Past, present, and future all under one rickety roof.

There’s a kind of magic to an old building, an imprint left by those who lived and worked and played there. The more people, the stronger the feelings, the older the tradition, the deeper the imprint. They infuse a place, sink into its walls and floorboards, fill it humming with fragments of lives and memories. I’ve felt it on the stage of a theatre, in the spire of a church, down the hallways of a prison, and from the rafters of a fieldhouse. Places that aren’t just historical, but seem to be composed of History itself.

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Just, uh, gimme a minute to pick my jaw and heart up off the floor.

Things had been looking up for our rakugo family as of late, but that may have just been the long slope to the top of a very steep drop. The final performance this week was so magnificently staged and such a major turn in the narrative that it’s tempting to ignore everything else and just focus on that, but there are a lot of tiny (and more optimistic) milestones that happen prior to it, and I’d be doing Rakugo Shinju a major disservice if I didn’t touch on them. Yakumo may be in a desolate place right now, but that doesn’t mean everything is.

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The One That Killed Me (But, Like, in a Really Good Way).

Usually by the time I get to writing these commentaries I’ve poured all my flailing fangirl energy into tweets and can focus on that High Quality Analysis you crave, but this week…yeah, this week requires some in-post flailing, too, because Rakugo Shinju melted me into a puddle of feels repeatedly, and two days later I’m still in the process of reforming into a solid human-shaped blogger again.

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Definitely gonna wanna memorize that rakugo rant for future reference…

I’ve been unofficially calling this episode “The Declaration of Independence,” as it’s very much about the present looking the past in the eye and insisting it won’t be chained to it. Yotaro takes Yakumo’s advice to a literal extreme, facing his old life head-on. Konatsu slowly starts to loosen her hold on her parents and bond with her new family. And Yakumo allows himself to revive his adoptive brother for the sake of his adopted son. Real change, it turns out, can’t happen until you’ve acknowledged the past and connected yourself to the future, whether that’s via personal relationships or professional goals.

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It’s two steps forward, one step back.

If Season 2’s premiere felt like a rebirth, this episode reminds us that karma still carries from one reincarnation to the next. The weight of the past clings like a–well, like a tattoo to the backs of all of our characters, reappearing through old faces, names, memories, and tales. And our new writer friend Higuchi is bound and determined to document all of it, even if he has to withstand the full-force of a Yakumo stink-eye to do it.

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Rakugo is back-ugo!

My pick for Best Anime of 2016 wastes no time in this Season 2 premiere reminding me why it’s so special. Right from its opening monologue, Rakugo Shinju is a masterclass in storytelling, every element of the production accomplishing multiple tasks at once.

Take that brilliant Season 1 recap, which not only does the obvious job of summarizing what happened last season, but also reminds us what a rakugo performance looks like, ingratiates us to Yotaro (a character we’ve spent relatively little time with), and sets the general tone for this second season. It’s exuberant and honest and warm, a stark contrast to the quiet melancholy of the first season, and promises us that following Yotaro is going to be a unique experience compared to the time we spent with Kikuhiko.

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