#sgrs

[yuramoonbow]

the god of death, the god of art

[digitalroot]

When things were hard for me, I wanted to hear your rakugo. All the good, all the bad... Your rakugo has given me every emotion imaginable. That's why I can't be without it.

[tiferet]

farewell my concubine (1993) shouwa genroku rakugo shinjuu (2016)

[grassbreads]

Man, genuinely there's little that excites me more than encountering queerness in fiction where I wasn't expecting it. I'm gonna be thinking about Kikuhiko/Yakumo from SGRS for so long.

Even setting aside the subtext of his feelings for Sukeroku, the narrative around his relationship to gender norms and his own expression is so fascinating. Guy who grows up steeped in rigid 40s gender roles and actively tries to enforce them, yet only truly feels like himself when he's acting on stage as a woman. Guy who says his life would have been better if he were born a woman and then refuses to elaborate.

[animefeminist]

Chatty AF 181: Ace/Aro Representation in Anime and Manga – Part 1

Dee, Alex, and Cy discuss asexual and aromantic coded characters and several new manga with explicit ace and/or aro leads.

Episode Information

Date Recorded: February 1, 2022 Hosts: Dee, Alex, Cy

Episode Breakdown

0:00:00 Intros 0:02:14 Ace/Aro 101 0:10:05 Conflation with frigidity/prudishness/trauma 0:12:18 Linguistic differences between Japanese and English 0:15:50 Koisenu Futari and recognition and evolution of terminology 0:19:52 Ace coding in anime and manga 0:28:30 Favorite ace/aro coded characters 0:42:10 Our Dreams at Dusk and Sex Ed 120% 0:49:50 I Want to be a Wall 0:57:59 Outro

[seasaltmemories]

Another look at complicated grief and memories that haunt

[mapoeggplant]

to be born and murdered by art: is there anywhere to go if not to the stage?

like the ones who were privileged enough to hear sukeroku, with flesh and bones, tell a story we, as the audience, were privileged enough to experience a long old tale of rakugo being born.

you and a rakugo artist, facing each other in a room completely devoted from an audience. there, he tells a story about the day he met the god of death and how he killed him, years later. his candle, still glowing, takes a form of a woman from time to time. what is he hiding?

showa genroku rakugo shinju not only tells a story about the beauty of an old art, but how human experience and relationships are bound to be laced from here to eternity. solitude, even as a childhood dream, would not be fair to the ones who made your story worth reading.

it’s about passion and life, never letting the flame go out. it’s about making past transforms itself in future, about the burden left to the ones who cary an old name. about humans impacting humans and changing their lives drastically, like it or not.

because what is tradition without it shares of tragedy? what is happiness to the one who only experienced grief? what is letting go of something that makes you whole? what is love to those unworthy of it?

sgrs not only teach us about rakugo: it is raguko on itself. a story to cry and laugh of, to sit in the same room over and over again just because you found your favorite voice. it’s about finding our own rakugo, even if we could barely tell a story on our own.

[beldaroot]

it's very interesting that people genuinely consider the ending twist of showa genroku rakugo shinju to have happened in the story bc for me, the gay subtext for yakumo is so apparent that there is just no way he could've slept with any women, let alone the daughter of the man he loved and the woman he was supposed to love.

and not to mention that the whole premise of the story is that rakugo allows for unreliable narration. the ambiguity of the ending goes with the entire theme that these characters are simply retelling stories and it's a mix of both fact and fiction.

also the way this "yakumo is actually shinnosuke's father" theory only came up from a dude who was obsessed with yakumo but never actually came close enough to truly know him. i think it was purposefully written that it was eisuke who created the theory bc while he never became a successful rakugo performer, he still used the essence of rakugo - aka the juicy, entertaining storytelling - to manifest a narrative he thought was believable with the little information he had.

[katzenklavierr]

I watched SGRS over the weekend

[tomoyoo]

sigh is my brain is still processing this series or have i gone crazy once again

[digitalroot]

Bon. First off, you gotta start smiling.

[fayegumi]

what is it now, mother?

[grassbreads]

I've been rereading more slowly through SGRS since I binged through the whole thing in one day the first time, and god.

In Kikuhiko's first rakugo performance after he and Sukeroku do their play, he does a story about a woman searching for someone to commit double suicide with her. Specifically, the only bits of his longer performance that are transcribed into the manga are snippets of this central character picking out and beginning to seduce the man she wants to target.

Kiku finds himself when he does the play with Sukeroku. He finds something fundamental in both the female role he puts on and the way he's able to command the audience's attention to him. And that's what becomes his connection to rakugo—it's a place where he can find belonging and adoration showing off that aspect of himself. So as the first performance after that, Kiku's performance of Shinagawa Shinjuu is a beginning of sorts. It's the start of his true love affair with rakugo.

And in that moment, we're shown Kiku performing a scene of a woman choosing the man with whom she'll commit lovers' suicide. Kiku—the man who decades later muses constantly about taking rakugo as an art form to death with him—starts his career in earnest performing as a woman who's just decided who she wants to take to death with her.

Then the scene goes on, and we get a little snippet of Kiku as the woman beginning to seduce her lover to death. In the same way as Kiku is seducing his audience into his story, and just as rakugo is truly seducing him. Kiku is the seductress in the story and in his performance, but by nature of the art form, he's also the naive man seduced to death. He's playing all roles. If Kiku wants his love affair with rakugo to end in death, then equally, rakugo leads him to his own demise.

As an old man, Kiku sets fire to the theater and just about makes that double suicide a reality. The building is eventually rebuilt, however, and Kiku's family and friends carry on the torch of rakugo. It's only Kiku himself who dies not too long after. He's saved in the moment by his chosen family and connections, yes. He says that he was ultimately denied his lovers' suicide. And yet, his final performance to the dead seems to mark the beginning of the end for him.

Kiku's first performance after the play is, in every way, a brilliant moment of intertextuality. Kikuhiko is Osome deciding she wants to die, implicitly tying his discovery of what rakugo means to him to suicide. He's Osome choosing who to die with as he truly chooses his art form. He's Osome entrancing the audience like they're the foolish Kinzo. He's Osome seducing rakugo itself to die with him—taking the first true steps down the path that will lead to him becoming the be all end all of the art (emphasis on the potential for him to end all). He's Kinzo being seduced by the offer of suicide with rakugo. He's Kinzo being entranced by the adoration of the audience like Osome's so-called love.

For this moment of Kiku coming into his own and entering his doomed love affair with rakugo, there's no narrative that could have suited him better.

[ichiharas-familiar]

Some bl authors do write women in a very stupid way and Kumota has certainly written some bullshit in her time, but honestly if you dont like Miyokichi that is a you problem :)

[moonlightsapphic]

Not me suddenly realizing after two whole years after watching the anime that Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju was an angsty love triangle between two (probably) bisexual men constantly pining for each other but instead alternatively settling for that one straight woman that they pretended to be obsessed with instead. Never has a trio of people needed therapy more than these three istg someone help them pls

[wutaijiemei]

bro. 1pm wednesday thinking about the french sgrs covers.