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x_losThis series verges on ‘too Japanese’. Like, we've reached the Japan threshold, here. The layer of unreality animation offers would at least provide me with some buffer against the hallucinatory food-themed dance sequences, but no: live-action it is. Every sixth word of dialogue is a random English loan word, used in the Japanese rather than the English sense. There’s a really elaborate parody of Laputa: Castle in the Sky. We go places in terms of sexual content that no Anglophone program would ever, ever go. “Kantaro” is asking a lot of my sensibilities.
You think you’re sitting down to a slice-of-life, semi-documentary, food-tv styled introduction to Japanese sweets, both home-grown and European. (But very localised European sweets, and often not forms of patisserie you see much in the Anglosphere today: more classic Viennoiserie, with the chestnut episode—I know a Mont Blanc doesn’t have a yeast dough, but it inarguably falls under the ‘things of Vienna’ definitional umbrella). And you are! Kind of. The over-arching frame narrative, though, is way less relegated to the background than it might be (and is, in an anime like “Thermae Romae”). Essentially the titular main character eats sweets while out on sales visits. He simultaneously completes his work in a timely manner. Sometimes other workers wish to stop him, for some reason. They are not his boss. Why do they care?
One thing that really pissed Katy off was Kantato’s whole job. He goes to book stores, gives them a business card and hands them a sample book. Why? He doesn't use his charm, if indeed he has any, to sell goods. He doesn’t just email the bookstores. I tried to suggest that maybe somehow this was a cultural thing in Japan. We did also used to have travelling salesmen!
This only made Katy angrier. All this work, just so that book shops can feel Courted? I guess I can't bitch, because economically Asian publishing sectors seem more robust than their Anglophone equivalents. Maybe you truly have to have a business card, and then to go give it to random bookstores, for the magic to happen! The only thing that almost makes this Bullshit Job economically make sense is that there are 40 million people in Tokyo. Possibly there really are enough shops in the city to give such a guy something to do year ‘round!
…even so, Christ’s sake, just email.
I do wonder if the sweet shops (and book shops) that Kantaro visits are real? They almost must be. The production team wouldn’t have made up twenty purveyors of sweets and their premises just for Kantaro to orgasm over. And my god, does he. This is the joke, every time. Imagine a man comes into your shop, orders bingsoo, has a spoonful and enters a hallucination sequence while trembling and groaning like a pig being fucked to death. You’d be like, ‘get out of my shop, take that shit elsewhere.’ He's always coming all over the pudding. This has to be uncomfortable for other pudding-eaters present.
And one knows this about wagashi going in, to an extent, but none of the first five deserts was actually desert-level sweet? Okay, the shaved ice, yeah—but the parfait was just some fruit. These hot cakes were just plain mini pancakes. Sir, that is breakfast. You have just shown me two breakfasts.
The real kickers have to be the dentist mommy issues incest episode and the ‘sexual awakening’ special grooming episode, with some seven year old eating rice balls. This is some cancellable shit. Cannot see this type of thing coming out of like, Canada: simply cannot see it.
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