The last chapter ends on a high note, with the village coming together for “mochi-picking”, a kind of dedication ceremony that involves throwing wrapped rice cakes at everyone in town. He makes a friend, the no-good son of the woman who makes food for him, whom he inspires into working harder through his own dedication. He meets more kids at the village school and gets roped into babysitting. That was refreshing to the spirit.Īs Handa moves in, he quickly learns about the willingness of neighbors to help strangers. The most appealing part, to me, were the images of the natural setting and island life. I didn’t find any of it very funny, personally, but that’s because Naru wore on me quickly. The series by Satsuki Yoshiko is billed as a comedy, but the humor is hit or miss. Like a sickness, she’s impossible to get rid of, but she provides naive wisdom and inspiration.
He keeps throwing her out (literally), but she keeps coming back. She’s been hanging out in the formerly empty house Handa rents, so the two are thrown together. She’s irrepressible, curious, and outspoken. Naru is quite the, as the first chapter title has it, “energetic child”. His work has been dull and conformist, and when told so, he attacked the messenger, a respected director of the company, so he has a lot to process. Handa is a talented calligrapher who’s been overcome by the stress of competitions in the city, so he’s moved to a small island village to recover his spirit in solitude. In my opinion, a better comparison to Barakamon would be Green Acres: high-powered city guy moves to the country and learns the virtue of relationships with a variety of rural character types. I’d heard it compared once too often to Yotsuba&!, which I adore, but I suspect that’s just because there’s a smart-alec kid co-starring.
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