ultimately rejects this relationship out of disgust, cowardice, disconnect, or fear. It seems almost that this story comes from a time in history when Japanese psychology has not yet learned the effects of sexual abuse, since his sociopathy is described as a form of inhumanity.

The success of this series will depend on the quality of the future novels being converted to anime form, since “No Longer Human” is such a strong story it will be hard to follow if the next stories are not equally complex.

-S.G.

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Steelbound here …

I somehow got derailed and failed to post the other two entries that my sister wrote about a month ago. Luckily, she’s been too busy with  getting Chibi (a very large purebred Rottweiler) moved into her house and finished with guard dog training to notice . If you missed the introduction of  my sister as a guest writer, you can check it out here. 

This series ran back in the Fall 2009 season and at the time I was really impressed with Madhouse trying something like this and then  impressed with the quality of the stories. I would have liked a better mix of stories adapted – is all of Japanese literature really that depressing? However, when I was thinking of my initial batch of shows that I wanted my sister to watch, I realized this anime series would be perfect for her. It wasn’t a series that would ever get licensed for America and it’s a series that aligns with her interests. Hopefully I can convince her to watch the rest of the series.

Kobato is this season's honorable mention.

The final part of my look at the surprisingly decent fall season is the countdown of the best titles of the season. This is always a difficult process since I enjoy so many different types of shows and there’s no clear-cut way of comparing a slice-of-life show to a shounen action show to a thought-provoking SF drama set in the near future but at the same time, it’s fun because it helps me focus on exactly why I like certain shows.

The first step in the process is to figure out how many places will this season’s top list include. The number changes from season-to-season based on the number of quality shows that I feel deserve to be mentioned. This narrowed the field down to eight shows and now the task turned to ranking these shows that I considered great shows of the season. Picking the number one spot was fairly easily but the rest of the list felt like pulling teeth so; whereas, I’ll argue that all eight of these shows belong on the list, I won’t argue to hard over the exact order.

And with that, let’s head to the countdown.

8 – Blue Literature

The use of classic modern Japanese literature as source material pretty much assured that Blue Literature was going to be this season’s most unique and thought-provoking anime. And because it was Madhouse animating this, Blue Literature also had this season’s best production values as well as high quality storytelling. So, with all that going for it, it might seem strange why this isn’t ranked higher; I’m even a bit shocked why I just couldn’t place this higher and believe me, I kept trying. In the end, I realized what stopped this from going even higher is that, while it’s obvious the stories picked are very well written, only one of the five stories used ended happily and it’s much harder to really get swept away by sad or depressing stories. I know that sounds shallow, and maybe it is, but I read plenty of depressing books and it’s not like current events have looked positive in a long time so is it so bad to gravitate towards those anime that make me laugh or feature characters that are just a bit better/heroic then the vast majority of people walking this planet, myself included.

7 – Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood

I continue to deeply love where the story of Full Metal goes; the conspiracies get deeper and more insidious, the dangers get more threatening, and the world of FMA gets more complex as new characters and their ambitions get introduced. The majority of this season, however, had the show in build-up mode with very little pay-off which explains why this didn’t get ranked higher; I expect next season to contain much more pay-off in the form of super-awesome confrontations/fights and resolutions to at least some of the plot threads that have been introduced and will probably rank much higher.

6 – Sasameki Koto

At first, I wasn’t expecting too much from Sasameki Koto but I was quickly won over by the quality of the characters and the show became one of my favorites that just happened to be a yuri show. The main character, Murasame Sumika, was dealt a very tough hand – she likes her best friend, Ushio, in that way and Ushio likes girls as well, just not tall athletic girls like Sumika so Sumika has to bite her tongue and be the caring best friend after Ushio gets rejected by the cute girls – and her struggle to do the right thing over what she wants to do help made Sasameki Koto a great show. Other memorable characters included the boy who fell for Sumika and started cross-dressing (and became a female model) because he knew she liked girls or the girl who always, and I mean always, had some sort of food in her hands. Sasameki Koto could have finished higher if the ending had been better.

5 – Sora No Otoshimono

The biggest surprise on this countdown is the presence of Sora no Otoshiomono on it; not because it’s a terrible show but because it wasn’t a terrible show. It should have been just like almost every other ecchi comedy series – generic and not very good or funny. Instead, Sora no Otoshiomono expertly cultivated an absurdist, over-the-top feel that repeatedly surprised and delighted.

4 – Cross Game

What can I say, Cross Game just continues to chug along making awesome look easy. The highlight of this season was to see how a new character shook the show and it’s characters up but that was hardly the only thing that made this cour of Cross Game good. We got a marriage proposal whose answer depends on if Kou’s team can make it to Koshien, new possible pairings like Azuma x Aoba, general Kou coolness, and new storylines like Aoba trying out for Japan’s national female baseball team.

3 – To Aru Kagaku no Railgun

After the second episode of Railgun I was ready to drop it because I was sure that the manga author had once again screwed up; this time focusing on shoe-horning as much Kuroko antics as possible into a manga and disregarding such important items as plot, characters, and story. Then a funny thing happened, the show started to actually work. The four main characters were fleshed out and developed a great chemistry between them, a deeper story was first hinted at and then expertly told, and let’s not forget how cool Misaka’s rail gun ability is (especially when J.C. Staff has the budget). I think I actually squealed in joy when I realized that Railgun was going to run past the fall season into the winter season.

2 – Astro Fighter Sunred Season 2

Okay, I admit to holding this list up so I could watch enough of this season of Sunred that I could place it on this list and feel justified in doing so. I just love this show to bits. I was a little worried that the second season would start to feel a little stale but each episode seems to offer a different reason why this show is so awesome. For example, one episode featured the leader of evil organization explain how they have to itemize all their expenses so the worldwide headquarters will reimburse them, another episode featured both the hero and evil leader attending the neighborhood meeting and the hero get called to task for not properly sorting his garbage like the evil leader, another episode featured a gadget the evil organization created that allowed them to pinpoint where the hero is but all this did was force them to attend a funeral, go to a very high-end restaurant, and almost receive a very serious beat down by two other heroes when they finally realized that they could just call the girlfriend of the hero (who has made friends with the evil organization) when they wanted to know where he was located. I’d go so far to say that once I get around to rewatching this show, I think there’s a good chance that Astro Fighter Sunred would earn a spot on my top 5 comedies list.

1 – Kemono no Souja Erin

And as much as I loved Sunred, it still didn’t get real close to unseating Erin from this season’s top spot. Once I realized how good this series was, I just knew that this last cour of episodes when all the various stories were threaded together would seriously rock and it did. What I didn’t expect was the little tease they did at the very end for the next two books of the source material that’s coming out this summer. It’s a great scene by itself but I’m already salivating over the idea of Kemono no Souja Erin getting a sequel. One of the ways this show really sets itself apart from a lot of other anime is the process in which the show’s hero is tried and tempered before stepping into the role as hero; it made her an especially memorable character and made her convictions that she fought for all that more real and worthy to fight for. I’ll say right now that Kemono no Souja Erin has better than a 50% chance of getting named my top anime of 2009 when I get to that list.

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Links to the other parts of my Fall 2009 Season Awards

Part 1 – Cast and Character Awards
Part 2 – Genre and Misfit Awards
Part 3 – VMA Awards

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So this fall season turned out better then I initially thought it would but I don’t see myself saying the same thing for the winter season. There’s a couple of good shows but it’s just a couple and I’m be talking about them soon.