Flower and Asura – Episode 10

Episode Synopsis:

Hana struggles to take advice from her peers and seniors regarding both her diction and her mental readiness to compete.

Episode Review:

I said in my first review that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the show is set on Kume Island, but I am very surprised indeed to find out that it’s actually set in Kyoto. Once again, there is a real island called Tonaki that actually does have, like, three hundred people on it, and—crucially—no high school of its own. According to google maps, it’s a couple-hour ferry ride from Naha, the capital of Okinawa prefecture, which is home to three hundred thousand people, as well as Lake Man, a body of water with a cable-stayed bridge over the wetlands on its southwest side which I had assumed was the inspiration for the setting of the final scene of episode 5 (based on several hours of tooling around on google maps and coming to the conclusion that the ocean around the island is too shallow and the rivers on it too small for any of its other bridges to require that level of engineering), even though the establishing shot shows two pylons and Toyomio Bridge only has one (many prominent cable-stayed bridges do have multiple pylons, but having pairs isn’t integral to the design like it is for suspension bridges).

*breathes in*

The city of Kyoto, by comparison, isn’t even on the coast, and none of Osaka Bay to the southwest, Lake Biwa to the northeast, or the ocean to the far north of the prefecture contain any islands both large enough to support their own population and remote enough to be accessed primarily by ferry. And yet, the four-school workshop that the club attends is in Kyoto, and Mizuki mentioned that she placed in last year’s competition there (I guess I figured Kyoto adopted Okinawa for regionals? Instead of Kyushu?). Heck, Akiyama got the text from his sister about coming to Kyoto – implying that the cast is at least closer to Kyoto than to Osaka, since the latter and Tokyo were also mentioned on the poster visible earlier in episode 6 – while on a ferry from Tonaki island. When the gang went to see her and Saionji Shura, at first I thought maybe they got some cheap flights – round trips from Naha don’t seem to be terribly expensive, depending on when you go, but they’re, like, two hours each way, plus airport logistics, so it’s not the kind of trip you take just to pop in for ramen, as Touga does in this episode. I mean, there’s several hundred miles of ocean in between – it’s not like you can just hop on Japan’s famed railway system and be there in less than an hour, as if you were starting from Osaka, or Kobe, or, uhh…

…or Nara…

No. No way. The kanji don’t look anything like each other.

No one would write a story where the cities of Naha and Nara are in some kind of geographic superposition. Think, Brendan – you can do better than that.

The bridge. Cable-stayed bridges are too uncommon for that scene not to be the key.

And so, several more hours of tooling around on google maps has led me to discover Maizuru Crane Bridge, which actually matches up quite well with the scene in episode 5 (as well as one of the shots in the OP, now that I look again), and I can now sleep at night assuming that the primary quirk in the show’s geography is that Tonaki Island has been moved to Honshu’s northern coast, just beyond Maizuru Bay (or at least given a fictional twin there – I suppose for all I know they’re written with different kanji), placing the cast within Kyoto prefecture and no more than two hours away from the city proper by train.

Now, where were w-
I mean, what was going on?

Hana finds herself in tension trying to discern what elements of her speech constitute her personal style, which ought to be cultivated from within, and what elements are representative of her skill, which ought to be refined to meet external standards. It’s a difficult balancing act (to say nothing of whether they overlap, or how the audience factors in), made all the more so by the temporally linear nature of audio performance – a visual artist or author may be able to identify a spot of their art that they don’t like at a glance, and adjust it in isolation to be integrated back into the whole, but doing so with spoken word is (while not necessarily impossible, given the right tools) somewhat trickier. Evidently, club activities haven’t prepared her for repeating the same line with numerous cumulative changes, each more subtle than the last.

On top of this, Hana is taken to task by another student for not having the resolve to compete against her schoolmates, and becomes further depressed by the notion that being chosen to participate in the national competition might mean displacing one of her friends. Totonoi (Ryoko) offers her some perspective based on last year’s results, emphasizing that, for an art form like this, all you can really do is be yourself to the best of your ability, and then let the chips fall where they may. The alternative is surely the path to madness.

It has been a long, long time since I was part of any kind of organized competition, and the haze of all those years lies thick over my memories, but I do empathize with the characters here, and appreciate this look at the beginning of Hana’s development into contestant.

Summary:

I try not to demand that shows have a detailed internal geography, but I am easily distracted, and what’s even weirder than inconsistencies in fictional geography are inconsistent references to the real world. Did I miss any other clues to this? Is it spelled out in the source material? I hate to get hung up on pointless details for such an otherwise pleasant show.

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