If I was hoping this would be the week that cleared everything up for me with Kujira no Kora wa Sajou ni Utau, I was sorely disappointed.  I’m just as conflicted about the show as I ever was – maybe more, in fact – but I think I’m getting close to the point where I’ll need to get to another level to keep covering it.  There’s just too much happening here that doesn’t really work for me, and if that hasn’t changed after four episodes I don’t know how realistic it is to think it’ll change with another eight.

If I try to put my finger on just what the issue is here, it’s not easy – but I think the word that keeps coming to mind for me is “false”.  There’s just not much authenticity to the writing with this series – to the characters, to the actual plot developments.  The overall premise is interesting but it feels like things just happen and people just show up and do stuff because that’s the next thing on the page.  As an example – who the hell is this Ginshu girl who just pops up out of nowhere and starts acting like every anime stereotype imaginable and making Chakuro call her “Nee-san”, then saves everyone’s butt later?  Where does that come from?

There’s another issue, too, which is illustrated by that example – a character like Ginshu feels totally out of place in a setting like this.  That’s an issue I see cropping up over and over, the way the overall presentation here just doesn’t come together.  It feels very hodgepodge and disjointed.  In a series so dependent on world-building that’s a real problem, because every time something glaringly extraneous pops up it takes the viewer (this viewer, anyway) out of the moment.  The random Yamashita Daiki character from last week is another good example.

Despite all that, I still sort of care what happens here.  The premise is, as I said, interesting – and the notion that the elders have decided to sink the Mud Whale rather than let its people be slaughtered is an interesting twist.  I’d like to know what great sin made their ancestors worthy of exile and execution, and I’m curious to see how a struggle between the marked and unmarked (which is, really, what this is turning out to be) plays out.  That too could play out as a parable for modern Japan, which is long-mired in an undeclared generational crisis where the interests of an older generation seem to conflict with that of a younger – or it could even be another dig against what Kujira no Kora sees as the foolishness of those who’d rather die than cling to their pacifist constitution ideals.  I don’t know, and I do kind of want to find out – but I’m going to need more than that curiosity to keep me hooked in, and the clock is ticking.