It’s back! After publishing the first three volumes and then going silent, with the arrival of the anime adaptation last year Kodansha has started putting out additional volumes of Wave, Listen to Me! and in print as well! (As a general side note, I really dislike the speech bubbles that they’ve started putting on the covers of each volume.)
Given that the anime only really covered the first three volumes I was dying for more of the story, although the anime must have covered more of the fourth volume than I realized at the time.
While there was new content in volume four, such as MRS personality Madoka telling Minare about an upcoming radio event that Minare might participate in, Valentine Radio, other scenes like the manager of soup curry shop Voyager returning and meeting Makie’s brother for the first time felt very familiar and I believe were in the anime as well. We also got the sketch that was used for the anime’s cold open, where Minare reads (actual? fake? does it matter?) advice column-style letters while “fighting” a brown bear. Of course, it turns out that the anime cut the best gag/the ending of the sketch, so I’m more glad than ever to have this quirky series about a disaster of a young adult back.
Minare continues to be the kind of protagonist that I usually dislike but surprisingly really enjoy following here; she’s quite dumb most of the time and the reasons behind her actions are an even mixture of not thinking things thoroughly through and not realizing in time just how mean her comments/actions are. She’s not the kind of person I would want to be friends with, and she might be easier to tolerate in silent manga form than in a voiced anime with set pacing (which isn’t to slight her voice actor!), but I am enjoying following her trials and tribulations at a distance, far removed from the seeming hands of fate that keep putting her in just plain weird situations.
Yes folks, it’s time for “occult shit again” and, like in most of these instances, it’s not actually Minare’s fault at all that she, assistant director Mizuho, and station writer Kureko get kidnapped by a cult! If anything Minare was forced to tag along for the ride: Kureko has been shortlisted for a prestigious fiction award and needs to do some research/location scouting for the manuscript he’ll turn in if he wins. Mizuho, still somewhat infatuated with him, volunteers to come along as his assistant and MRS director Mato tells Minare to go along as well, after all she can just record remotely and send something back for the show if needed (although, as someone on this very website’s podcast, I now have major questions about MRS’ audio quality standards). Alas, the local guide Kureko hires to take them around rural Hokkaido and explore abandoned/nearly abandoned villages is actually a part of a cult of sorts whose job is to lure the three of them to an isolated building, kidnap them, and then force them to produce radio shows for them!
Wave, Listen to Me! isn’t a magical realism story, given that there’s no actual supernatural forces, but, with the way the universe seems to bend over backwards to provide Minare with strange situations to deal with, it does sometimes feel like there are larger forces at work. And there is certainly some kind of larger force at work with this cult, as apparently Minare and co aren’t even the first production team they’ve done this to! To make matters even funnier, the detail that might save them all is a call-back to Minare’s “Dear Prudence, exit pursued by bear” sketch, the very same punchline that the anime cut out! The anime made a few odd choices when it came to the adaptation, such as shuffling around the order of a few events for no discernible reason, so I wasn’t completely surprised to discover that the sketch had been cut short but I did have to laugh when I realized the narrative importance of that sketch.
All of this only serves to confirm my feelings that the anime was merely an “okay” adaptation of the manga; I truly think that everyone who enjoyed the anime to at least a moderate degree should give the manga a shot and hopefully be just as charmed by it as I was (or at least, entertained by whatever trouble everyone finds themselves in this week).