The Elusive Samurai is an anime series based on a manga from the creator of Assassination Classroom. That series was one that skewered the Japanese educational system through the context of a Shonen Fight manga – so I was interested to see how The Elusive Samurai handles Japanese history.
From the jump, it seems like The Elusive Samurai has issues with tonal whiplash, as a show where it starts with gorgeously animated fluffy comedy, and then gets incredibly harsh in its tone, as the friends and family of our main character, H?j? Tokiyuki, are brutally murdered (including his fiancee being raped and murdered off camera) by Ashikaga Takauji. Tokiyuki is rescued by Suwa Yorishige, the leader of a religious sect nearby, and an ally of the H?j?, who promises to help Tokiyuki avenge his family’s betrayal using his (semi-limited) ability to see the future.
This is something where I’ve seen people react to the show as if there’s a real sense of tonal whiplash. On the one hand, I get it – as it can go from wacky comedy to intense darkness very quickly. However, part of the “comedy” also comes from very deliberate anachronisms – which is important because those anachronisms also serve the purpose of getting the viewer to not do the thing that so many other period pieces do – which is to think of them in the context of their periods. We’re expected to view these characters from a 21st century worldview – because this is a revisionist period.
So, why Ashikaga Takauji as the antagonist, and not any of the usual antagonists, like the Tokugawa Shogunate or Oda Nobunaga? Well, because Takauji was written about by his contemporaries as being “kind and merciful” to his enemies. Except that everything that happens in this first episode, effectively, happened in the real world history, and was well documented. Takauji betrayed the Hojo clan. His forces sacked their capital. The family members of the ruling Hojo family along with their retainers were brutally murdered. If you’ve seen Kurosawa’s Ran, and remember the fall of the Third Fortress, you remember the women in the lord’s entourage killing each other. Specifically, that was expected of them historically to keep from being raped by the sacking forces. By adding all these anachronistic elements, ostensibly under the guise of comic relief, it gets the audience to look at Takauji and his “mercy” as being BS. That the way the samurai class waged war was horrific and brutal, and that the idealized portrayals written by later generations were, at best, lies, and were at worst written by conservative writers of their periods seeking to glorify the “old days” without having to acknowledge the realities.
All of this is spectacularly animated by CloverWorks. Before watching Wind Breaker, I viewed them as being the studio that handled the gorgeous pastoral and scenic elements of Spy X Family and left the action sequences to Studio Wit. Well, if that was the breakdown – CloverWorks has picked up a lot from Studio Wit, because throughout these two series, they demonstrate tremendous craft not only at gorgeous action, but gorgeous action with a level of visual stylization and flair that separates them from so many other studios.
Honestly, I came away from this show hoping that when we get a Steel Ball Run adaptation, maybe David Production tags out and lets CloverWorks take a crack at it.
The Elusive Samurai is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.
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