Radio Coming Back from the Dead

You’d be surprised what a spontaneous Google search can reveal. It’d been yonks since but I remember stumbling upon an anime adaptation of a manga that unfortunately flew under the radar for reasons I’ll share later. Known in English as Wave, Listen to Me! and in Japanese as Nami yo Kiitekure!, the manga tells of a Sapporo-based restaurant worker who finds herself as the newest voice of a late night radio show by proxy. A drunken rambling to an ex-TV executive gets her into this world and she doesn’t even realize what had happened until she and her peers recognized her voice coming out of the radio in the restaurant she works at. Talk about stumbling face first into fortune, right?

Well, fortune isn’t exactly how she sees it and legally no lawyer would unless a negotiation and settlement would be reached. Reasonable people call this a discussion, we here in the real world call this the high road most copyright strikers on YouTube refuse to take.

All things considered, this is the kind of series that lives up to its stated mission goal. Although I’m not a wave, I certainly am listening. (See what I did there?) The protagonist, Minare Koda, found herself in this world thanks in no small part to Mr. Al Cohol. For me, I found my way into blogging purely out of desperation for employment of some kind. I had just graduated from community college and I didn’t want the degree to just sit there and look nice, though now I know that this is a fate that befalls many arts degrees.

A majority of the focus in the series is on the radio, the station, the show Minare works on, etc. but it doesn’t focus on the inner workings of running a radio show or performing in one. It’s not like Akane-banashi where the story introduces the reader to the history and culture behind rakugo performances. And honestly, it’s not like it really needs to. If the pandemic was proof of anything, it doesn’t take a lot to just grab some equipment and start podcasting. Some of the people who gained popularity through the medium have been doing it for years or decades by then. They just got more listeners because of the lockdowns.

Rather, Wave, Listen to Me! reminds me of a couple of other series I happened to stumble upon from that old article a few years ago: House of Five Leaves and Ristorante Paradiso both written by Natsume Ono, both of which I’ve seen, and one of which I tried talking about on my first blog, but will likely devote time to again once I get to rewatching them both.

The connecting element between the three Seinen series is that it’s not about the practice, it’s about the people engaged in the practice. Wave, Listen to Me! takes care to dive into the people’s personal lives and show you what goes on in their lives outside of work. Pretty much how a slice of life should be. Describing the rest of the cast, well, do you remember when you were a kid you saw all the adults engaged in admittedly mundane activities, but it looked like they had everything sorted out? Then when you became an adult you realized everyone was essentially bulls[bull noises]ng the entire way and no one had anything sorted out? That’s what it felt like watching Wave, Listen to Me! except me being 25 (around the same age as Minare in the series) I had gotten smart to this around the time I was in college.

Minare is given a lot of responsibilities in the restaurant, not all of them relating to waitstaff, but that and coupled with her personal woes may or may not be the reason she drowns herself at the bottom of a beer glass weekly. She’s such a mess that her downstairs neighbor brings her back up to her apartment on his back. Her boss and coworkers aren’t all that much better either. The ex-TV exec, Kanetsugu Matoh, recorded her without her consent and even though it works out in both of their favors, an even worse person could easily have a lot of fun with that. Hell, her boss at the restaurant is one such example, and this could be a minor indictment on the series itself. For starters, this character gropes the bums of men whenever he takes pictures with male celebrities who come to dine. Do with that information what you will.

Now, all of that is interesting on its own, but what about the diminished attention this series has? Why haven’t I heard about it until now or before? Normally, with unsung and unknown series, that’s a matter of debate unless outright stated by the creator themselves on the status of the series and in the case of the anime adaptation, it was like a bunch of other short term anime series: an advertisement for the manga. But I think I have a few theories on why Wave, Listen to Me! slid through the cracks.

One part of it may have to do with the release schedule: April 2020, so exactly four years ago (my, how time flies). The year of the pandemic, the riots, and what amounts to an almost-pocalypse in retrospect.

Barely a week in and people were crying about a potential war! It’s just a dark joke now.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the month before Wave, Listen to Me! debuted, the U.S. went into a lockdown and news of lifts kept getting pushed back every three weeks with TV moving out of studios and podcasts dropping from the sky left and right to pass the time until a vaccine could be mobilized. As for Japan, a more health-conscious country, guidelines were stricter and generally everyone was encouraged to maintain safety and even move their work home with them, hence why a look at 2020’s anime repertoire doesn’t look as stacked as what preceded or succeeded it since. Loads of projects were canceled or postponed until the pandemic was declared reduced or over.

That said, I believe that even if there wasn’t a pandemic that year, the marketing would’ve done a lot to make or break the reception of the series. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great series. But a bad or badly received trailer can straight up assassinate interest in a show, as explained in this video about demos:

There’s also this trailer for the 2018 TV series Titans:

In both of these examples, Spec Ops: The Line and Titans were both given positive reviews post-release, but the initial reception based on their respective marketing led to a lot of people counting their chickens before they began to hatch.

For Wave, Listen to Me!, good marketing could help promote it at the time. No clue if it would have the longevity to still be talked about even now if this were the case, but we’ve seen stranger things happen. To quote a smooth-talking, galactic smuggler:

YouTube recommendations are still a thing, albeit biweekly for now. And for this week, I bring you Mrs. Eats.

https://www.youtube.com/@MrsEats

One of a handful of Japanese YouTubers whose content is in both Japanese and English, Mrs. Eats likes to show people the ground perspective of life in Japan, at times in a comedic way with her husband. Additionally, her videos uncover several misconceptions many people, especially foreigners, may have about Japanese culture, lifestyle, or even entertainment. Sounds like it’s up your alley? See the link above.