Never had I been brought to laugh over a board meeting, over name memorization, or over the chowing down of a lunch break’s tonkatsu bowl; Never had I been so invested in the workplace of a corporate amalgam of same-face men participating in the everyday, the mundane, and the boring…That is, until Mr. Tonegawa’s Middle Management Blues.
There’s some kind of special concoction here, a perfect formula of things that shouldn’t work, but do: A spin-off of the ultra serious Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji. A workplace drama. A comedy. A workplace drama-comedy spin-off with the villain of Kaiji as the lead. What in the fucking hell?!
For six years, clock it - SIX YEARS - I wrote this off as one of those goofy, cash-grabby sequels pumped out haphazardly alongside the main course. Think deformed chibi tv shorts made on the cheap in way of BANG! Dream, or your Isekai Quartet, or what-have-yous. What I didn’t expect was late-game studio MADHOUSE on the project. Now, this show’s far from high-framerate action, “sasuga! sakuga!” moments, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t look outstanding! You’ve got these sharp, angular, ridiculous faces drawn in every which way in every which expression, bouncing off each other with sudden text-filled backgrounds and looming tense close-ups for quick gag set-ups.
One of my main takeaways from the first season of Kaiji was just how gorgeous it would’ve been in sharp, HD DVD Blu-Ray quality. It’s something I didn’t have to worry about much longer with the advent of the second season, and Middle Management Blues pulls that same dramatic intensity of Kaiji’s visual flair to re-appropriate it and make that visual identity its own.
Unlike Kaiji, there’s no main narrative propelling this one along. Instead, it’s bigshot Tonegawa Yukio’s daily life as the Teiai Group’s number two man, second only to the president himself. He’s subjected to the president’s whims time and time again, and it’s up to Tonegawa and his crew to multi-handedly deal with the president’s eternal boredom. It allows for the show to go anywhere, from revealing the truth of Kaiji’s infamous rock-paper-scissors game, to a six-month hunt for the perfect doppelgänger.
A big payoff sits at the end of each fifteen minutes, with little hits in-between. A lot of comedy anime focuses on blasting jokes at you every second just in case one fails to land, but Tonegawa takes the ballsier approach and trusts you to buy into its unique brand of adult cynicism, overexaggeration, and sarcastic bites. Mixing each character’s unique firey identity into this off-kilter hotpot makes quite the dish! Anything can happen in Tonegawa, and it always left me waiting for the next chuckle, or grin, so I ended up having one stuck on my big friggin’ face from start to finish.
Lunch breaks now became Herculean tasks with the very reputation of the Teiai group on the line. Twitter beef, VERY MUCH THE SAME. A new hire threatening Tonegawa’s position as the second-hand man?! Don’t even talk about it!!
Episode fifteen and onward splits each episode in half. Another Kaiji antagonist enters the mix - Foreman Ootsuki from Kaiji’s second season! The conniving kind of the underground gets the occasional stint aboveground, a reprieve from the endless torture of the mines in which he’s indentured to, so half these episodes are the new segment, “1 Day Outside Pass Foreman”, alongside the previous “Middle Management Blues” of Tonegawa.
Very much the same as Tonegawa’s side, each of Foreman Ootsuki’s episodes has an uncanny way of injecting silliness into its system. On his day out, he’s sick, so Ootsuki has to follow a strict method to make himself better in a simple eight hours! Someone keeps frequenting his regular haunts in his exact pattern! Ootsuki’s sidehustle is outplayed by another foreman, so he’s gotta up the ante! And so on, and so forth.
My favorite thing about Middle Management Blues is the recontexualization of these guys. You’ve only seen them with everything on the line, steeped in their wickedness, grandstanding, ridiculing Kaiji and his impossible odds to beat their games. The curtain pulls back to reveal, perhaps not the best of people, but (respectfully, now -) washed-up old men trying to carve their place into their corner of the world. To see them succeed in the way they do, to varying effects…Gah, I’m just a goddamned sucker. You love to see it.
The second to last episode has Tonegawa attending a class reunion, laughing in the face of the ridiculousness of it all to begin with. But when he’s there, everyone in their stupidity sets Tonegawa on edge. Unable to match that energy or gloat in the face of it, he ends up looking like a fish out of water. Ends up reminiscing over an old flame just like anybody else, and, for as tough as he is, he’s not beyond this sort of thing. (Though, he’ll never, ever admit it!)
And then he ends up heel-spin turning back into the party to play one bad-ass piano solo for his class anthem. Tonegawa, you guy, you!
The entire show is full of moments like these. Nothing complicated, but punctuated, humanizing moments of idiots fumbling through life, but trying their best despite failure after failure after failure! Even the opening crawl repeats it from time to time - “The small, unremarkable story about the struggles of a remarkable man.” His tenacity, his creativity, and, above all, his empathy for each man in black below him puts him stacks above the rest. It’s enough to make a man cry!
That’s what really touched my heart. Besides, y’know, the splash screens of ridiculous faces and screaming. That, too, I’m sure. In a different way, though.
Watch Tonegawa. Snag the Blu-Ray for cheap if one hits eBay, or watch it somewhere on that mysterious, elusive internet’o’yours.
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