Allow me to be honest for a moment, my dear readers. Recently, I’m having a hard time sitting down to watching Rakugo. This is not due to a lack of enjoyment and I found myself to have this strange apprehension to starting to watch it. Youjo Senki and Little Witch Academia are shows that I can’t wait to watch and usually do so at the first chance I get. Rakugo, however, I find myself putting off for reasons I can’t quite fathom. Perhaps, it’s due to not having a lot to say about it in my blog posts as the slow pace of revelations leaves little room for interpretation or opinion. Another reason could be that a large amount of the series is already tied up. Yotaro has gotten over his problems as a performer, Konatsu and him now have a rather loving relationship, and Yakumo’s past has been laid out to bare. Really, there isn’t much left to this story and the plot now focuses on Yakumo getting back into Rakugo after his health taking a nosedive. Truthfully, I find everyone’s attempts to force him back on the stage to be rather cruel. He’s past his prime and the accident took away his ability to perform well, so if there was a point to retire, this would be certainly it.
I can understand what Yotaro is trying to achieve in performing Sukeroku Rakugo in front of Yakumo as it ss made clear that he wants his master to have fun performing again. In a way, it’s similar to how Yakumo pushed Sukeroku back into performing before his death. Though, the big reason to get Yakumo to perform is to make the yakuza boss happy as he and Yakumo have some shared history that I don’t believe was explored in the anime. Actually, on that note, there has been a disconnect between episodes in regards to time. Each time I start up an episode it feels like a significant amount of time has passed but not many clear indicators of it having done so. Maybe there is a date shown at the beginning of the episode but it’s mentally taxing for me to keep track of the timeline week after week. Either way, Yakumo’s problem looks to be wrapping up if it wasn’t for the police to have picked the worst timing to arrest the Yakuza leader. From the next episode preview, it looks like
Yakumo will be giving him that performance in prison is what’s in the future for this series. The only thing left isn’t essentially saving the art of Rakugo but how that is going to happen is a mystery. We have the writer working on new Rakugo stories and preserving the art but other than that, there hasn’t been much effort to shake up the art. I do still like this show but I admit my interest is waning a bit. In truth, Rakugo was never usually my kind of show as I tend to not go for series set within reality. I often prefer to escape the mundanity of real life, which makes slice of life such a bore for me. Rakugo to me looks to have reached a premature conclusion and now needs to bring up a new struggle to deal with in its final episodes.