First Impressions – The Fable

In terms of pre-season expectations, The Fable is the biggest premiere of the season so far.  There have been qualifiers all along with me – the studio, the fact that I don’t know the source material, a director that hasn’t done much work in three decades.  Add to that now we’re looking at a 25-episode run for a manga that has 22 volumes (I suppose it could get more but it seems unlikely).  On the other hands it is a seinen, and an extremely well-regarded one at that – it won the Kodansha Manga Award in 2017.

So, on balance, it’s fair to say I came into The Fable cautiously optimistic.  And that’s about where I am after the premiere, which was solid if unspectacular.  With Tezuka Productions in charge I did worry that we’d be looking at another My Home Hero situation – a much-lauded seinen crime saga tanked by a shockingly ugly adaptation.  But while this was certainly nothing special visually, it wasn’t that – what we saw was clearly low-budget but tolerable.  I’d say that about the direction too, which was competent almost to the point of mundanity and lacked much style, but didn’t really stumble at any point.

The Fable is the story of a super-skilled hitman whose real name we aren’t told here, widely known as – you guessed it – The Fable.  He’s killed 71 in six years, some big fish among that group.  Fable (Okitsu Kazuyuki) is an extremely deadpan figure, businesslike about his work.  His associate (Sawashiro Miyuki) handles the mundane stuff like cleanup, chauffeuring, and blowing on hot food.  Fable’s sponsor (Ichijou Kazuya) decides he’s been a little too successful and his reputation grown a little too bloated, and orders Fable to lie low in Osaka for a year with his assistant.  If he kills anyone during that year, Master says, he’ll kill the both of them.

It should be noted that mangaka Minami Katsuhisa is Osaka born and bred, and unsurprisingly the anime cast a Kansai boy in Okitsu as Fable.  He notes that he’s learned six “languages” (in truth Japanese dialects) that he can turn on with a switch in his head, so authenticity was always going to be key here.  Given that Fable – now going by Satou Akira, with his companion posing as his sister Youko – is going to be under the care of the local Osaka mob during his time there, Osaka-ben and local customs are clearly going to be a big part of this story.

Seeing that Fable is supposed to be pretty much a cipher here – derisive sneering is pretty much his only emotion when he’s not laughing at his favorite jackass comic on TV – it’s not surprising that I don’t get much of a read on him here.  Youko gives us more of her story – she was orphaned by a fire at ten years old and “for some reason” (I suspect because his group set the fire) Master took her in – and is a little more nuanced at this point.  She’s clearly bright and playing dumb, or so it seems to me.  One doesn’t envy her having to babysit “Akira” for a year.  He almost blows their cover on the road trip to Osaka, not avoiding a confrontation with a couple of low-rent car thieves in the rest area parking lot (though he doesn’t kill them).

The local yakuza are presumably going to be major characters too.  The boss (Komura Tetsuo) is sanguine about taking this loose cannon under their care, clearly not having been given much choice.  His captain Ebihara Takeshi (Ohtsuka Akio) is more worked up about it, referring to Akira as a “killer whale” (shark wasn’t big enough) in their midst.  Akira has ¥50 million in cash and the local boss is providing them housing, so it’s not like the guy has to work for the next year.  This is supposed to be all about him learning how to be a “normal” person”, so what choices he makes about how to spend his time is going to be an interesting element.

Again this is all pretty solid stuff, if not yet compelling.  Japan is not alone in being obsessed with organized crime stories so it’s not easy to break new ground here, but one has to presume the manga is as acclaimed as it is for a reason.  None of my concerns going in have been summarily dismissed, apart perhaps from the production itself not being a disaster, but The Fable hasn’t done anything to amplify them either.  So it’s basically status quo heading into the second episode.