And Yet the Town Moves
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Slice the Life
Welcome to the official start of this blog-thing! I'm Glass, your host. Pleased to meet you, if we haven't already met.
Anyways, I'm envisioning this as a place for me to casually ramble about whatever I've read or watched or played or whatevered recently. But I don't wanna waste this lovely new webpage on shitty copypasta one-liners like every other Steam review, or go on and on like an hours-long video essay. Hopefully I'll be able to strike some sort of happy medium.
If nothing else, I'd like to convince whoever reads my thoughts here to consider checking out whatever it is that I'm talking about. Because, ideally, I'll be discussing things that I like more often than things that I don't. There's too much negativity in the world as it is, so we'll try our best to stay positive here.
Well, enough of this, let's get on with the show! We'll be looking at a new favorite of mine this time, And Yet the Town Moves.
I remember thinking it was cool to not like slice-of-life and romance anime. Like, why would I waste my time watching anime girls do insignificant, everyday things when I could read something cooler and deeperer like Berserk or Goodnight Punpun?
...Yeah, I know.
At some point within the last couple of years, that pretentiousness (and maybe also a small bit of insecurity) left me, and I started reading more SoL and romcom-type manga. Maybe that whole pandemic thing made me want to shift gears a bit? Broaden my horizons? Stop reading angsty shit all the time? Shit that generally made me feel kinda bad? Something like that.
Some of my favorites thus far have been Yotsuba&!, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Mysterious Girlfriend X, and Ranma 1/2. I'd easily recommend them all, especially if you're looking for good laughs. (Not so much in the case of YKK, it's not a comedy. I lied sorry)
But today, I wanted to talk about one that I don't see brought up quite as often: And Yet the Town Moves. I'll be referring to it from here as Soremachi, an official shortening of its Japanese title, Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru.
I think I first became aware of the series when I decided to pick up its Blu-ray release during Black Friday season for, like, five bucks... only to not get around to watching it for a long while because I have way too many Blu-rays. Haha. I don't have a problem.
Earlier this summer, I decided to read through the original manga since I generally prefer that over watching anime. This decision mostly came about as a result of a roulette spin, if I recall correctly; I spun one of those customizable roulette wheels with some of the series I own on Blu-ray filled in and happened to land on Soremachi.
The Soremachi manga is something of an interesting case, having an official English localization that hasn't ever seen a physical release, only digital. I definitely legitimately attained it when I decided to read it through. Yeah. i'm sorry but i am not giving crunchyroll money to temporarily be able to read a manga in a web browser. i buy manga all the time so don't get all Nintendo fan on me for this
It's a decently-lengthed series, filling out sixteen volumes with well over one hundred chapters released from 2005-2016. To keep the whole thing in print when it never got all that popular in the West would likely be unprofitable, unfortunately, but it's still pretty great that the entire run is available in consistent quality because of the aforementioned digital release. maybe it was my very legally-acquired copies' fault, but some of the supplementary material in later volumes like the inter-chapter doodles eventually stopped getting translated. that's the only big thing i noticed was wrong anyways
As a side note, the series' author, Masakazu Ishiguro, has since worked on several other manga, including the previous anime season's Tengoku Daimakyou/Heavenly Delusion. I'm not fully caught up with that one as of writing, but it's been an interesting read (with a printed English release, too! Same goes for Skygrazer, a one-volume story which got a physical release last year.)
But that's enough about the series' release, let's talk about what actually happens in Soremachi. The story follows Hotori Arashiyama, a high school girl who works at the maid cafe in her town's shopping district. It's owned by an old family friend, who recently rebranded the place into a maid cafe after hearing how much money they can bring in.
However, neither the owner nor Hotori really understand how maid cafes are supposed to function, so it's up to Hotori's classmate, Tatsuno, to show her how it's done. (She's only working there because she has a crush on one of the cafe's only regular patrons: Hotori's childhood friend Sanada, who in turn has a crush on Hotori.)
But... that's not the whole story. Like, at all. Besides working at Cafe Seaside, Hotori also has a keen interest in mysteries and detective stories and spends her free time either reading or investigating bizarre situations that she finds herself dragged into. Despite her naive and clumsy nature, Hotori can be surprisingly and humorously observant when it comes to cracking a case.
In fact, many chapters are entirely removed from the maid cafe premise, especially later on in the series. And I don't just mean that we get to see the characters' wacky hijinks at Anime High School (TM) and other typical day-to-day happenings. We also get to see them encounter ghosts and aliens and time travelers. It's not every chapter that these sorts of overly-fantastical events occur, but it's often enough to keep you on your toes.
Here's a comparison. I don't know that I would even call it a particularly great comparison, but here it is: Soremachi is much like SpongeBob Squarepants,. While the pilot episode establishes that SpongeBob is starting his new job as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab, more episodes than not follow SpongeBob as he does... damn near anything else. Going jellyfishing, hitting the beach, failing his driving exam, annoying his neighbors, meeting ghosts and also God, et cetera, et cetera.
I'd go so far as to say that Hotori as a character is not all too different from SpongeBob himself, either:
Silly analogies aside, Soremachi has a very pleasant sense of humor, with each of the different characters' quirks sparking funny interactions. The central focus more often than not is Hotori, whose more innocent and easy-going personality clashes with her more "normal" and serious friends. Even her younger brother, a grade schooler, is more mature than her in many ways. But this doesn't stop her from trying her best to help people out around town and finally write a successful mystery novel.
While I would recommend reading the manga first and foremost, the anime adaptation is pretty good as well. It was done by SHAFT in 2010, in the middle of, like, their peak era and adapts a selection of stories from the first few volumes as well as you could expect SHAFT to have done at the time.
The only issue I really have with it is that it's so short relative to the manga (only reaching twelve total episodes, with no hope for any second season at this point). So I wouldn't personally recommend it over the original manga, unless you're strapped for time and just want to see if the series is for you; that, or if you've already read a bit of the series and view it as a sort of supplementary viewing. It has a lot of visual flair, for sure.
So uh... that's the first of my (maybe) many rambles. I don't know how to outro this sort of thing yet, sorry. I guess next time we'll maybe talk about a game or something? Maybe more manga? Let me know what you think, and thanks for sticking through this whole thing!
