Wave, Listen to Me!

Episode 11

It's hard to believe that the season is already coming to a close, but Wave, Listen to Me! offered up a doozy of a reminder with “I Don't Fear Anaerobic Creatures”, a rip-roaring trip through Minare Koda's weird world of radio that could very well have served as a surprisingly satisfying finale for this spring's run of episodes. Here, we have a little sampling of everything this series does that makes it such a unique and rewarding treat to watch each week: Stellar direction and animation combined with a confident blend of workplace comedy and a meta-fictional genre dive into occult horror, all wrapped around Minare's forceful and compelling presence as our heroine and hostess for the evening.

Picking up where we left off last week, this week's in-universe episode of Wave, Listen to Me! sees the fictionalized Minare committing cold-blooded Mitsuo murder with her partner in crime, “Mr. Matt” (played by Kanetsugu), only for the two of them to be confronted by Matsuo's bent and broken corpse rising from the grave. Things take quite the turn, however, when Zombie Mitsuo drags Minare down into the underworld, underneath the Sea of Trees in Aokigahara Forest, to meet with a divine woman who claims to be Asama-no-Okami. This deity is responsible for the cleansing of sinful souls, and she is intent on serving up a reckoning for the sins of Minare, Mitsuo, and Mr. Matt.

It's a positively gonzo development, paired with delightfully surreal visuals and the entertainingly silly sound-design that we constantly cut back to the radio station to see in action. Asami-no-Okami's three-eyed, monstrous design is legitimately cool looking, and the episode manages to sneak it a genuine air of horror that makes the comedy work that much better – for most of the episode, for example, Mr. Matt has one of his eyeballs just hanging out of his skull and dripping blood. It's a weirdly gnarly effect, in a good way, and a perfect symbol of the strange way that Wave, Listen to Me! has been able to consistently indulge in Hiroaki Samura's horrorcore aesthetics while still being a workplace comedy that takes place in a radio station.

Emotionally, the show also serves as a solid climax for Minare's slow-but-steady emotional development. When Mr. Matt confesses to murdering dozens of people over the years, and when Mitsuo basically cops to his refusal to change his ways or take responsibility for the people he's hurt, Asami-no-Okami grants both of them a reincarnation as humble Swedish men (it's one of the episodes silliest and best running gags). Minare refuses to take the easy way out of simply acknowledging the bad karma she regrets putting out into the world, however. In a very “anime” climax, Minare owns up to all of the ways she has been unfair or cruel to the people in her life, and each of her confessions cuts to the people she's had conflict with throughout the series: Kanetsugu, Mitsuo, Nakahara, Shinji, Makie, and so on. It isn't exactly a shining moment of utterly profound revelation — Minare simply acknowledges that she regrets almost everything she does, all of the time — but the summative way it addresses the major and minor plot threads of the whole series feels very appropriate for a story that is nearing it's conclusion. Or, at least, a conclusion.

After all, the whole point of this particular trek into bizarro occult land was to give Minare the chance to be “reborn”, and once the show is done with, Minare really does seem to be refreshed and recharged. Some of her declarations of completely forgetting Mitsuo ever existed might be more bluster than anything, sure, but now she's got a show with her name on it, dammit, and now she's got to figure out her style as a host, and what guests to invite on to the program to build her fledging community of late night occultist weirdos. I don't know what the proper series finale will bring, but it's undeniable that Minare's future is looking brighter than it did when she ran into Kanetsugu on that drunken night out all those weeks ago.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• You've Got a Face Made For Radio: This one was actually really easy, as the best Minare face of the week comes right at the top, where see the campy terror Minare is trying to inject into her vocal performance when Mitsuo rises from his grave. A close second place winner is this incredibly sweet reaction that Minare shows off when she is realizing all of the support she now has in her life with her new and old friends.

• Chishiro shows back up again for the first time in goodness knows how many episodes to perform as Asami-no-Okami. It's a fun reveal, though I have to wonder if the character had (or has) much more to do in the manga, since I had completely forgotten she even existed.

• There's a little more of the Mitsuho/Kureko drama injected here — Minare knows that Mitsuho is stressed about him leaving because of how much she's been sharpening her kitchen knives. We also learn that Mitsuho's life goal was apparently to assemble her dream team of Kureko the writer and Minare the host with Mitsuho herself as Chief Director for a full three-hour block of whatever the hell they would end up creating. Minare is right when she assesses that dream as both insanely cute and incredibly sad.

• In the script, Asami-no-Okami notes that Mr. Matt is experiencing his 8740th reincarnation when he is zapped into the life of a non-descript Swedish man. I wonder in how many of those thousands of iterations he ended up an unrepentant serial murderer?

• Another great gag is Asami-no-Okami's dialogue, which is very blatantly just Chishiro reading from some Wikipedia articles that Kureko cribbed on Aoikigahara Forest. Asks one listener: “Was the passage on UNESCO really necessary?”

Wave, Listen to Me! is currently streaming on Funimation.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.