Welcome to This Week in Shonen Jump, our weekly check in on Viz’s various Shonen Jump series. Viz has recently changed their release format, but our format will mostly remain the same. We will still review the newest chapters of one title a week, now with even more options at our disposal. The big change for our readers is that, even without a Shonen Jump subscription, you can read these most recent chapters for free at Viz.com or using their app.
This week, Robbie checks in with “Akane-Banashi.” If you have thoughts on this or any other current Shonen Jump titles, please let us know in the comments!
Akane-Banashi – Story 9: After the Delight
Written by Yuki Suenaga
Illustrated by Takamasa Moue
Translated by Stephen Paul
Lettered by Snir Aharon
Reviewed by Robbie Pleasant
I’ve been wanting to talk about “Akane-Banashi” for a while, and chapter 9 has a perfect example of what it is about this series that keeps impressing me.
Often times, when a manga attempts to convince us that a character’s acting is good, it falls flat because we can’t actually see or hear it ourselves. Then we have rakugo, where the performer is sitting down with only a few props at their disposal, and it becomes even more important to properly show through art and dialogue alone how well the character actually delivers their lines. Other series in Shonen Jump have tried to mixed results, so what is it that makes “Akane-Banashi” pull it off so well?
For starters: there’s Takamasa Moue’s artwork. The art features strong, bold linework that gives characters clean designs, with nice little details filling them out, which keeps it easy on the eyes. But more importantly is the expressiveness Takamasa Moue gives the characters. When Akane performs rakugo, the manga really focuses on her posture, body language, and expressiveness, which nicely demonstrates how her demeanor and voice changes as she performs different characters.
Beyond that, the manga uses the fact that it is a visual medium to its advantage, by showing us the characters in Akane’s rakugo performance as she performs. The artwork takes on a different style then, using a style more akin to classical Japanese artwork than traditional manga; this adds another visual element to the performance, allowing us as readers to see the story that Akane is performing the same way listeners would see it in their “minds’ eye” and illustrate how her performance is going. Plus, it will often jump between the performance and the illustration of it, or overlay the images, to show how Akane’s physicality embodies the characters.
Finally, there’s the way the manga’s panels are set up to control the pacing. They start off larger, taking up a good portion of the page and showing the characters’ in full body, but as Akane increases the tempo of her performance and picks up the speed, the panels slowly grow shorter and wider, while moving in closer and closer to the characters; this picks up the speed for the reader as well, drawing us into the exact pacing it aims to hit.
And that, dear readers, is how you properly demonstrate a character’s ability to perform on a static, soundless medium. In fact, it worked so well that one moment got a much bigger laugh out of me than “Show-ha Shoten!” has managed to in any of its chapters, and that’s a manga all about comedy.
Okay, so that covers what really impresses me about “Akane-Banashi.” So how’s this chapter in particular? Well, this is where we see Akane apply the lessons she learned over the past few chapters, including narration from a more experienced character to explain what she’s doing differently and how it’s impacting her performance. It’s interspersed with flashbacks to illustrate those lessons, allowing us to see her growth.
So it’s a pretty satisfying chapter for us as readers, who have been following her so far, while still making it clear that this is only the beginning of her journey. It also takes some time to talk a little more about the history of rakugo, so readers unfamiliar with it can get to understand it a little bit more.
In short, it’s a solid chapter that really demonstrates how the artwork and pacing makes the rakugo performance come across in illustrated form, even without an actual performer. It’s chapters like this that have moved “Akane-Banashi” to near the top of my weekly reading priorities, and I can’t wait to see how it progresses from here.
Final Verdict: 8.7 – This chapter highlights the artist and writers’ strengths, nicely demonstrating how rakugo can work as a manga while showing the protagonist’s growth.
