Well it seems like I have to eat my words as Yakumo is quite the ladies man. Which is odd when he clearly doesn’t have any interest in interacting with women. Yakumo has a fruitful love life despite his apathy towards love in general. Yakumo and Sukeroku’s relationship has certainly gotten more easygoing as the two work off each other like the odd couple. Yakumo is the more sensible of the two but it seems that his perfectionist tendencies are working against him. Rakugo is a fairly improvisational art and Yakumo performs it too perfectly. In what I can see, Yakumo’s Rakugo doesn’t feel natural, you can see his “acting” in it. Compared to how he will preform in the future, it’s a lot stiffer and too precise.
Ultimately Yakumo just needs to loosen up and find his way of Rakugo. Perhaps a stepping stone to that is this geisha girl whom has taken a large interest in Yakumo. This same girl looks to catch Sukeroku’s attention as well so the predictable outcome would be a love triangle. I believe that Shouwa Genroku is not the kind of show to take the easy route like that when it comes to storytelling and such a development would be rather futile when we could already guess as to who the victor is. I am fairly certain this woman is the mother of the girl from the first episode, and she clearly stated that she was Yotarous daughter. Of course perhaps this relationship is more complicated than one would think? Perhaps this girl was not actually Sukeroku daughter? Or to be truly outlandish, perhaps they were both her mother’s lovers?
As an episode, things were a bit slow as a majority of the time was devoted to Sukeroku’s Rakugo. I really respect the shows insistence to rarely visually represent the story the characters are telling. They allow Rakugo to be show how it’s meant to be shown, with only the performer’s voice and mannerisms to go off. It must be quite the challenge for the voice actors and animators, having so much dependant on subtle movements and mannerisms. The rest of the episode was devoted to the geisha girl coming on to Yakumo. It’s debatable whether she is doing this out of her own interest or if the Rakugo master put her up to it in order to help Yakumo’s Rakugo grow. Regardless I believe there is some genuine attraction she has for him, mainly in seeing her blush and openly state how different he was from other men. It’s amusing in how the she likes him because he doesn’t look at her with desire but that in turn makes her desire him. This could be a matter of wanting what you can’t get or genuine love but whatever it is will likely throw a wrench into Yakumo and Sukeroku’s Rakugo.
