Minare Koda is good at her job, as a waitress and doing social media for the curry shop Voyager in Sapporo, but she’s not a good fit for her job and especially not a good fit with the owner. However, even at her young age she doesn’t have many other prospects, especially if she wants to stay in the city instead of moving back home. Plus, on top of everything else going on in her life, she just had a messy breakup with her boyfriend and yet she can’t get that slob of a guy out of her mind. Through a strange series of events, although maybe it was a set-up all along, Minare is now being trained up as a new radio talent on the regional radio station MRS and it seems like her life is about to get even quirkier in short order.
Hiroaki Samura’s, of Blade of the Immortal fame, most recent work is slated to receive an anime in 2020 and I think a lot of folks will enjoy the life and story of doesn’t-have-it-all-together-yet Minare, even if it’s a hard life to categorize. (Frequent) brushes with the occult aside, Wave, Listen to Me! is a work of realistic fiction that ping-pongs back and forth between moods so quickly that your head tends to spin as the story takes on a slice-of-life, but not episodic, sense.
Minare doesn’t have any grand ambitions to be a famous radio personality — she just wants to earn enough money to stay financially afloat and for people to stop giving her such half-assed scripts to riff off of. I’m sure that every character in the series would argue that they’re relatively normal but a number of the situations they find themselves in are not. Honestly, after one too many strange theories of Minare’s came true I started to wonder if Samura was going actually introduce some “real” occult elements into the story; that or if Samura just dumped every strange character idea he had out into one story and managed to make it all fit.
I do like all of the characters quite a bit. The core cast is on the small side but Samura provides so much characterization to even the side characters that it would be an easy task to elevate almost any of them to a more prominent role in the story at a moment’s notice. Minare herself is quite relatable as she goes through both predictable (like conflicts at her job) and unforeseen hurdles (that boyfriend subplot really goes some strange places but that’s what really got me hooked). There’s no grand master plot to Minare’s life, she’s just having to take it day by day, broadcast by broadcast, and these hurdles might be what finally pushes her to pull her life together.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how bizarre her radio segments tend to get; sometimes her producer pushes things to have a weirder bent and sometimes they just turn out that way and I just thought that most of them were hilarious and seeing how Minare handles them really establishes who she is.
With all of this in mind, I’m looking forward to the upcoming anime if only to see more of Minare’s story. Despite the fact that there are currently six volumes available in Japan, Kodansha USA hasn’t released anything beyond volume three (and it’s been almost three years since that release) and I really want to see what curveballs life throws at Minare and her colleagues and friends next.
I’m also interested to see how the anime interprets Samura’s art style. I’d call it “defiantly rough” and it’s more of what you would expect from say, a thirty-volume seinen fighting series than the relatively action-less realistic fiction of Wave, Listen to Me!. At the same time I can’t say that the art doesn’t fit the series because it does shape your views on the characters as they live their own, unvarnished lives in their own ways. In Wave, Listen to Me! you feel as if you have stumbled in on the lives of the cast and see them at their most un-performative, a strangely apt feeling for a front-facing waitress turned local broadcaster minor celebrity!