#####This review contains spoilers.

The Tatami Galaxy follows the repeating stories of an unnamed university student. On his quest for a ‘rose-coloured campus life’, the series shows the many different realities that emerge depending on the society he joins. 

Each episode follows a familiar structure. At the start of each episode, our blissfully optimistic protagonist joins a student society as a freshman. After he inevitably (and very quickly) becomes disillusioned by his chosen activity, disappointed that his choice has not brought him a rose-coloured life nor led him to his ‘raven-haired maiden’, he falls in with the fiendish Ozu. 

Ozu rapidly corrupts our protagonist, sending him down a twisted path built on less-than-perfect moral grounds. Along the way, he’ll also encounter a girl, Akashi, an engineering student a year his junior, and then a price-gouging fortune teller who reminds us of the mochiguman keychain lost by Akashi that is hanging from our protagonist’s ceiling. An opportunity? Perhaps. 

Yet it will not be one our protagonist will act upon before his world comes crashing down. He is left, briefly, to ruminate on how different his life could have been, how he could have had his rose-coloured life and raven-haired maiden, if and only if he had joined a different society. And so we are whisked back in time to that decision point and the next episode begins.

Within this structure, The Tatami Galaxy captures and satirises a vibrant cross-section of university life. Within each story, we meet characters who quickly become the most extreme parodies of familiar people. 

I’ve met the cycling enthusiast, obsessed with their bike, with minimising weight and optimising aerodynamics. The Tatami Galaxy destroys this person, it strips them down to their essence and utterly humiliates the protagonist who comes to embody them. 

The wannabe director – who, at 20-something years of age, fancies themselves as the next Quieten Tarantino or Wes Anderson – has been my classmate. The Tatami Galaxy has a vendetta against this person and provides one of the most extreme parodies I have borne witness to. In stunned silence, you watch and discover that this character has installed, in his own home, a rock-climbing wall made of silicone breasts, modelled after actresses from his amateur films. Who, on god’s green earth, thought of this? They must be mad. Mad, but oddly right on the mark, too.

The genius of The Tatami Galaxy is that it builds off of very real experiences, but takes them to their most extreme. Injected with more than a liberal dosage of absurdism and surrealism, what was once familiar quickly becomes a hysterical distortion. The result is a relentless barrage of comedy, both clever and stupid. 

The Tatami Galaxy follows the repeating stories of an unnamed university student. On his quest for a ‘rose-coloured campus life’, the series shows the many different realities that emerge depending on the society he joins. 

Each episode follows a familiar structure. And within it, the show expertly crafts its distinctive look. As the opening sequence plays, the show gladly exposes its low-budget style. As real-life footage winds through an apartment, the characters appear like cardboard cut-outs, very clearly just 2D images imposed on top of the footage. There is almost no animation. So, rather than no expense spared for a grand opening, no expense has been made. It’s declaring itself as a low-budget show. It works best this way, however. 

The Tatami Galaxy openly celebrates its cheapness. And everything in the show seems considered with this in mind. Even down to the repeating episode structure which allows the show to freely reuse animation and voice acting. By linking all the episodes together, the series keeps its cast small and minimises character design work. 

It's like using all the parts of the animal. Humans have long done it out of economic necessity, eating tripe and turning guts into sausages. But so too can we do it out of respect for the animal. And there’s evident respect for the craft, here. It’s an expertly produced show because it makes the absolute most out of as little as it can get away with and then seamlessly incorporates the resulting style.  

You can simply applaud the studio for creating such a stylish and clever show while keeping costs low, but I’d go a step further and argue that intentionally creating a show with a cheap style works to capture and evoke a feeling of life at university. A university experience based in one room and sustained by ramen, castella, and cheap whiskey. 

Through this cheapness the show feels like an ode to the student lifestyle, a tribute made for and even by those who have passed through the university halls. Because it doesn’t just feel familiar, it feels hauntingly relatable. Like the work of an alumnus. A staggeringly impressive feat that works in tandem with the spectacular comedy the show weaves. 

The genius of The Tatami Galaxy is that all of this careful work makes such an enthralling low-budget style that you wouldn’t even want to give the studio more money. It’s almost as if the financial constraint compelled the show’s creator forward. And out of this labour, a work of art was born.

The Tatami Galaxy follows the repeating stories of an unnamed university student. On his quest for a ‘rose-coloured campus life’, the series shows the many different realities that emerge depending on the society he joins. 

Each episode follows a familiar structure. Within it, the show explores the idea of opportunity. Throughout the series, our protagonist constantly fails to achieve the rose-coloured life he desires. As each episode ends, we are left with a sense of dramatic irony. As the protagonist laments his choice of club and of befriending Ozu, blaming him for getting in the way of meeting his raven-haired maiden, we, as an audience, understand his failure to be almost entirely the fault of him not pulling the mochiguman off of his ceiling. 

In this sense, the show has a clear message. It is about living life, making the most of it and doing stuff. Our protagonist is at his lowest when he goes with the flow and ends up where he is led. And in contrast, we constantly see Ozu three steps ahead, because he's always seeking the next goal. The protagonist may have a shit deal of it all, but he does succeed when he tries. Life is a mess, a riot. Fast-paced. Up, down and out. But the opportunity is always dangling right in front of him. He just needs to grab it.

So, quite simply, when the final two episodes break away from the cyclical format it shows us what happens we he finally does grab the opportunity dangling in front of his eyes. The protagonist does not need the clubs to find his rose-coloured life. The pursuit of happiness rested on him alone. 

The final two episodes take the show to its conceptual limit. What if rather than just showing the world as alternative timelines or universes, our protagonist’s worlds were linked? The endless looping nature of the 4.5 tatami rooms becomes a very literal metaphor for the banality of life without others. The repetitive days, each one like the last, the dull and mindless routine the same to us as the tatami mat becomes to our protagonist.

So if the show is about opportunity and making the most of it, these episodes provide the stark contrast and reality for our protagonist. No longer able to lament his choice, we see the fate of a man who rejected the decision entirely. 

And so the protagonist learns that by refusing to take from the bounty of opportunity provided to him, he remained oblivious to his own misery. The final episodes show that only when the chance to live life disappears does it become harder to leave our rooms, which we see as the protagonist finds it literally harder and harder to get from one room to the next.

So when the show reaches its climax and the protagonist does finally grab the opportunity that had been dangling in front of him, he can finally escape the room, the banality, and live life to the fullest. In essence, the show tells us to get up off our arses and ask the cute person out. 

But, I think the conclusion also provides another answer. The show also suggests that regretting a decision is far worse than not making one at all. As the protagonist walks from room to room, he recalls the people we’ve seen through the series, distant and foreign memories to his current self. He comes to learn more and more about them, and misses them, wishing he could’ve known them. 

So when he finally breaks free from the room, he sees them. The obvious thing would be for him to run to Akashi and return the mochiguman. But he doesn’t talk to Akashi first, he saves Ozu. 

In this sense, the show provides a more nuanced answer. Campus life might not have lived up to his lofty aspirations, but he meets some wonderful people. And I think this is a far more reassuring conclusion to dwell on, for both the show and this review. Sure, you may have a single opportunity dangling before you. If you do, the show is telling you to grab it! Your rose-coloured life might be sitting behind that doorway.

But if you don’t, this show invites you to take chances and make choices of all kinds, even if you may regret them. The vibrant ending of The Tatami Galaxy reflects on all the people our protagonist met when he made what he thought was the wrong decision. In all of these different stories, our protagonist lived crazy adventures. Because any colour of a life, even if it isn’t rose-coloured, is better than a grey one.