"Araburu Kisetsu no Otomedomo yo" (O Maidens in Your Savage Season) has been on TV since July in the late Friday night anime slot called Animeism on the TBS network.
The anime is based on the manga of the same title that has been serialized since January 2017 in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine, a manga monthly published by Kodansha.
When I learned that the manga would have an anime version, I worried -- unnecessarily -- about whether it would turn out well because the manga contains quite a few sexually explicit lines. I was impressed that the anime used those lines as is.
"The sweet nectar that flows from her ..." Five girls gather in a high school literature society in which they read aloud lines from assigned novels and discuss the works. However, a recently published novel they read uses such racy sexual descriptions. This causes embarrassment only for the protagonist, Kazusa, who has never fallen in love. Niina, the prettiest girl in the society, when asked what she wants to do before she dies, quietly says, "Sex." Her bombshell of a statement sets off a ripple effect among the girls as they venture into the wilderness that is sex.
I'm sorry if I've set some expectations, but this work is by no means erotic. Rather, it is a hilarious comedy about a clumsy girl who panics when she accidentally sees her male childhood friend masturbating. She even invents a new word, "esu-ee-X," to replace the word "sex." In contrast with the racy lines, the visual images are warm and pretty like usual manga for girls. That contrast is delightful.
The script is written by Mari Okada, famed for "Anohi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai" (Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day), who also provided the original story for the manga version of "Araburu Kisetsu no Otomedomo yo" drawn by Nao Emoto. It's almost an acrobatic multimedia project in which the same person writes the story for both the manga and anime versions, and both versions end almost at the same time.
"The words in Okada's script have souls in them, so the characters' feelings are easily accessible," said Takuro Tsukada, who jointly directs this anime with Masahiro Ando.
Tsukada trained under Ando, a longtime collaborator with Okada. Tsukada, an up-and-coming anime director, already showed his vivid sense of humor in the first episode for which he also drew the storyboard.
"Ando gave me free rein, so I've been able to clearly show my colors in the work," Tsukada said. "The language may be racy, but I think this work tells a universal story of young people. I want to show how attractive those funny and serious-minded characters are."
Another reason Tsukada feels a connection to Kazusa and her fellow characters is that he studied fiction writing at Waseda University and aspired to become a novelist. He is particularly fond of novels by Hiromi Kawakami and Yoko Ogawa, whose works he feels share a similar quality with this anime.
"It's powerful, there's eros and not only femininity, but also men's fetishism," Tsukada said. "When I'm reading the script, it shatters my expectations, which is refreshing and makes me grow more and more curious about what will come next."
I believe that what makes this work special is probably the fact that this is an anime about bookish girls directed by someone like Tsukada. Anime works that delicately depict everyday life have evolved enormously in the 2000s. This work is proof that such anime is a good match with literature.
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