Speaking through senryu is at least a creative approach.
What They Say:
cherry blossoms bloom / as a pair of brand-new friends / writes some poetry
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based n the manga by Masakuni Igarashi, Senryu Girl is written and directed by Masato Jinbo with Connect handling the animation production for it. The original work kicked off back in 2016 and has eight volumes so far with most of them hitting close to 100,000 copies each, which is pretty good. As you can tell from the title, it focuses on the short poetry form called senryu that’s close to haiku in some ways but, like the game in Chihayafuru, is all Greek to me when you get down to it. It’s also what I love about anime because all of these things that may be niche to some degree can warrant a well-produced adaptation to expose it to the world more, which as we’ve seen before can cause some small booms in just how much interest there is as people find out about something they may not have really known before.
Coming in at just about twelve minutes per episode, the show focuses on Nanako, a pretty nice and outgoing young woman in high school who finds herself drawn to a former delinquent that she sees there named Eiji. As outgoing as Nanako come across she has a problem in that it’s very hard to talk in public and to people, though she’s able to with them in her own way. We see some of how that plays out in class as she writes everything down and does it in a kind of poetic way using the paper style you see hanging from bamboo trees during Tanabata. While it is written down we do get to hear her voice “reading” it through the internal dialogue so she’s not a completely silent character, which admittedly could be an interesting approach to handling things.
What becomes amusing is that she finds herself able to connect with Eiji easily enough in her way of speaking whereas everyone else just talks about him or is outright afraid of him because of his reputation and his looks. Naturally, they’re both part of the same kind of literature club that makes it easy for them to spend time together and there’s a kind of beauty and the beast approach to how they come across when together, especially with her being so quiet. Eiji’s fairly amusing with how and what he talks about, and playing up his reputation comically, which is pretty disarming as well as making it easy to see why she likes him. The show spends a little time with the club side as the two of them plus the club president, Amane, work on creating some new senryu which runs the gamut in cute ways here.
In Summary:
Senryu Girl starts off light and charming and maintains that feeling throughout. Nonoka’s well-handled with her issue and it plays well into the club side of things but it’s really Eiji that steals the show. As we get to see more of him across the episode and he emotes more than anyone else you find yourself really liking him and this pairing since they’re cute together. The path and journey for this relationship can have some obvious ups and downs ahead of it but the opening episode sets it up nicely and has me looking forward to seeing more of it since it has a kind of cute approach to everything.
Grade: B
Streamed By: HIDIVE
