Sarazanmai

Episode 1

He's back...! Fans of the fabulous alien invader known as Kunihiko Ikuhara have a buttload of reasons to celebrate this season, as Studio MAPPA dumps his most beautifully animated (and viscerally disturbing) TV series yet on an unsuspecting public. As an Ikuhara fanatic myself, I just can't hold in my enthusiasm, but of course there's a nasty asterisk at the tail end of all that hype. For viewers unaccustomed to this one-of-a-kind director's style of storytelling, Sarazanmai's brand of surreal puzzlebox dramedy might just seem like a steaming load of nonsense.

But I believe the powerful ideas that have made Ikuhara's stories so revered aren't just for navel-gazing weirdos to enjoy, and that more than anything is what I want to explore in these weekly reviews. Underneath the abstract, repulsive, or just plain trolling elements of Ikuhara's work, the emotional truths he seeks to convey cut straight to the heart of human experiences that anyone can relate to on some level. After all, his work in the '90s on Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena was formative for a huge worldwide audience, and just because he's making more obtuse and arty work in the 2010's with Penguindrum and Yurikuma Arashi doesn't mean the emotions underneath are any less powerful. Plus, even though only two episodes have aired, anecdotal evidence suggests to me that Sarazanmai might be drawing the biggest English-language viewership that Ikuhara has entertained in decades.

So where are all Sarazanmai's curious new viewers coming from? The answer to this question only raises another question I want answered: did Ikuhara come to MAPPA with an idea for a BL-flavored series, or did someone at MAPPA ask Ikuhara if he had anything on the more phallic side of queerness he wanted to produce? Whether the kappa or the egg came first, Ikuhara—a man most famous for exploring sapphic desire in his work—has been pretty forward in interviews about wanting to make a story about queer boys as well, but never getting the opportunity because that demographic is considered less marketable than cute girls smooching. (This seems especially stupid to me because yuri-loving otaku largely did not turn out for Yurikuma Arashi, and why bother trying to pretend that an Ikuhara show will be standard genre stuff at this point? Everyone should know by now that he only makes weird shit.) After MAPPA's unprecedented success with Yuri!!! on Ice, they seem to be cornering the market on high-quality BL-adjacent entertainment, so the same crew that turned out for Banana Fish are coming on board for Sarazanmai too. I bid you all a warm welcome, and I hope you'll check out more of Ikuhara's past work once this season's Kappa Butt Boys comes to a close.

Before we dive into the madness of Sarazanmai's surreal symbolism, I want to keep things simple by just focusing on its story. Once you get past all the misdirection, fast-scrolling text (or fart-scrolling text), and obnoxious double entendres, this premiere is surprisingly straightforward as a magical boy story with sharp edges masked by a fluffy aesthetic. Kazuki is a nice boy who wants to maintain a connection with someone important that he almost lost. But in order to do so, he has to follow local idol Azuma Sara's daily fortunes and carry a large cardboard box around everywhere he goes. When his connection with Sara gets him in trouble with the delinquent boy Toi, they invoke the wrath (or is it a deeper curiosity?) of Prince Keppi, a kappa deity who needs their help now that he's been freed from inside his golden statue. He transforms the two boys into kappa by sucking out their shirikodama, an organ within every human anus that contains their feelings of desire. (Please note that Kunihiko Ikuhara is not a licensed medical practitioner.)

Kazuki's friend Enta, who's still mad at him for quitting the soccer team, passes by just in time to face the same slimy fate, and the boys can barely get over the shock of their transformation before Keppi informs them that they must tear shirikodama out of the city's invisible kappa-zombies if they want to become human again. (It helps that their first target just so happens to be obsessed with boxes, and he's trying to steal all three boys' precious packages!) The hapless kappa defeat their enemy with the power of musical theater and anal beads, but the sarazanmai process isn't yet complete. To become human again, Kazuki must swallow the shirikodama he's stolen, digesting it in congress with the other two boys so its gaseous form can be released and transferred to Keppi's own bowels. The zombie's ghost evaporates harmlessly into the night sky, but this city's woes are far from over. It seems a pair of dirty otter cops have been using social media to catch deviants and transform them into zombies every night, by sucking the desire out of their bodies! Left with a pulsing shirikodama of secrets and no way to relieve the pressure, these zombies will continue to steal the desires of others until they are put to rest.

Unfortunately, far from making them a superhero trio, Kazuki, Toi, and Enta's new bond has already begun to fracture, because the sarazanmai process leaks their own secret desires into one another's minds like a silent but deadly confession. Now exposed as a cross-dressing catfish, Kazuki turns on his old friend and new nemesis alike, saying he'll do all this and more to maintain a relationship with his little brother, who believes the real Azuma Sara is talking to him on an app—where the otters are always watching for exploitable desires.

See? It makes perfect sense.

In all seriousness, the most immediate appeal of Sarazanmai is the striking gap between its silliness and shock factor. This has always been a strength of Ikuhara's work, probably stemming from his roots in avant garde performance art, but Sarazanmai's gonzo levels of potty humor and social transgression already outpace his past premieres so intensely that I'm eagerly anticipating just how deep he plans to plunge into this new anal-ysis of society. To that end, I'm going to break down my thoughts on Sarazanmai's symbolism into tidy little boxes each week so we don't all go insane from the imagery overload. Because I've seen all of his past work, I may refer to that knowledge when explaining the use of a symbol, but I would never want to dampen someone's first experience with Utena, Penguindrum, or Yurikuma by spoiling them, so I'll only allude to recurring symbols from those past works without giving up any specific details.

Kappabashi: ANN's own Lynzee Loveridge has written an excellent primer on Asakusa's relationship to the mythological kappa, so I won't be repeating any of that information here. The greatest thing that stood out to me about Kappabashi Street is its giant red bridge, an obvious symbol of connection between two sides. While the area may treasure kappa as a regional symbol, the fact of the matter is that "real" kappas live underneath bridges, in the river where no humans dwell and few will even pass through. They just cross over far above, never seeing the invisible kappa (or zombies apparently) around them. Keppi at least appears to be immortal, clarifying the kappa's position as a creature with no beginning or end, just like the rushing river it dwells in. And kappa don't connect with anyone on the river's banks except to eat them, which means that connection with others is likewise impossible. So if they can't connect to humans without hurting them, does this mean that kappa should simply connect with one another? Well, that didn't go so well the first time our three adolescent kappa tried it...

Boxes: Boxes are a favorite symbol of Ikuhara's, so this imagery may be the easiest to interpret. Cardboard boxes and music boxes often blend and twist together with imagery of coffins or mortuary boxes in Utena, Penguindrum, and Yurikuma, making them symbols of death, silence, resignation, or otherwise compressing human emotions and identities into containers that don't fit them, sometimes choking out their life beyond recovery. The boxes in Sarazanmai largely serve the same purpose, even if they don't contain entire human bodies (yet). Kazuki's cosplay, Toi's freakishly photo-realistic gun, and Enta's promise bracelet are all secret burdens they must carry around with them at all times. These packages are unwieldy and anxiety-inducing, tiring the boys out and drawing unnecessary attention even when they desperately try to keep their treasures hidden. Curiously, they're also branded with "Kappazon", so there may be a more contemporary criticism of kappa-talism to these boxes in the future, but right now it's at least clear that they represent the compartmentalized desires and secrets within the human heart that weigh us down the longer we have to carry them.

Social media: It's unclear what all the "Aa" symbols around the city are meant to indicate yet, but one running theory is that the "Aa" stands for antenna. After all, when the boys connect through sarazanmai, little signal bars appear above their heads, evoking the strange combo of intimacy and distance that social media grants us. People can now share information with one another more easily than ever before, but that doesn't mean our true feelings are communicated just as easily. Without social media, catfishing would be impossible, so it's allowed Kazuki a level of closeness with his little brother that he could never have before, even though that otherwise sincere connection is built on the total lie that he's the famous idol, Azuma Sara. There's also an illusion of privacy to social media that disguises an ugly truth, that the corporations and governments who built these systems of communication are always watching, using the information they take from vulnerable people to fuel their own personal interests. What is the true nature of the hungry otter listening on the other side of that antenna, and what desires are the people of Kappabashi unwittingly feeding to it?

Simply SARA Report: It's immediately suspicious that Sara's all-romaji ticker at the bottom of her program's screen can only be read by "abnormal" humans, but the contents of its secret message are somehow even more alarming! She claims to be searching for a prince, then goes into detail describing what sounds like Prince Keppi, implying that he should be out of cold sleep by now, and she will need lots of boxes in order to elope with him in the future. However, all of this is interspersed with a lot of advertisement and self-promotion, so it's hard to say how much of Sara's info can be considered sincere. Does Sara have secret nefarious desires of her own, or is someone using her image for their corporate purposes?

The Field of Desires: When night falls, the "Aa"s around the city flip around to reveal a similar shape with a far more sinister meaning: an otter reaching out for a sphere (possibly a shirikodama?). This imagery isn't necessarily familiar territory for Ikuhara, but it's extremely straightforward as commentary on urban society; creatures who feast on desire come out to play at night! The few humans out late with no such cravings drift through the streets as ghosts, ignorant to the pain or hunger of the night's children. Cross-dressers and criminals alike are more likely to come out once the sun goes down, to say nothing of box-hungry deviants. It's certainly seedy imagery, but it's supposed to be, and there's also a thrilling magic to Kappabashi at night that makes it feel more inviting than demonizing, despite the danger inherent to such adventure.

Zombies: If normal humans walk around with their desires locked safely in their shirikodama (even if it sometimes leaks out into Kappazon boxes), what happens if you forcibly suck those desires out of them? Apparently you get a gigantic zombie who hoards the desires of others to refill their shirikodama and keep the secrets inside it from leaking out. Since the zombification victims must first be arrested and interrogated, I think it's safe to interpret this as a metaphor for how traumatizing it can be to lose the anonymity and safety that social media initially offers, since it can be ripped away at any time by bad actors, faulty systems, or even the victim "turning themselves in" out of shame. It's obvious that the cardboard-zombie hasn't actually lost his sense of desire, he's just lost his boxes—the safe outlet he was channeling that desire into. Now that he's been privately castigated (and metaphorically castrated, which might explain his submissive pose and the oddly vaginal shape of his zombie-taint), he's become desperate to find another outlet for his "illegal feelings" before the real secret behind them is exposed to the world. Tragically, when the subtext for his actions is violently exposed, he loses all sense of desire or self and becomes an invisible ghost to human and kappa alike. But the saddest moment comes when Kazuki yells "It's your fault for having a secret that can get you in trouble!" Kazuki is ordinarily such a meek and gentle kid that this accusation seems strange, but perhaps the person he's being hard on is really himself.

Sarazanmai: Keppi is blessedly straightforward on this one, explaining that sarazanmai is a process by which minds and souls cross over between kappa. While humans don't normally connect by combining the plates on their heads for a psychic fart-leaking session, Sarazanmai's blend of imagery between water ripples and wifi signals (or puffy farts and transmission dots) gets the point across clearly. Truly connecting with someone mind and soul means sharing embarrassing things, and social media further separates the context between those embarrassing things and the feelings of their exposed victim. Toi and Enta only see what Kazuki has done, in Enta's case literally in the form of text messages he wasn't meant to see, but they don't understand why he has done it, and the experience was so violating that Kazuki isn't likely to open up about it any time soon. And yet, the boys are probably going to continue to extract the desires of others against their will as the story progresses; basically, having more information about somebody is not the same thing as having more empathy for them.

Otter Cops: Since we only get a quick stinger of these mischievous mustelids doing their thing, I'll keep this brief. While indigenous otters sadly went extinct in Japan during the 1970's, they hold a place in folklore similar to the kitsune, as shape-shifting tricksters who enjoy ensnaring people. Besides their ability to change shape (perhaps in reference to their online sting operations), the most obvious difference between kappa and otters is the ability to "connect." Otters can walk around on land and cross rivers no problem, granting them as much freedom and power compared to kappa as a policeman might hold over a young teen boy. Their desire extraction process is also quite different from a kappa's, since Keppi removes a person's entire shirikodama (holding their secrets hostage—blackmail—in exchange for a favor), while the otter cops suck the desire out of their victim's zombified shirikodama at gunpoint (forbidding them to express their desires and forcing them to keep the secret until they snap). Also, their name (kawa-uso) literally means "river liar", so that's awfully convenient to the themes of this show! The Reo and Mabu manga currently being released in Japan also leaks some juicy spoilers about them, but I'll pack those up safely in a Kappazon box in the forums for anyone who wants to experience this series completely blind.

But by far the most nebulous symbol in Sarazanmai so far is the sara itself, a pure circle of water with no beginning, no end, and no point with which to connect to another shape. Ikuhara loves bringing all his stories full-circle, hooking the back to the front in mind-blowing ways that always leave me feeling refreshed. So I want to end this review by returning to the premiere's beginning as well. One of the least explained elements of this episode is Prince Keppi's ability to erase memories; we still have no confirmation that he's returned everything he removed from the boys' minds, which means there's no telling how many desires in this story remain invisible to us. And when it comes to details that I don't remember, the first thing that stands out in my mind is that Kazuki was wearing Enta's friendship bracelet in the opening moments of the episode, before he got swallowed by the backside of a giant "Aa" sign. Has that connection already been lost?

I have no idea where Ikuhara's newest commentary on queer identities, adolescence, and the ills of modern society is headed yet, but for these three boys just now entering puberty, the boxes that society has given to them may not be enough to contain all the desires overflowing the fragile sara that presses down on their young minds. Can they find a way to connect without cutting each other on the sharp edges that result from these fractures? My own shirikodama is filled with the desire to find out.

Rating:

Sarazanmai is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Jacob also enjoys yelling about anime on Twitter and YouTube. If you're thirsting for more Ikuhara content, he's written many episode analyses of Revolutionary Girl Utena that will resume after Sarazanmai concludes.