Hyouge Mono

Hyouge Mono is an anime I do not recommend to anyone. Not because it is bad, but because it is completely on a different level. It is not a flower you can just buy and toss later. It is a fragile one, blooms in desolate lands, and you need a bit of effort to find it. It will never gather an army of fans screaming the best anime ever. It will never get the highest ratings. Most people will not even like it. They will quickly get bored and discard this gem. Then what makes Hyouge Mono great? Not its animation or sound quality. The ... reason is its characters, superb use of concepts, and avoiding a story of the usual struggle between good and bad, black and white. Hyouge Mono is a land of chaos, obsessed not with morality but beauty.

ANIMATION, SOUND AND THE END OF NARRATION

Hyouge Mono has nothing new or excellent to offer in animation and sound departments. Especially the animation has nothing to look forward to. The creators were not aiming to offer an eye candy rendering the story secondary. They had only the story, the rest was simply a medium. I don’t mean that the anime with good animation are bad, but regretfully, visuals tend to play a more important role in getting popularity and a lot of cash. As time passes animation is getting more stunning, and unfortunately past anime age faster than ever before. Perhaps the only way for anime to survive in the long run is not best ever fight scenes, but offering its core: story and characters.

In the sound department the work is solid. Characters are original and voice actors do a great job at fleshing them out.

STORY, PLOT, AND PHILOSOPHY

The main themes of many anime are simple and straightforward. Many shounen are about helping friends and getting all the best women. Evangelion TV series is about coping with existence, how to deal with life at its worst. On the other hand, Hyouge Mono is about beauty, aesthetics. But (this is a big but) it does not present a simple answer. It offers different interpretations, multiple perspectives. It does not bombard you with stand-alone ideas injected into poor characters. Ideas in this anime do not come from outside, but from within. Characters and story develop in such a way that we end up with something totally different. It is not Ergo Proxy giving reference to Derrida, Husserl or Sartre. It is Hyouge Mono that lets its viewers enter the world of aesthetics, ideas, philosophy by offering events, plot developments that lead you there. That is why Hyouge Mono, a historical samurai anime can compete with most sci-fi, post-apocalyptic works, with Ergo Proxy, with Ghost in the Shell.

CHARACTERS AND THE WORLD OF CHAOS

Anime takes place in the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1569-1603), the final phase of Sengoku (warring states). Japan is almost united, but who will be the single ruler of all is not established yet. You can still hear the breath of the past era. Rebellions, conspiracies, and assassinations occur frequently. Fortunes can rise and fall overnight; today’s fortunate are tomorrow’s betrayed victims and vice versa. This perfect situation helps the characters shine. Their decisions can lead to their demise. They have to be cautious at all times. Dialogues are not wasted on babbling. They are there for a solid reason and you can see consequences of what characters talk later. In short, they are not monologues disguised as dialogue. In many anime, especially those trying too hard to be deep, we see characters blabbering. What they say does not resonate well with their characters, or just can be said by anyone. In short, they are ideas masked as characters.

Hyouge Mono begs to differ. Its characters are not one-dimensional, not even two-dimensional. They have multiple sides about them. They sustain multiple relations with each other. For instance, Soueki Senno – a rather reticent old tea master with his own school of art – has to treat everyone differently. He does so many incongruous things that if disclosed to all he can lose everything. And more than all, I have never seen in any anime before of such an old person undergoing such a dramatic transformation.

Senno isn’t the only unique character. Furuta Sasuke – the main character and self-declared aesthetic – is not your usual reflecting on the meaning of life character (I’ve in mind most so-called deep anime). He has flesh: he is in search of self without even being aware of that. He does not change once in the series, but multiple times without losing the grasp of his initial personality. All characters, even the supporting ones that appear in a few episodes, do have few things to offer. They fit their place in the story perfectly. They can even show original development.

Hyouge Mono characters have more to offer other than being multidimensional and developing continuously. They also have intelligence. They are conscious of themselves, of their deeds, they can relate with others at an intellectual level. To put it differently, even characters do know themselves. That is radically different from other anime. Hyouge Mono is on a different level simply because it adds intelligence, self-awareness, not mere smartness to get the attention of viewers.

ENJOYMENT AND ORIGINALITY

Hyouge Mono has an original voice, so original that even if you dislike it you cannot deny its peculiarities. But does it guarantee enjoyment? No. I’m pretty sure that many will not like it. Preferring silence to action, speaking to fighting does not appeal to most. There are scenes in this anime where silence is the main plot device. Reticence has an aesthetic dimension here, holding oneself and not speaking out everything adds to the world of imperfection (school of imperfection is an aesthetic movement in Hyouge Mono). I recommend you to keep in mind that once someone tried to persuade you that Hyouge Mono is a gem so you can revisit it later. Its originality can be better understood if you have watched many anime and undergone different stages of being an anime fan (from calling everything the best anime ever to slowly getting bored, then rediscovering again, and so on). Originality can be better understood if you have already conquered lesser mountains.

Hey look! Some dumb asshole is trying to review Hyouge Mono! I have that on that on my Plan to Watch list! I think it's safe to say a LOT of us have the same experience with this anime. You've been on MAL for about a year. You get recommended the members of the sacred 3x3. You guys know what I'm talking about. Tatami, Mushishi, LotGH, etc. Now you've watched 9 anime that are highbrow and not on Netflix. You aren't the N00b anymore. What's next? Someone is going recommend Hyouge Mono. You think to yourself, "Oh WOW! A 40-episode anime about tea ceremony that ... also takes place during the reunification years of the Sengoku Era." That sounds tasteful. It will probably be pretty good. I'll just add that my watch list. There it sits for weeks, months, years, etc. This is the anime that everyone wants to watch, but nobody has actually fucking watched! It's December and nobody else has even written a review this year for Hyouge. As of the time I'm writing this, only 10 people have ever reviewed this series since it came out in 2011!

So now you've decided to watch Hyouge Mono. I'll just watch it on Crunchyroll...but it's not there. I'll just watch it on one of my other streaming services...but it's on none of them. I'll just go on Rightstuf and buy the DVDs. Oops! It's never actually been released in English. So how do you watch it? You go on a pirate site, and you watch the fansubs produced by some group called Huzzah. Let me tell you, these are some of the worst fan subs I've ever seen. I'm 33 years old and have seen a lot of anime. I mentioned in my review of Link Click that I remember the bad days of bootleg anime on VHS. However, this isn't a Chinese studio Google translating out of laziness. This is a group of college kids trying WAAAAY too hard to punch up the script and make it seem more elegant and refined than what they're actually saying. Since it takes place in the 1500s, they honest to God tried to make every line sound like Shakespeare or the King James Bible. However, even an untrained ear can pick up that the anime isn't using some archaic Keigo speech that modern Japanese couldn't understand. It's using basic ass Shonen anime speech! However, every "Hai" is translated to "Aye Milord". I may have been drunk, but I swear I recall a "Naruhodo" being translated as "indubitably". I normally don't rant about fansubs, but this is literally the only way in which I can watch the series besides raw Japanese. This is what you will experience watching this anime! The people who made up Huzzah subs, truly believed that the job of a translator is to make the work look way more artsy than it actually is. I want to watch the Huzzah subs of other anime. You're watching Elfen Lied and Lucy is finally confessing to Kouta in that climactic final scene and says, "I can never express the remorse that consumes my soul, but should you ever have need of my life, come take it." Your eyes tear up and you think "God DAMN this dialogue is good! Why is this anime rated like garbage?!"

Anyways, it's time to finally talk about the actual show. The main character is Furuta Sasuke and he's a minor retainer of Oda Nobunaga who is absolutely obsessed with pottery and tea ceremony. As in Furuta is obsessed in a very cartoonish, over the top way that's played for comedy. Furuta is loosely based on a real historical figure named Furuta Oribe, who was the apprentice of Nobunaga's beloved tea master Sen no Rikyu. I may as well mention this here, but if you don't know Japanese history you're going to be confused. This anime assumes that you're Japanese and you know who these people are. So, it's not ever going to slow down and explain anything. Why should it? You know who Sen no Rikyu is right? He's the tea dude! Yamanaka sensei taught you that shit in 9th grade! Let's say you know a little Japanese history already and with the help of Wikipedia, you familiarize yourself with all these figures and events. Well prepare to get trolled, because this series is as accurate as Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter! This is a historical anime where Nobunaga wasn't betrayed by Akechi and forced to commit seppuku while his loyal general Toyotomi was away fighting a battle. Sen the tea dude didn't like Nobunaga because of his shitty aesthetics, so he tempted Toyotomi into assassinating Nobunaga by walking up to him and literally cutting him in half with his katana. Then Nobunaga's torso insults him like the Black Knight from Monty Python because Nobunaga is that badass. Then Nobunaga pours some shitty blood from his intestines into a teacup and forces a horrified Toyotomi into drinking it so he can laugh at him before finally dying. This happens early in the series btw. If you sit through all 40 episodes, this one scene is what you're going to fucking remember. I really hate to reference TV Tropes, but I believe scenes such as this are referred to as "A Big Lipped Alligator Moment!"

The most spoken word in the entire series is "aesthetics". If you read about this anime, you're going to see that word again and again. This word is used every time Furuta freaks out over a new teacup or new vase. "LOOK AT THE AESTHETICS! MAGNIFICENT!" Furuta screams. To be honest, a more appropriate word would be craftsmanship. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that is never really touched on in this series. You can't watch this anime and learn the difference between Zen aesthetics, Confucian aesthetics, and Western aesthetics. It never actually explains shit about aesthetics. If you read a book like Tanizaki's "In Praise of Shadows", you'll learn that traditional Japanese aesthetics values old, wooden, and earthy over polished brass and bright lights that make the shiny new stuff go bling bling. That's because Japanese aesthetics is deeply tied to the concept that life is transitory. Nothing is going to last forever, so there's no reason to build flashy and dazzle people with your incredible wealth. Flashy is seen as unrefined and uncultured. Western aesthetics takes the opposite approach. The interior of most European palaces is just as flashy as any gangster rapper from the 1990s. If you've seen the interior of the Peter and Paul Fortress where the Tsars are buried, HOLY SHIT! The interior has so much gold I think it's worth more than the entire GDP of Ghana. The Tsars are buried down there with 50 kilograms of gold chains. On Judgment Day they will rise from their graves and shout "Where da East Coast At? Where da West coast at?!" Anyways, it would be interesting if this anime actually covered aesthetics. Instead, I would recommend reading "The Book of Tea" by Kakuzo.

Zen aesthetics is all about accepting flaws and imperfections because we're flawed creatures and live in a flawed world. Art is not great because it is complete and perfect, but rather because it leaves things unfinished and allows us to put a piece of ourselves into it. Imperfection certainly describes this anime and as a Zen aesthete I can't say I dislike it. However, it's asking the viewer a lot considering its runtime. Not to mention putting up with the awful fansubs and the mediocre art by Studio Beetrain. After finally watching this thing, I'm not honestly sure who I would recommend it to. I'm sure somebody will love it. It has positive qualities and some good episodes. I just hope this review sheds a little light on this acclaimed series that 200 people have actually watched. Maybe it convinced you to actually start it. Maybe it convinced you to finally take it off your watchlist. I just hope it helps do something.

I watched Hyouge Mono up to episode 23 out of 39, and honestly, I'm proud of myself for enduring an anime I didn't enjoy for that long.

This series feels mediocre, dull, and uninteresting. The lack of background music between scenes makes each episode feel monotonous and drawn out. If anyone is planning to watch it just to see why it has a high rating, I’d recommend watching it at 2x speed just to help your brain tolerate the dull moments.

Hyouge Mono is about historical figures demonstrating their aesthetic sensibilities and mastery of tea ceremonies. I would’ve appreciated it more if the show had explored or ... explained the historical philosophy behind being an aesthete, or the cultural value of hosting tea ceremonies during that time period. As of episode 23, it hasn’t offered much in terms of educational depth, which makes it fall short in that regard.

The show also introduces a flood of character names, making it hard to follow who’s who in the conversations. The main character, Furuta Sasuke, is portrayed as an aesthete, constantly pulling exaggerated, clownish expressions whenever he sees what’s supposedly exquisite craftsmanship, even when the object in question doesn’t appear particularly beautiful or luxurious.

Most of the characters are two dimensional. The only one I found genuinely interesting is Senno Soueki. He comes across as a wise genius, deceptively cunning, complex, and with motives that are hard to grasp.

The most frustrating part of this anime is the subtitle translation. I don’t understand why the translators tried to make the dialogue sound more profound than it actually is. I kept having to search on Google just to understand the definitions of the obscure and outdated English vocabulary they used.
It was terrible, like trying to read a script written by the ancestors of William Shakespeare.
In short, it was a headache.

The only part I somewhat enjoyed was the rebellion arc, though even that wasn’t as exciting as I had hoped.

Surprisingly, the opening and ending themes are excellent, unique, and genuinely enjoyable to listen to.

Overall, the negatives outweigh the positives. I really tried to like the show, but in the end, it just isn’t my cup of tea.