Light week! 1 performance, 1 movie, 1 novel.

Rakugo by Katsura Sunshine
My favorite manga currently in serialization is Akane-Banashi, a manga devoted to a hundreds-years-old performing art I knew nothing about when it first started running: a performer sits on a pillow and tells a (generally comedic) story from hundreds of years ago filtered through their sensibilities. You may hear multiple Jugemus but you'll never hear the same Jugemu twice. 

But as much as I enjoyed the beautifully illustrated versions, it also scared me a bit, because Rakugo is all about the performer creating a world in the mind of the audience, and as I’ve talked about way too many times there are no worlds in my mind… and so I thought it just might not be for me. And anyway, it’s such a specific-to-Japan art form that I never even knew it existed! So I never sought it out.

Until a few months ago, when I walked by the New World Stages and saw a poster for Rakugo performances from Katsura Sunshine, who turns out to be only the second non-Japanese person to ever be deemed a Rakugo master, and the first in over 100 years. He has been performing in New York for seven years… Also he performed at the anime premiere event the Japan Society apparently did for the Akane-Banashi adaptation and I let my membership there expire so I had no idea:

F M fucking L.

In any case, I went to see him perform. In fact, my whole family did! And everyone had an absolute blast. I actually recognized one of the stories from the manga, but the details were new, and of course it's a totally different experience being in the room. We had tickets fairly close to the stage and got to really soak in the storytelling. Sunshine is super funny, and you can really feel his mastery of the art by considering the apprentices who served as opener and interlude between his stories; they were solid performers in their own right, but you could tell that they hadn't fully honed their personas (the first performer actually reminded me a bit of of early-chapters Akane), where Sunshine is locked the fuck in start to finish. 

And it's sad that this is his last show in New York for a while as he heads off on a world tour (this coming weekend, he's doing a series of shows in Tokyo), because I get it now. My whole lack of visualization may blunt the effect, but a well-told story is going to appeal no matter what, and yeah I'm very much appealed to. I look forward to his return. 

Your Name. (Makoto Shinkai, 2016)
One of my other go-to serialized manga is Are You Happy Lemon, a body-swapping romcom that literally last week (two years into the run) said “Hey, did you guys wish on a shooting comet or something” and the second most popular comment on this week’s issue ends: “The star went ‘All right. Your Name time.’” 

How apropos! Because if you look up any list of Best Anime Films, and you'll inevitably see the works of Makoto Shinkai, but despite having seen his name and some associated names such as Your Name. (period part of name) over and over again, it took the 10th anniversary theatrical re-release of that particular film to finally get to finally get me and golly I got got! It absolutely lives up to the hype!

Not immediately – beginning with a body-swapping teenage boy groping the teenage-girl body he's awoken to find himself in is A Choice – but as the stories of these two kids continued to intertwine (and, it turns out, not), I became increasingly invested in whatever it was that was going on. Like, the final callback to that Choice? Shockingly, genuinely emotional. (And hilarious to boot: the entire theater completely lost it, myself very much included.)

What sets Your Name. apart from all the other body-swap stories (there are dedicated sections of the “Body Swapping Appearances in Media” Wikipedia page for anime episodes and manga because it’s a very common trope in Japan) is the revelation that these two characters are not just swapping across space but across time… and while you could imagine all kinds of fun and silly hijinks that could ensue from that sort of story, here it’s very serious and indeed is a gutpunch of a revelation.

And while I did not cry, my movie-going companion did and I came super hecking close a whole bunch of times… and all throughout that back half in particular, I kept thinking, “Man, movies are just the best, aren’t they?” 

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep (Paul Tremblay, 2026)
Have you ever read a book so frustrating it made you want to write a book of your own? 

I hadn't. But I have.

It's not that I think I'm a better writer than Paul Tremblay – and certainly I'm not a better author – but I write in a way that I like, and he aggressively does not. Nearly every sentence in Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is (at least!) one word longer than I want to be; every idea takes just a bit more effort should be necessary. I was curious if this was a him thing or a book thing, so I downloaded a sample of his award-winning breakout A Head Full of Ghosts… and in the literal second sentence he describes jacket buttons “as large as kitten heads” and two sentences later, stones “wiggle under her feet like loose baby teeth.”

I don't know that I've ever seen prose so purple… and I just did not particularly enjoy being subjected to it non-fucking-stop for 300ish pages. So why did I read it? I use Storygraph to track my reading, and unlike Goodreads they allow for marking books as Did Not Finish! I could have just moved on to one of the literal four other library books I have out right now. 

But I wanted to see it through, because it's got a pretty solid sci-fi premise – Weekend at Bernie’s except Bernie has an AI in his head learning from a Gen Z girlie controlling his movements with an app – and an even more interesting structure – cutting between the third-person, objective experience of that Gen Z girlie and a second-person, very subjective experience of Bernie (whose actual name turns out to be Art because, ya know, we're putting the robots in Art (Step 1) to control Art (Step 2) to ??? (Step 3) and Destroy Humanity (Step 4)).

That's interesting! I wanted to see where it would go! And, well… to its credit, in a weirdly aggressive “Interlude” the author tells us the readers that we're not gonna like where it ends… but the reason I think he thought I wouldn't like it (it's bleak) is not the reason I didn't like it (it's stupid). 

So that's a shame. Post-NaNoWriMo novel-writing November here I come.