Kikuhiko the Genderfailure: Disability and Masculinity in Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu

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The smart thing to do when starting a new blog would be to begin with a topic that many people love and more people know at least something about. But instead, I’m starting with Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, because this is my blog and I can do what I want. And what I want to do is talk about a cult classic anime from twenty-goddamn-sixteen. Rakugo is regarded in hardcore anime circles as one of the best shows of all time, a remarkable exploration of character and melodrama, and yet I rarely see it mentioned in discourse anymore, and even more rarely to say anything beyond “what if we ever got a blu-ray release?” (and what IF we ever got a blu-ray release??? what then??? I would simply be unstoppable).

(Note: for the purposes of this post, I will be using the names “Kikuhiko” and “Sukeroku” – I recognize that the characters’ names shift throughout the show in ways that are reflective of their changing identities, but for the sake of consistency and ease while writing, I chose these).

Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu is an anime that has meant a lot to me from the moment I first watched it - as a young prison abolitionist, I was immediately enraptured by the story that seemed to focus on the path of a recently-released man seeking to explore himself through art. Of course, that isn’t what the story is really about, though it is sort of about that, because Rakugo is sort of about a lot of things. Art, mainly, though also love, and the passage of time, and the slippery nature of truth, and names, and ghosts, and death, and gender, and sexuality, and family, and war, and loss, and grief, and parenting, and and and. And, for the sake of this post, disability.

There is much I want to say about Rakugo’s protagonist, Kikuhiko. Most of which has already been said. He is one of the most complex, multifaceted characters I have ever seen in any media, let alone any anime. And yet, there’s one key aspect of his character that I have hardly, if ever, seen explored. An unchanging factor about his existence that impacts every single aspect of his life, and one that resonates profoundly with me on a personal level, to the point where it was genuinely remarkable to me that I found no results in my frantic ctrl-F searches for the word on any of the forum threads I visited about the anime. Google was no help. Here is what the AI gave me when I searched "kikuhiko rakugo disability":

The thing that I need everyone to know about Kikuhiko is that he’s disabled. He has been disabled since he was a child. He has a bad leg from an injury and requires a cane to stabilize himself when he walks. This is something that is key to understanding his character, presented subtly but with great force by mangaka Haruko Kumota and the animation team at Studio Deen. From the very first episode, Kiku is othered based on his disability. Born to a geisha and raised in a geisha house, his injured leg renders him unable to learn to dance like the other kids. Thus he is kicked out of the house and sent to learn rakugo with Yakumo VII, earning him the pity of the same adults who exile him. Of course, Kiku would have been sent away from the geisha house eventually due to his gender, but his disability marginalizes him even as young as six years old. Children, while still heavily gender-policed, often are able to express fluidity with less severe punishment than adults. Kiku has this option taken from him before he can even make a choice.

So Kikuhiko is sent away from the house of women, the only community he has ever known. But it is not as if he is able to find a home among the men, or more realistically boys (or even more realistically boy, singular) who will come to occupy his life. Quite the opposite. The image of masculinity as portrayed in Rakugo is strong, dominant, heterosexual, and most importantly, able-bodied, all qualities found in Kikuhiko’s very first friend, Sukeroku. The contrast between Kiku’s disabled masculinity and Sukeroku’s abled masculinity is apparent even in their first scene together. Episode 2 opens with a young Kiku walking slowly and deliberately towards Yakumo VII’s home, using his cane for support. Sukeroku, approximately the same age, sprints aggressively towards the him, leaping on his nondisabled legs and waving his arms frantically. Kiku, put off by this behavior, slaps away Sukeroku’s offer of a handshake when they meet. I’d believe that Kiku’s rejection largely comes from a place of class – Sukeroku is visibly dirty and lacks the manners of someone raised “properly” due to his history of living on the street – but I believe it also signifies his desire to move and live independently and his resentment of others who have what he cannot. This resentment colors much of Kikuhiko’s most significant relationships throughout the series. In fact I would say it is one of his most defining character traits.

Kiku’s lack of an able body, the factor which all other masculine identifiers fall upon, means that he is not able to achieve the easy masculinity embodied by Sukeroku. Sukeroku, a prodigy at rakugo and gender, achieves what Kikuhiko desires seemingly without even trying. I’d argue that for Kiku, those two may as well be the same thing. He has the same problems with each – Kikuhiko is not a “natural” at rakugo, nor is he a “natural” at masculinity. His advancement, to him, is a series of failing-upwards. Any success is salt in the wound. A genderfailure, he is forced into feminine positions against his desires quite often. He is aware and resentful of the ways that this hurts him. Yet his lack of internal sense of self leads him to depend heavily on the validation of others, and so he sees himself as having no control over the situation.

When Yakumo VII takes Sukeroku with him to entertain the troops in the war, he sends Kiku to stay with the women in the country, citing his leg as something that would make him unfit for service. This forces him out of the world of rakugo (masculinity) and away from his burgeoning sense of identity. Kiku’s exile with Yakumo VII’s wife posits him squarely in the feminine role in his relationship with Sukeroku – the parallel is clearly intentional and explicit. The mistress of the home withers away without her husband around. Kiku emotionally withers, disconnecting from himself and from rakugo (masculinity/independence). Kiku, with his cane and his bad leg, is Sukeroku’s abandoned wife, waiting for his return so that he may launch himself into Sukeroku’s masculine embrace (which he promptly, actually, does).

This scene is incredibly telling. Kiku is sweeping, presumably using the broom as a sort-of stand-in cane in the way that disabled folks often do, until he spots Sukeroku and Yakumo VII coming into focus on the horizon. While he attempts to remain standing, he eventually stumbles into Sukeroku, grabbing him for a tearful hug. The broom, a stand-in cane. Sukeroku, a stand-in cane. In this moment, Kiku is as physically dependent on Sukeroku as he is emotionally. Once again, the parallel is striking. Earlier in the same episode, when Kiku’s first girlfriend Ochiyo confesses that she has to leave the city, she collapses into him, forcing him to drop his cane. He stands still while she cries, embracing her gently. Kiku embodies his most masculine performance of self in this moment, and it’s no coincidence that his cane falls to his side, abandoned, even as he stands robotic and disconnected from a woman he claims to care about.

Of course, Kiku is also heavily implied to be queer – no thought about this show would be complete without an acknowledgment of this fact. Able-bodied queer fans have been quick to notice Kikuhiko’s strained relationship with heterosexual masculinity, but largely attribute it solely to his sexuality, as opposed to considering the intersections of his identities. His queerness is, in my opinion, almost a secondary factor to his degendering. Queer men are not allowed the same ease of access to masculinity as straight men, but neither are disabled men. For Kikuhiko, disability and queerness go hand in hand, in that both traits distance him from the people around him. I would even go as far as to say that Kiku’s disability queers him and his queerness disables him. In any case, the result is the same – he is exiled. His success in the world of rakugo is both a credit to the excessive efforts he takes to get there and a complete accident. Kikuhiko was never supposed to actually inherit the mantle of Yakumo VIII. Salt in the wound. Failing upwards.

The thing is, Kiku doesn’t just succeed, he exceeds… when he is feminine. His rakugo is at its best when he is portraying feminine characters. His most iconic performance, Shinigami, has him embodying the reaper in a way that’s described many times as seductive, like a woman. He comes into his own as a performer while in drag, for god’s sake. He (in his one “woke” moment) berates Yotaro for portraying women as caricatures in his rakugo — Kiku’s women are never caricatures, but are full-fledged characters with their own motivations and personalities. On a deep and intrinsic level, he understands them. This is an insight he refuses to apply to the actual women in his life, who he views both sympathetically and as threats to his position. As much as I call him a genderfailure, Kikuhiko is still very much a man. He is distanced enough from masculinity to understand the difficulties that women experience, but close enough to still aspire to any form of masculine ideal he can manage. How does he do this? Like many marginalized men, by putting down women to make himself feel better.

It’s impossible to talk about gender in Rakugo without talking about Konatsu in some way - in fact, I’d love to write thousands of words just about her, but that’s outside the scope of this post. Her relationship with Kikuhiko is, to me, the most revealing one in the show. Kiku treats her with disdain and affection in equal measure, an intimacy stemming from how deeply he knows and understands her and how much he rejects her anyway. The way he treats Konatsu is punishment – yes, towards himself for the deaths of her parents, but also to her, for daring to attempt more than her place. Konatsu rebels against the bars of the woman-cage she has been forced into, surly and chainsmoking and learning rakugo stories on her own. Kiku even admits it himself in the director’s cut of the first episode – her life would have been easier had she been born a man. But she wasn’t, and in Kiku’s eyes the fact that she refuses to accept this and instead pushes towards rakugo is both incomprehensible and childish. Unspoken goes the knowledge that Kiku himself never had an option to rebel. Again, his disability made the choice for him. Konatsu’s fierceness reminds Kiku of everything he has lost and everything he cannot be.

Which brings us, finally, to Miyokichi. I believe that Miyokichi is a foil to Kikuhiko in the same way as Sukeroku, but set on the opposite side. Miyokichi embodies the role of femininity in the Showa era, as much a performance as Kikuhiko’s failed masculinity. Kiku and Miyokichi rotate around Sukeroku as their object of masculinity, each inhabiting their own feminine role, forced upon both of them due to their inability to achieve manhood. Whether or not they would desire this form of manhood is irrelevant, because it is not an option. Miyokichi’s admission that she would have lived a happier life if she had not been forced to “play the role of woman” is incredibly telling – she, too, felt the constrains of gender, contorting her life into knots around a man in order to claim any kind of power she could. It’s a poignant reflection.

Some people have pointed to Kikuhiko’s words to Miyokichi when he breaks up with her in episode 9 as a him criticizing her – which it absolutely is, to be clear. But it’s also more than that – functionally, it’s a moment of self-hatred. The words he says are ones that could be used to describe himself, and he is keenly aware of this fact – it’s why he lashes out at her. Once again, in a woman, Kikuhiko sees only a mirror, a disabledqueer man, dependent on Sukeroku, and cringes away in fear. His self-hatred wins. He severs his one remaining connection with a person who claims to love him. He tells Miyokichi that she needs to learn to be independent, while internally wishing he could stay with Sukeroku forever.

Kikuhiko’s physical disability impacts him less as he gets older, though he becomes disabled in other ways (see: the growing impact of suicidality and major depressive disorder). An older man with a cane is seen as distinguished, not weak, not feminine. A man with the name of Yakumo VIII carries respect. Identities shift over time, and so do the ways people perceive us. However, our attitudes, personalities, and scars remain the same. Kikuhiko becomes Yakumo VIII and remains a stubborn, self-hating, misogynist bastard – at least until the absolute very end, when he makes his last move and finally accepts Konatsu as his rakugo apprentice. His acceptance of her signals to us, the audience, that he has accepted the parts of himself that he once held with only shame. With this, he can pass away in peace. And so he does.

A saying commonly shared amongst the disabled community is that everyone, if they are lucky, will live to become disabled. The implication is that if you do not become disabled, it is because you died young, before disability, a shinigami in its own right, can take you into its loving arms. But Kikuhiko met his shinigami early, lived a whole life with it on his metaphorical shoulder. His leg was a burden that he bore for eight decades, shaping him just as much as any of his other identities, his relationships, his art. This is where I admire Kumota most as a mangaka - her ability to weave together seemingly disparate aspects of someone’s life into a whole human being. In her creation of Kikuhiko, she wrote a character who represents the complexity of life as a disabled person, flawed and compelling and beautiful, and whose existence is an incisive critique of the operations of gender, sexuality, class, and ability. While I began watching Rakugo anticipating to enjoy the restorative justice and healing arts perspective, I did not expect to sink my teeth into such a delightfully deep character study, especially one that I am still gnawing over six years later.