Come on karaoke! – Series overview

Content warning: Potential Age Gap Romance (Epilogue), Blood

What is it about? Oka Satomi is about to compete in his final competition as a high school student and captain of his school choir, but the soprano parts are becoming increasingly difficult for him. And then, to make matters worse, a Yakuza approaches him and asks for singing lessons.

The most popular search term for Come on Karaoked is “is this BL?”. Putting aside the pedantry about the fact that the original comic was self-published (and thus doesn’t have a marketing category label), the answer is….sort of. It’s a coming-of-age story based on the concept of an unlikely age gap friendshipwhich relies on several signifiers to predict the possibility of a post-credits romance. And that’s a big part of why it works so well.

On paper, it’s a remarkably simple tale of puberty as a crossroads in life. The more complex stuff was definitely done with the charged nature of the voice changes (oh my kingdom for Shonen note anime…), but Karaoke knows its lane and grounds its outlandish premise with an understanding of the mundane. Satomi was clearly faced with the loss not only of his soprano voice, but also of the artistry by which he had been defined until that moment. As we got to know him, it might as well be a complete loss of his personality. He’s believable as a straightforward guy trying to hide his inner turmoil, thanks in large part to Hori Shun (Danger in my heart, Migi and Dali), which becomes my favorite.

Yakuza Kyoji, meanwhile, is more of an abstract concept than a person. That’s not an insult — that’s why the story works. I said it was a coming-of-age friendship story, and it is…but it also uses the hallmarks of a coming-of-age romance. The story doesn’t shy away from the fact that Kyoji is a bad dude (and at this point I think Ono Daisuke could play a dangerous fantasy human in his dreams, not that he’s phoning it in here), which is a relief after so many years of feel-good yakuza stories, but he still shows up in time to gallantly protect Satomi from a pushy guy in a bad neighborhood. A song so important to the thematic through-line that the show licensed it (not that Crunchyroll has subtitles…) is X Japan’s romantic ballad “Crimson.” And naturally, every time Satomi receives a text inviting him to karaoke, his classmates assume it’s from a girl. It’s also not just a “teenager and youth” age difference. Satomi is about 15 years old and Kyoji is 40 years old.

The key thing that, to me at least, is the cornerstone of effective age gap stories has to do with Kyoji’s unreality. It’s about Satomi and this emotionally charged connection that’s transformative but also completely chaste. It seems so focused on a childish fantasy of a hot older person walking into your life, where you know you’re feeling something, but you don’t know the magnitude or depth of the implications surrounding it. They also completely lose touch with each other after the fateful day of the concert-slash-karaoke-competition, with Kyoji deliberately backing away because he doesn’t want to ruin the kid’s life. And all that table setting makes the impromptu epilogue reunion when Satomi is about to go off to college go much more smoothly.

It’s a good piece of writing backed up by a good production. This miniseries was part of a double project that included another book by Waiyama Yama, Fascinated by you. Each adaptation consists of five episodes, which is enough space to make one volume with a breather, but not so much that the material seems stretched. The creative team is fueled by this Doga Kobo juice, and they’re good at it. Director Nakatani Asami’s experience in idol shows translates well to another musical story (one that may contain the best portrayal of comically bad singing I’ve seen in anime), while Narita Yoshimi last had his emotionally faithful adaptations Twilight out of focus. Art direction returns to Hiram Yuka (Backflip!, Say “I love you”), and three animation directors (Inade Haruka, Junichiro Taniguchi, and Rina Morita) rotate credits that include Hypnosis Mic, Oshi no Koand Madoka.

If the show has a weakness, it’s that it has five episodes, not four. The first four were broadcast together in a block and covered the entire single volume of the dojinsi; the latest episode, meanwhile, aired after the full Fascinated by you aired and was widely talked about as anime-only material. Considering that Vayama is simple envelopment continued (Fami-res Ikowhich I would very much like to localize as “Let’s Go to Denny’s”), perhaps there were high hopes that some of this story could make it into Karaoke the anime

Unfortunately, no. The fifth episode is just catching up with what Kyoji was doing during the time between the end of the story and the epilogue. Let’s just say it’s not bad, but it doesn’t add much and perhaps hurts the strength of the original Satoma-centric story. We’ve already gotten a brief window into Kyoji’s past, enough to make him a little more rounded as a character, but he was never meant to be our character in terms of perspective. And taking him out of his foothold in the realm of fantasy risks introducing more grounded questions to his role in the story, such as “why would this adult think it’s a good idea to hang out with a teenager.” However, this is a minor complaint, and the viewer loses nothing by simply not bothering with the latest episode.

It’s great to see studios experiment with episode form and length, especially as animators are exhausted by the sheer volume of anime and untenable production schedules. It’s too early to be some grand savior of an industry that increasingly needs to collapse before it can begin to recover, but I’d like to hope that the success of projects like this will open the door to both better working conditions and adaptation opportunities for many great works which are too long for a movie and too short for 12 episodes. Your commitment to Come on karaoke will no doubt depend on how tight your limits are for age gap stories, but this is a lovingly crafted little piece worth spending half a day on.