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It should be noted that The Flying Trapeze won the Naoki Prize in 2004, Japanese equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards for Okuda's stories. It is amazing that such an intriguing anime with such startling pedigree is available only from one retailer in Australia (see the encyclopaedia entry for link.) Amazon.co.jp has Okuda's books available but only in Japanese or German. Amazon.com has only an audio CD of Welcome to Irabu's Office. There is no mention of it anywhere else, by any retailer here or abroad, except in reviews scattered far and wide. It looks to be so little known that there are no torrents of the anime, even dead ones (not unusual for very old anime but uncommon for recent ones--not promoting illicit file sharing but sometimes it is a very rare work's only route to being discovered.) I would probably have never heard of it (even though I browse the ANN on occasion) except that I decided to examine the fine print on the "noitaminA" splash page at the beginning of an episode of PSYCHO-PASS. The title "Welcome to Irabu's Office" intrigued me. Sometimes I think little chance happenings like that are messages from the quantum foam, to which we should pay attention. I recommend anyone who is even slightly interested to invest in the DVD so that it continues to remain available. Were it to go out of print, the price of remaining copies would only rise precipitously. It wouldn't hurt to get the books, also, if you can afford them.

Last edited by yuna49 on Sun May 26, 2013 9:57 am; edited 2 times in total

It took me all of ten seconds to find a fansub on a well-known torrent index site.

I'll watch anything Nakajima Kenji directs. I'd place Kuuchuu Buranko (aka Trapeze, aka Welcome to Irabu's Office) ahead of [C]-Control but behind both Tsuritama and the Apothecary stories in the "Bakeneko" arc of Ayakashi Samurai Horror Tales and its sequel Mononoke. i dropped Trapeze about half way through when it first aired on noitaminA but decided to give it another try about a year later. I enjoyed it more the second time around, but I'd agree with the reviewers B+ grade.

For those of you in R4, Siren has acquired the license to Mononoke. If you have never watched that, you should put it on your list right now. It's definitely in my all-time top-ten, though I think the original "Bakeneko" in the Ayakashi anthology is the best of the Apothecary stories. It's still available in R1. You couldn't find a better way to spend $9 on an anime than buying Bakeneko.

gridsleep wrote:

It is amazing that such an intriguing anime with such startling pedigree is available only from one retailer in Australia (see the encyclopaedia entry for link.)

It's only available from one distributor in Australia, like every anime in every country, but is available from all the normal retailers as well as direct from Siren.
As I recall it was torrented as "Trapeze" while it aired, for the "raws" at least, since I still collected them back then.