Part 276: The Art That Wanted to Die With Him: Descending Stories and the Number of Endings

There is a moment, fairly deep into Descending Stories (昭和元禄落語心中, Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu), when the old master Yakumo says, more or less plainly, that he intends for rakugo to die with him. Not decline. Not modernise. Die — and be buried, with him, as a thing that had its time and should be permitted to end. It is the most shocking line in a manga full of shocking lines, and it is shocking precisely because he is not being cruel or petty. He means it as a kindness. He has watched the form outlive its century and he would rather see it laid down whole than kept twitching.

Haruko Kumota's manga, serialized in Kodansha's Itan from 2010 and adapted by Studio Deen across two seasons from 2016, carries a Destiny number of 9 — the Humanitarian and Sage, whose vibration, in the scheme this series has used for two hundred and seventy-five parts, is endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles. I have deployed the 9 many times in these essays, usually to describe a hero who gives everything away in a final gesture. I have never had a cleaner case. This is a work about a man who has decided to close a cycle, and about the people who will not let him.

Rakugo Is a 1

Start with the art form itself, because the number it returns is the best single result the lens has produced in a long while. Rakugo reduces to a Destiny 1 — the Leader and Pioneer, whose vibration is beginnings, leadership, and the will to act alone. Its Heart's Desire is also a 1.

Now consider what rakugo actually is, as a physical fact. A single performer kneels on a cushion — the zabuton — in a plain kimono. They have a folding fan and a hand towel. That is the entire apparatus. No set, no costume changes, no fellow actors, no music. From that cushion, without standing up, one person performs a story that may contain a dozen characters, switching between them by turning the head a few degrees and altering the voice: the merchant becomes the landlord becomes the drunk becomes the wife, marked only by an angle and a pitch. The fan becomes chopsticks, a pipe, a sword, an oar. And the audience — this is the part that matters — supplies everything else.

It is the most solitary performing art in Japan, and possibly anywhere. One person, alone, on a cushion, playing all the parts. The number of the will to act alone. If the reader wants a single example of why this series has been worth writing even though its method is, as part 165 conceded, an artefact of romanization, it is this: the frame sent me to look, and what it pointed at was really there.

The 9 and the Man Who Wanted to End It

The manga's structure is itself a closing cycle, which is the sort of formal rhyme a numerologist is professionally obliged to enjoy. It opens at an ending: a released convict, given the nickname Yotaro, asks the great Yakumo to take him as an apprentice, and is astonishingly accepted. It then reverses, and spends the bulk of its length inside a flashback to the Showa era — to the young Yakumo, then called Bon, and to Sukeroku, the other apprentice, the natural, the one with the vulgar unteachable gift that Bon's rigorous technique could never touch. And to Miyokichi, who loved one of them and was destroyed by the arrangement.

What Kumota is really writing about is the difference between an art you inherit and an art you are. Bon works. He is precise, disciplined, technically immaculate, and for a long time he is not good, because rakugo cannot be executed — it has to be inhabited. Sukeroku does not work at all and is magnificent, and is destroyed by the fact that magnificence is not a career. The tragedy that binds them is not a rivalry in the shonen sense. Neither wants to defeat the other. Each wants, hopelessly, to be able to do what the other does, and neither can, and the form itself is too small to hold them both.

By the time we return to the present, Yakumo is carrying all of it: his master's art, his friend's death, his own late-arriving greatness, and a certainty that the whole tradition is a rope that has strangled everyone who touched it. The 9 — endings, the closing of cycles — is not a flattering number here. It is the number of a man who has decided that the compassionate thing to do with a dying art is to let it die.

The 11 in the Author's Name

Haruko Kumota carries a Destiny 11, a master number: the Visionary, whose vibration is inspiration, tension, and heightened awareness. Her Heart's Desire is a 2 — the Diplomat, the same rare number that part 274 of this series found sitting under March Comes in Like a Lion.

The 11 is worth pausing on, given where Kumota came from. She built her reputation in boys'-love, a genre the mainstream critical apparatus — such as it is, and this site has argued at length that it barely exists — was content to ignore. Then she produced a historical drama about the death of a performing art, which won major awards, was adapted with unusual care, and is now routinely named among the finest manga of its decade by people who would not previously have read a word she wrote.

The heightened-awareness reading is easy to make and I will make it only lightly: what Kumota brought from BL to rakugo was an ear for the erotics of proximity — for what it means to watch someone perform, to be the person they are performing at, to be bound to a person you cannot have and cannot leave. The Bon–Sukeroku–Miyokichi triangle is not a romance and is not not one. It is a study in three people arranged at fatal angles to each other, which is a thing the genre she came from is extremely good at and the genre she moved into had barely attempted.

What the Number Cannot Do

The honest caveat, as ever. Descending Stories is a translation of a title — Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu means something closer to "Showa-Genroku Rakugo Double-Suicide", and the shinjuu in it, the lovers' suicide of the puppet theatre, is doing work that the English title quietly drops. The number 9 attaches to a phrase an English-language publisher chose. Had they rendered it literally, the Destiny would differ, and I would be writing a different essay with the same confidence, which is precisely the trap this series identified in part 165 and has been walking around ever since.

And yet. The word rakugo is not a translation. It is the thing itself, romanized directly, and it returns a 1: one man, alone, doing everything. That is not nothing. It is not proof of anything either — the universe does not assign numbers to art forms — but it is a coincidence with enough shape to it that I would rather report it than pretend I did not notice.

The Cycle Refuses to Close

Yakumo does not get his wish, of course. That is the shape of a 9: the cycle closes, but not in the way the man holding it intended. The art does not die with him. It goes to Yotaro — the ex-convict, the natural, the one with no lineage and no technique and an unkillable enthusiasm — and to Konatsu, who was never permitted to have it because she is a woman, and who wanted it more than anyone in the manga. The tradition survives by passing into precisely the hands the tradition was designed to exclude.

That is the closing of a cycle in the way the number actually means it: not preservation and not extinction, but transmission to someone the previous holder would not have chosen. Every art form that has lasted did this. Manga did it, repeatedly — from the kashihon libraries to the magazines, from paper to the phone screen, each time carried forward by people the previous generation considered barbarians. Kumota, writing about rakugo, wrote the truest thing anyone has written about the medium she was working in.

One man, alone on a cushion, playing every part. Then he stands up, and he hands the fan to someone he does not approve of, and the story goes on being told.