“The fireworks were the only ones there to witness our farce.”
Creative Staff:
Story & Art: Ryoko Fukuyama
Translation & Adaptation: Casey Loe
Touch-Up Art & Lettering: Joanna Estep
Design: Yukiko Whitley
Editor: Amy Yu
What They Say:
I would have been able to say “I love you.”
Nino Arisugawa, a girl who loves to sing, experiences her first heart-wrenching goodbye when her beloved childhood friend, Momo, moves away. And after Nino befriends Yuzu, a music composer, she experiences another sad parting! Luckily, Nino reunites with Momo and Yuzu in high school, but things haven’t played out the way anyone expected…
When In No Hurry’s Rock Horizon performance ends in a whirl of frantic passion, does Nino’s voice reach Momo? And with the school festival coming up, the Pop Music Club prepares for its first performance in a long time… with things between Haruyoshi and Miou suddenly heating up!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After the explosive performance wrapping up the last volume, it only made sense for Anonymous Noise volume 6 to be serve as a cool-down period—some time for characters to interact without the pressure of any heavy-lifting when it comes to forwarding the plot. The problem is that all the character interaction this volume felt so nebulous and meandering. Yes, there’s the upcoming event that is the Pop Music Club’s performance during the school festival, but that comes off as less of a build-up and more like a sudden realization that shows up late into the volume.
Following In No Hurry’s performance at Rock Horizon, it feels like all romantic tension has once again been reset to square one. Except unlike previous times this has happened, we’re deep enough into the story where it feels less like a minor inconvenience and more like a downright tease to have the love triangle between Nino, Yuzu, and Momo essentially rebooted. At school, Nino and Yuzu are getting oddly snippy with each other, which feels a lot more unwarranted since they never really acted like this in prior volumes.
Meanwhile, Momo has been taken out of the picture entirely—fleeing from his band Black Kitty entirely and transferring to a completely different school. It’s an incredibly drastic decision for his character, and yet there is very little consequence to these actions. Not only are the people at his record label not worried, but even Momo’s time at his new school doesn’t feel fully utilized. While he does admit to a classmate that he is in love with Nino, he has yet to truly demonstrate himself as an empathetic character (or even a viable love interest, for that matter). In comparison to Yuzu, a good chunk of Momo’s viability as a love interest has been lip service at most. And maybe that contrast is intentional, but at this point in the series, I would have much appreciated a bit more fleshing out to Momo.
Of course, this is a shojo, so it shouldn’t surprise me that the main love triangle is meant to never be sorted out up until the very end of the series. And it’s clear that those are author Fukuyama’s intentions as well. So in what seems to be a clear response to that, we do get to see secondary characters Miou and Haruyoshi become a couple. The two certainly have strong enough personalities for us as the reader to be invested in both of them, but at the end of the day it’s still a thinly-veiled palette cleanser to make up for the lack of romance going on with the main love interests.
All the while, we also have an upcoming school performance to look forward to. And as hyped as the volume has made me for the upcoming performance, I will say that the dynamic of school versus live rock venues is something I wish the series would delve into. Here we have the members of In No Hurry to Shout and one member of Silent Black Kitty attending the same school club, and performing together on the same stage, yet there’s little to no fanfare about that or the dual lives each member must be going through, since nobody at the school knows they’re in those respective bands. Yes, it would be incredibly trite to pull something like that, but to ignore that it’s something that would have happened at one point just feels sloppy.
In Summary:
Volume 6 of Anonymous Noise is a random mishmash of character interactions that are too minor to really care about carried out in tandem with character interactions reset to square one. Where the cast should feel comfortable in their own shoes, it feels like they’ve instead grown further apart for no reason other than keeping the series feeling as episodic as possible. Nonetheless, the build-up to the school festival does keep me anticipating what’s to come, so at the least there’s that to look forward to.
Content Grade: C+
Art Grade: B
Packaging Grade: A
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: Teen
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: November 28, 2017
MSRP: $9.99
