Let’s Go Karaoke! – Series Review

Content Warning: Potential age-gap romance (epilogue), gore

What’s it about? Oka Satomi is about to enter his last competition as a middle-school student and captain of his school choir, but the soprano parts are becoming increasingly difficult for him. And then, to make matters worse, a yakuza approaches him and asks for singing lessons.

---

The most popular search term for Let’s Go Karaoke is “is it BL?”. Putting aside pedantry about the fact that the original comic was self-published (and thus lacks a marketing category label) the answer is….kind of. It’s a coming-of-age story conceived around the concept of an unlikely age-gap friendship, which leans on multiple signifiers to imply the possibility of a romance after the credits roll. And that’s a big part of why it works so well.

On paper, this is an extremely simple narrative about puberty as a crossroads in life. More complicated things have certainly been done with the charged nature of voices changing (oh, my kingdom for a Shonen Note anime…), but Karaoke knows its lane and grounds its outlandish premise with insight into the mundane. Satomi is clearly facing down the loss not just of his soprano singing voice, but the skill by which he’d defined himself up to that point. As we’re introduced to him, it might as well be the complete loss of his identity. He’s believable as a straight-laced kid trying to hide his inner turmoil, thanks in no small part to Horie Shun (The Dangers in My Heart, Migi & Dali), who’s becoming a favorite of mine.

Yakuza Kyouji, meanwhile, is more of an abstract concept than a person. That’s not an insult—it’s why the story works. I said that this is an age-gap friendship story, and it is…but it’s also using the hallmarks of age-gap romance. The story doesn’t shy away from the fact that Kyouji is a bad dude (and at this point I think Ono Daisuke could play a dangerous fantasy man in his sleep, not that he’s phoning it in here), which is a relief after so many years of cuddly yakuza stories, but he does still appear in the nick of time to gallantly protect Satomi from a pushy guy in a bad neighborhood. The song so important to the thematic through line that the show licensed it (not that Crunchyroll has it subtitled…) is X Japan’s romantic ballad “Crimson.” And naturally, whenever Satomi gets a text inviting him to karaoke, his classmates assume they’re from a girlfriend. This isn’t just a “teenager and young adult” age gap, either. Satomi is about 15, while Kyouji is 40.

The key thing, one which at least to me is a cornerstone of effective age-gap stories, is tied to Kyouji’s unreality. This is about Satomi and this emotionally intense bond that’s transformative but also completely chaste. It feels so centered in a child’s fantasy of a hot older person sweeping into your life, where you know you feel something but not what the importance of it is or the depth of the implications around it. They also completely lose contact with one another after the fateful concert-slash-karaoke-contest day, with Kyouji deliberately stepping away because he doesn’t want to screw up a kid’s life. And all of that table-setting makes the impromptu reunion of an epilogue, with Satomi about to go away to college, hit a lot more smoothly.

It’s good writing backed by a good production. This miniseries was part of a dual project that involved Wayama Yama’s other book, Captivated, By You. Each adaptation is five episodes, which is space enough to do a single volume with breathing room but not so much that the material feels stretched thin. The creative team is backed up by that Doga Kobo juice, and they wield it well. Director Nakatani Asami’s experience on idol shows translates well to a different kind of music story (one which might feature the best portrayal of comically bad singing I’ve seen in an anime), while Narita Yoshimi last had his emotional bonafides adapting Twilight Out of Focus. The art direction loops in Hirama Yuka (Backflip!, Say “I love you”), while the three animation directors (Inade Haruka, Taniguchi Junichiro, and Morita Rina) flex credits that include HypnosisMic, Oshi no Ko, and Madoka.

If the show has a weakness, it’s that it has five episodes rather than four. The first four aired together in a block and covered the entirety of the single volume doujinshi; the last episode, meanwhile, aired after the entirety of Captivated, By You was broadcast, and was much talked-about as being anime-only material. Considering that Wayama is just wrapping up the sequel (Fami-res Iko, which I dearly wish could be localized as “Let’s Go to Denny’s”), hopes were perhaps a bit high that some of that story might’ve found its way into the Karaoke anime.

Alas, no. The fifth episode just catches up with what Kyouji was doing during the timeskip between the end of the story proper and the epilogue. It’s not bad, per say, but it doesn’t add much and arguably does damage to the strength of the original story’s focus on Satomi. We already got a brief window into Kyouji’s background, enough to make him slightly more rounded as a character, but he was never meant to be our point-of-view character. And taking him out of his firm place in the realm of fantasy risks introducing more grounded questions to his role in the story, like, “why on earth would this adult think hanging around with a teenage boy is a good idea.” It’s a minor complaint, though, and the viewer loses nothing by just not bothering with the last episode.

It’s such a delight to see studios experimenting with form and episode length, particularly as animators are ground down into exhaustion by too many anime and untenable production schedules. It’s too soon to be some grand savior of an industry that increasingly seems in need of collapse before it can begin to rebuild, but I’d like to hope the success of projects like this could open the door to both better working conditions and adaptation possibilities for the many wonderful works that are a bit too long for a movie and a bit too short for 12 episodes. Your fondness for Let’s Go Karaoke will definitely depend on how hard your limits are for age-gap stories, but it’s a lovingly made little production that’s worth an afternoon of your time.