Akane-banashi Volumes 7-9 Manga Review

After her tumultuous debut into the world of professional rakugo, Akane has been given an opportunity to show she really has what it takes by participating in Ikken Arakawa's Four Person Selection Event. But Akane's meteoric rise has already started to look shaky, and can she conquer the skill of other Arakawa trainees, including Hikaru, let alone impress a fearsome combination of art critics and the scariest thing of all: a live-streaming audience?

Akane-Banashi is translated by Stephen Paul with lettering by Snir Aharon.

After her tumultuous debut into the world of professional rakugo, Akane has been given an opportunity to show she really has what it takes by participating in Ikken Arakawa's Four Person Selection Event. But Akane's meteoric rise has already started to look shaky, and can she conquer the skill of other Arakawa trainees, including Hikaru, let alone impress a fearsome combination of art critics and the scariest thing of all: a live-streaming audience?

Akane-Banashi is translated by Stephen Paul with lettering by Snir Aharon.

In my last review, I griped about the fact that while Akane's debut into the professional world of rakugo hits snags in the form of toxic workplace behavior and misogyny, her status as a protagonist seemed to negate some of the impact those things could have on her momentum; after all, in the real world, these things often tend to derail careers and passions far more than they get blown out of the water. Sadly, fiction is not reality, so generally good triumphs over petty evil, but it can at times make for an odd feeling in one's brain when considering how the protagonist probably SHOULD fail more often than they do, right? Whether that failure is their own doing or that of their adversaries, a series that has grounding in a very real industry and the very real workplace politics and hierarchies that exist should probably have a protagonist find out that luck and pluck are not enough to always win.

Volumes 7-9 address that issue, fairly soundly, as the main narrative of this arc is Akane's realization that while she is good at what she does, she isn't the only person who is good at it, and also that she must start to grapple with the ghost of her father and his inadequacies as a performer, chipping away at the phantasm of his rakugo being supposedly flawless, a seed borne by Akane's meeting with Issho Arakawa in the previous arc. Both of these narratives interweave in exceptionally fulfilling ways as, for perhaps the first time, the reader is forced to watch in horror as Akane makes bad decisions that could end her career. Despite the coaching of her superior, Maikeru, Akane refuses to step away from chasing the ghost of her father's career, and Maikeru obliges, albeit almost knowing that it will likely end badly.

While volumes 4-6 had some rough moments, 7-9 is all gas. It begins to truly show the ability for Yue Suenaga to build out a lateral cast of characters who are almost all as fascinating as Akane is, with Hikaru, Maikeru, the Arakawa Four, and more all begging for more exposition and exploration. My personal favorite tombstone-toothed creature, Karashi, also makes great strides here, still a few volumes away from his true transformation, and this batch of volumes even answers the question of what became of Guriko after he seemingly vanished from the narrative after the introductory arc.

The Selection Arc judgements also add some great wrinkles to the way the narrative has approached rakugo so far, showing off the art-form in more dynamic ways and trying to add in how various performers approach their ways of expressing their art, and how that art is received; rakugo streams are actually fairly popular in Japan, a form of viewing the artform that became a bit more popular due to COVID, so the wrinkle of Akane and company having to impress classic art critics and the general public is less reality show fiction and more exploring the balancing act that a performance art is often asked to do: appealing to purists, or appealing to the curious and potentially easily bored public. In the midst of this juggling act, Akane is also dealing with a third audience: herself. Specifically, the big internal struggle of this arc for Akane is less to do with her clumsiness and cluelessness about the working world but simply with recognizing that she isn't actually the biggest fish in the pond, and that losing is a very real possibility that could delay or derail her performing future.

I've noted that Akane is my favorite part of the manga, at least the parts that aren't rakugo, Karashi, or Issho Arkawa, and the selection arc really helps highlight why she's such a great modern protagonist. Akane seems to even realize that the path she's on is destructive and possibly fruitless, but that's easy to say of a fictional character; as readers, we can often very easily just go “well, I wouldn't do that”, but Akane's humanity helps negate that impulse. Yes, she wants revenge for her father's career, but she also wants to prove that her dad was good at what he did, that he was as cool as she thought he was, and yet, as she's growing into an adult and away from the nest, having to grapple with the fact that her father was not, maybe, as perfect, cool, or amazing as she always thought. One of the hardest bridges to cross is that disillusionment with our parents. And while the manga treats her father as “dead” in the professional sense, he is very much not, which it is sure to remind us of before this arc comes to a close.

Following the aftermath of the selection competition, the manga presents us with an interesting look at Akane that we haven't quite seen before: one that doesn't know what to do next. But as we've seen, she's got an amazing support network, and the next opportunity might just be around the corner; first, she'll have to deal with one of the most bombastic rakugoka we've met so far, who promises to teach her even more about her father's past and perhaps help her start to put that ghost to rest, before it really destroys her career once and for all.