#mymasterhasnotail — Public Fediverse posts

Story Pile: My Master Has No Tail (Manga)

My Master Has No Tail is a 2019 manga, which got a 2022 anime adaptation, making it one of a number of truly excellent anime in an excellent year of excellent anime. It’s the story of Mameda, a tanuki girl from a rural island, who travels to Osaka for an adventure of playful mischief! The problem is, this is the Taisho era of Japan (which is around 1912 to 1926), and her tricks are decidedly Meiji (which is the era before that). Turning leaves into coins meant more when the coins were important, but people check paper money for counterfeits, which ruins her plan. A spooky light on the road at night? That’s just a car, nobody’s that scared of it.

Distressed by her lack of success, Mameda winds up encountering rakugo theatre for the first time, and now I get to explain rakugo again.

Chances are good that you might, if you’re a big anime dork or general theatre nerd. Rakugo is a specific form of Japanese theatre, a formalised type of one-person performance where a storyteller relates common, familiar stories, reinvented and redelivered, and told with a standardised set of props and items, within specific limitations. It is an art form formalised beyond almost all western types of theatre, where even forms like opera with specific lyrics and performance rule at least let you choose to some extent where on the stage you’re going to do it. Rakugo, you gotta have your knees on one cushion.

My Akane-Banashi review

And like every major character headlining a manga series about rakugo, Mameda realises rakugo is awesome, and then begins the obligatory story of Trying To Get Into Rakugo, despite the forces stacked against her. The forces are her master, the woman whose rakugo she’s seeking to emulate.

If you’re sensitive to spoilers, I’m going to describe some of the events in the manga My Master Has No Tail, in a broad sense, and that means spoiling some of the events in the anime.

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