NEW ANIME ONE-EPISODE BLOG: Mr. Tonegawa Middle Management Blues
The first episode of Mr. Tonegawa Middle Management Blues has a lot to establish in its first five minutes. This is a spinoff of Nobuyuki Fukumoto’s brutal suspense series Kaiji, about an incorrigible loser caught in a series of death games arranged by the bloodthirsty Teiai finance company. Specifically, it is an office gag comedy about Teiai’s inner workings from the point of view of competent but exasperated middle manager Tonegawa.
That’s a really sharp tonal shift, and the Tonegawa anime opts to explain that shift in a long flashback sequence before it even gets going. Using footage from the previous Kaiji series, it establishes survivor protagonist Kaiji Itou, not appearing in this series but buy his books today, as a big deal! And Tonegawa as a nearly as big deal as that guy!!
It doesn’t want to launch us straight into comedy without any context. It wants us to know — perhaps it’s too eager to tell us — that the business we’re going to see reduced to absurdity here is in fact deadly serious. People die, viewer. On another TV show, but…~
That being said, the oppressive suspense style of the Kaiji series is well-suited to parody. After it introduces the character, the first episode of Tonegawa traps him in an unproductive meeting for the rest of its running time. Tonegawa’s frustrations with his underlings are vividly conveyed in the Kaiji style: that trademark nervous whispering (zawa zawa), an overbearing announcer heatedly describing every bit of the character’s thought process as they’re driven closer and closer to madness. Except Kaiji Itou is crossing a bridge over two skyscrapers, or he’s playing rock-paper-scissors to the death. Tonegawa is just having trouble memorizing the names of his subordinates.
The joke is the gulf between the insane underground death games that Teiai runs and the absolute true-to-life mundanity of an office lifestyle that, despite a few quirks, is still pretty ordinary. Kaiji fans will immediately understand this, but Tonegawa’s sense of humor is universal enough to work on viewers who’ve never heard of the source material before. No wonder the show spends so much time trying to ease the viewer in.
(An aside: Kaiji fans may see Tonegawa and wonder “Why not another season of Kaiji?” The answer is that after “The Bog” arc, Kaiji’s battles in the comics start to really get stretched and drawn out: in the Minefield Mahjong arc, he plays mahjong for 13 volumes. As a TV series, this would test the patience of even the truest Kaiji believers.)
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