Hello and welcome back to Otaku Thursday! And happy first day of December! Tis the season of holiday cheer, cold weather, hot chocolate, power outages, presents and lights, snow storms, and of course–Weebsmas. This yule season, we are planning to once again bring our 12 Days of Weebsmas to the blog as a countdown to Weebsmas, catch up on some of this year’s anime in preparation of our Anime Awards, and bring you some fall season anime reviews leading up to it all. So today, I’m going to be giving a short and hopefully sweet review of yet another tanuki-focused anime–My Master Has No Tail.
My Master Has No Tail is, to put it simply, a very cute anime that is about a young tanuki who pretty much has one mission and one alone–to fool humans. She has never been out of her tanuki village before and only ever heard stories of epic pranks pulled on humans by her father, but when she is given a task in a human village, she naturally takes it as the time to go play her own tricks. However, most of the humans she runs into are not fooled by her antics. In fact, she ends up being chased by an angry mob for, y’know–being a tanuki in the Meiji era running around and trying to mess with people. But it’s thanks to this angry mob that our MC finds herself in a theater where she watches a performance where she becomes enamored with what she is watching–which, to be clear, is a rakugo performance.
Now, I had to look up what a rakugo was. From what we gathered, it was like a comedy show or verbal performance of sorts from what it looked like in the show. Now, from my actual research, a rakugo performance is better described as a sitcom in which the performer plays all of the parts. There’s dialogue, imagery, jokes, and a very specific formula to the performance. So much so, I can confidently say that I cannot possibly ever be in a rakugo show. It’s mastery. Anyway, so home girl is watching this rakugo performance and decides that she too wants to study this art and become a rakugo master, after all, it’s her only chance of ‘fooling’ humans. So cute. She asks the rakugo performer she was watching to become her apprentice but ends up having to prove herself worthy. But y’know, being a cute anime and all–we know she’s going to be an apprentice by the end of episode one.
The rest of the anime is pretty much just our main character and her now teacher, as our MC trains to become a rakugo master (yes I realize how ridiculous that sounds). The episodes are cute, low stakes, and often conclude in one episode. There was a two-parter story they a bit ago, but it was like eh. I feel like the vibes of this entire show are really good but the storytelling itself is not so much. It’s not like it’s boring or anything, or even that the characters are unlikeable. It’s just that…there’s something about it that makes the narrative subpar even if the overall episode is good. It’s weird to describe.
So overall? Would I recommend that you watch it? Well, it’s definitely a cup of tea anime. Meaning that I have heard some people say that they really like it and other people said they do not like it at all. Boring or great, comedic or yawnworthy–it’s all perspective at the end of the day. As for me? I do like it. But I’m not sure I would whole heartedly recommend it to anyone I know. I think that it’s definitely worth at least one episode, but don’t hold out hoping it’ll get better. It is what it is.
Stay weebtastic,
xoxo
Luna
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