Two episodes of this season’s Undead Girl Murder Farce have aired, and one aspect of the show has been largely overlooked in English discussion: the show’s connection to rakugo and Japanese theater in general.
You may know that the anime is directed by Shinichi Omata, who previously helmed Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju. It’s clear that his experience there must have been one of the reasons he was chosen here, and is helping elevate this element of the show.
As an experiment, I searched Twitter for the show’s title or hashtags + “rakugo”. In English, I could only find mentions of Rakugo Shinju. In Japanese, however, that only accounts for a small fraction of the results since airing – the great majority of the comments are about lowercase ‘r’ rakugo. Here is why that is.
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