BASARA Gaiden-KATANA Rainbow Story-Ginkgo : A review (?)
When I first read the Katana Short Story in volume 26 of Yumi Tamura's Basara I had the thought that in a fair universe where Basara has the high budget anime adaptation it deserves this story would have had it's own stand alone-ish movie adaptation.
The people who adapted Basara to the stage must have had a similar idea because they chose to adapt this story for the stage.
Like all 2.5 play this play was performed for a limited time, in february 2019 (i think they were only 7 performances in total).
I was pretty curious to watch it so i ordered a dvd off yahoo auctions, and watched it yesterday.
Obviously this didn't come with subtitles, and my Japanese it still very rudimentary so this review is going to be quite superficial, but I was still able to to follow the play pretty well having read the short story it's adapting twice before.
For a refresher Katana is the story of the failed rebellion led by the generation of Sarasa's great grandparents against the cruel and sadistic Lion King, 100 years before the events of Basara.
Our protagonist Tara is a young woman who grew up as an orphan and was painfully rejected and abused by her community as they believed her to be cursed which means that she had grow up without ever feeling love or comfort. She was about to be killed in a sacrificial ritual but is rescued by the rebellion led by Gensho (Tatara and Sarasa's ancestor). She then joins the rebellion, where she for the first time find meaning and a place where she belongs, and we follow her and her companions doomed efforts in their battle against the Lion King.
The story is pretty short (about a 100 pages), which means that the stage play is able to adapt it really well without having to take big shortcuts, and it's folktale like narrative worked very well on the stage i thought. The play is even able to flesh out some bits, which was very nice, they added a lot of banter between our rebels which highlighted their relationship as brothers in arms (even if i couldn't understand most of it...).
Notably we see a lot more of the Lion King (who by the way is played by a woman, a former Takarazuka actress which i thought was neat), with little comedic scene which really show him a a despotic and cruel but also very bored ruler. By his side are two original characters and given their color coding i assume that must be the then Red and Blue Kings, which is the nice touch, they don't really do much in the story though, apart for acting as a leader of enemy troops in battle.
Speaking of battles those were really fun to watch! The choreography felt really dynamic, I loved the scenes with the lions in particular , i think they were inspired by traditional performances and used puppet and traditional sounding music with some nice drums. They were really cool to see!
Something else that was fleshed out in this adaptation is the relationship between Tanmanya and Iris, the stranded European woman he falls in love with. I think this was my favorite part of the show (maybe because i could actually understand some of it since Iris spoke english), it felt very sweet and beautiful (and you know, sad...).
Asahiko also get a flashback scene featuring his little sister that makes the scene where he's tricked into killing her all the more tragic (the flashback scene i wasn't quite able to follow but I'm a bit worried that it had some weirdly incestuous undertone since what i understood of it was Asahiko telling his sister that she's beautiful before she tells him that she wants to become a bride, doesn't seems very tamura esque though, so i might be completely off).
The finale was was very emotional with the tragedy of seing our heroes fails and their swords be scattered across the Japan, but with an added touch of hope conveyed by a cameo by Sarasa and the other heirs of the legendary swords.
If there was something i liked less it was the over reliance on pre recorded lines used for the characters inner monologues, since those are usually some very important lines and it would have been better to see the actors actually perform them in my opinion.
Other than that i thought the performance were pretty good, but without really understanding them i can't really judge, the music was great and really one of the highlights for me. The costume were simple but pretty nice (why didn't they let Asahiko wear crop tops like he does in the mnga though...), i wasn't much a fan of the costume of the King's harem (?) women though, it felt a bit to orientalist sexy costume and less like the interesting byzantine and Japanese style fusion Basara is usually going for.
It was really fun to watch and if you like Basara i can only encourage you to check it out! I think it's available on amazon Prime in japan, so if you have a subscription and a VPN you might be able to watch it there.
It left me very interested to check out the three other stage play that adapt the main story!