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A mismatched pair of adventurers—a “strategemist” for ancient Japan’s Shogunate and a “swordsman” who uses no swords—embark on a quest to find twelve swords that could alter the country’s destiny.
Katanagatari goes out of its way to be odd, but it’s also loaded with color and exotic charm. It’s not so much about its story as it’s about its storytelling, and how byplay and interplay between characters can be as engrossing as any number of supercharged duels.
It also looks fantastic, in close imitation of the illustrated light novels that preceded it.
Pros
- A creative premise based on works from one of Japan's most idiosyncratic novelists.
- Stylish, fiercely colorful designs (based directly on the book's own illustrations).
- The visuals and storytelling might also be too outwardly quirky for some.
- Director: Keitaro Motonaga
- Animation Studio: WHITE FOX
- Released By: Aniplex
- Released Domestically By: NIS America
- Audio: Japanese w/English subtitles
- Age Rating: TV-14 (martial arts violence, blood, thematic material)
- List Price: $69.98 (Blu-ray / DVD combo)
Anime Genres:
- Action/Adventure
- Martial Arts
- Samurai/Ninja
- Drama
Related Titles:
- Rurouni Kenshin
- Basilisk
- Oh! Edo Rocket
- Shigurui
Boy (martial artist) meets girl (master of strategy)
When you step back and look at it, Katanagatari is not all that complicated: two people team up to find a bunch of swords scattered across Japan. Up close, it looks impossibly convoluted, because that baby-simple storyline is used to showcase a whole roster of characters defined mainly by their eccentricities.
They’re as talkative as anyone in a Quentin Tarantino script, and are repositories of at least as much oddball trivia as that lot too. Then they stop talking and act, and the rather elliptical story unspooling around them snaps that much more solidly into place … and what seemed like harmless eccentricity turns out to be concealing some rather dark depths.
Katanagatari (the title means “Tale of the Swords”) takes place in the feudal era, when a sword was the reflection of the soul of both its creator and wielder. Once, a master swordsmith created twelve swords of such legendary power that anyone who collected all of them would be … well, you can guess. In pursuit of these twelve weapons is a Shogunate official, Togame, who sports a title far too big to fit comfortably on a business card: she’s the “Direct Domain Delegated Director of Defense,” a “stratagemist” who may be frail in body but sharp in mind. She needs a bodyguard to carry out her mission, and she finds one in Yasuri Shichika, the seventh-generation heir to the Kyoto Ryu martial art which is a fighting style for swordsmen who don’t use swords. In other words, Shichika is himself a sword, something that has its own implications later on as things grow increasingly tangled.
Enter the ninja
Shichika is as gormless and naïve as Togame is calculating and perceptive. Or rather, we are led to believe this from the beginning, when Togame approaches Shichika on the island where he lives with his sickly sister Nanami and persuades him to accompany her for this mission. Togame is a brilliant fighter, able to take down most anyone no matter what they’re armed with, but simple human interaction is beyond him. The only people he’s ever known are his father, now deceased, and his sister; at first he even has trouble telling her and this exotic new stranger apart despite the fact they look absolutely nothing alike.
Then the ninja show up. They are the Twelve Shadows of the Maniwa Ningun, each sporting a bird or animal motif that’s as striking as it is impractical (well, this is anime, so we can forgive that). They are determined to get their hands on the swords first, or failing that avenge their fallen comrades by any means available. They haven’t tangled with the likes of Shichika yet, though, and once they do we see even their special powers are not much help. Even more jarring is when three of them gang up on poor little Nanami, only to find that even in her “enfeebled” condition she can still whip the stuffing out of all of them.
About storytelling, not just story
Each episode deals with, as you might well imagine, a quest for a different sword in the hands of a different master, each one requiring a different strategy on Togame and Shichika’s part and told with a slightly different spin on the storytelling. The episode where Nanami defends herself against three Maniwa ninja, for instance—it all happens at the same time Shichika is allegedly facing off against a master swordsman on an island somewhere (shades of Miyamoto Musashi versus Sasaki Kojiro), but we only see Nanami’s fight. Shichika’s encounter happens entirely offscreen and is referenced only in retrospect after the episode’s almost over.
The show’s littered with similar sly jabs to the viewer, pokes in the ribs to make us remember what’s important here is not what we’re being told but how we find out about it, or how we let what we don’t actually know color our understanding of the goings-on. Shichika’s father, for instance: at first we’re just told he passed on some time ago. Then we find out he was killed, and then after that we find out he was killed by … well, I’ll stop there lest I spoil one of the more incrementally eye-opening sub-elements of the show. Let’s just say one of the show’s points in this regard is that “naïve” is not the same as “harmless” or even “good,” and much of what we casually assume about the people we meet is just as casually demolished.
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