This girl Nanako
Speaks with senryu poems
It’s adorable.
I swear I can write better haikus than that…
But yeah, I’m liking Senryu Girl plain and simple. It’s just a short anime series that’s as cute as the promos would have you to believe. By herself, Nanako (Kana Hanazawa) is a really fun character with how comically quick she writes her poetry and even gets playful with it such as when she plugs her blog or rats off the body measurements of the club president, Amane (Sayuri Yahagi). Meanwhile, the addition of Eiji (Tasuku Hatanaka) gives Nanako an interesting dynamic to work with. They’re kind of opposites since one is super shy and the other is an ex-delinquent but in a way, that difference makes them similar since Eiji has his own difficulty with communicating with others. It really makes you wonder how exactly these two even met in the first place which is something that this premiere skims over. Perhaps we’ll find out learn soon enough.
Oddly enough, you actually get to hear Nanako’s voice quite often. She doesn’t speak verbally; rather, Kana Hanazawa recites her character’s poems as a form of narration. That I’ll admit is odd and it kind of defeats the purpose of making Nanako a selective mute. You could easily just establish that she feels most comfortable at talking when she has a senryu to go off of and you’d more or less achieve the same effect you’re going for. I don’t want to harp on this note too much though. Truth be told, it helps a ton to hear a seiyuu read the poems for you especially if you’re like me and you’re not fluent in Japanese. Subtitles being a approximation of language is perfectly fine for dialogue but when it comes to poetry, you’ll only get a sense of the cadence if you hear it spoken in the language it’s intended to be written in.
All in all, this series is as adorable as the promos would lead you to believe. Maybe it could get stale at some point but right now, consider me sold.
OP: ‘Kotonoha no Omoi” by Sonoko Inoue
ED: “ORDINARY LOVE” by Rikako Aida
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Xenodude's Scribbles 
“I swear I can write better haikus than that…”
In the world of haiku 5-7-5 has been deprecated in favor of 3-5-3. 5-7-5 emerged because of a misunderstanding of the difference between English syllables and Japanese on. (The two aren’t quite the same thing.)
in the quiet
poetry whispers
I am still
OK, I’ll stop being a picky haiku nerd… 🙂
“Subtitles being a approximation of language is perfectly fine for dialogue but when it comes to poetry, you’ll only get a sense of the cadence if you hear it spoken in the language it’s intended to be written in.”
Yeah, it turns out my fear of translation problems was overblown… I hadn’t really thought about how anime subtitles are simplified and streamlined. Even crappy poetic translations are far outside the interests of the subtitling staff.
That being said, I’m loving the show to pieces. Nanako is absolutely a-dork-able, and it’s so obvious she has it bad for Eiji.
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Hey, poetry/language trivia I’m always cool with. I actually already knew about the whole 5-7-5 vs 3-5-3 thing. Again, I swear I can write better haikus haha.
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I’m actually kinda surprised you knew that… My impression (which may be wrong of course) is that’s it’s not widely known…
I’m a closet haiku poet/scholar myself.
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To clarify, I vaguely recall someone bringing that up in my college’s creative writing club which I was an on and off member of.
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