Sakuratetsu Taiwa-hen: Unedited Audio and Recording Notes (Patreon)

Manga Details

• Per tucker the manga name means “dialogue” or even as “oral history”
• Author: Ryu Fujisaki
• Author’s other works:
  • Psycho+, was a flop
  • Hoshin Engi ran for 23 volumes
  • After
    • Waq Waq, was a flop
    • - 11 volumes
    • Kakuriyo Monogatari - 8 volumes
    • Legend of The Galactic Heroes manga adaptation
• Notable assistants:
  • Yasuhiro Kano (Pretty Face, Kiruru Kill Me)
  • Munenori Michimoto (A-O-N, Daisuou)
  • Both are referred to as close friends, but they helped him on his comics and THAT COUNTS ON THIS SHOW.
• Run dates: Dec 4, 2001 to Apr 23, 2002
• Chapters/Volumes: 14 / 2
• Series it replaced: Grand Vacan by Kazushige Hamada maxybee can’t find it but it’s about a bunch of Shakespeare, Frances Drake and Queen Elizabeth as kids
• Series that replaced it: Pretty Face by the creator of Mx0 the series I most want to cover

About the Manga

• Plot
  • Sakura Tetsu is a kid on the Sigma CEO Grindset, working the shittiest jobs to make as much money as possible to maintain his house that he cares deeply about. He lives there with his brother Teppei, his grandfather Boke and his sister Kusan, while being stalked by a mysterious girl named Furato. Suddenly a ship appears with a giant tree. They are the future people led by their Queen Alice, who jumped to the past 6 hours before the entire universe ended. They want to take Tetsu’s land, but then a space pirate and the mole people appear to challenge them for it. Furata suggests they go to war and they do, fighting to a standstill, leaving Tetsu in charge but with Alice living with them as  his “sister”. Then the prince of hell, Neitzche, appears to lay claim to the land, but Kusan drops a rock on his portal, trapping him there with no way to get home, leaving him broke, homeless, and forced to live in a cardboard box. A giant eye appears in the sky and then Furato decides to measure Tetsu’s asshole but since his sister is there Tetsu refuses. The god of assholes appears and Furato instead wishes to know the size of his asshole.
  • 
    
  • The president of Japan, who speaks French for some reason, tries to blow up Tetsu’s house but Tetsu kicks his ass and Nietsche pet shows up from a new portal from hell. He’s  Zoroaster, a giant sea otter creature who turns into different manga characters when Furato gives him poison mushrooms until he just transforms into a kaiju. Furato’s brother Kiseno returns from the Middle East and buys Tetsu’s house off of his sister in exchange for a magic credit card. Tetsu then buys the house back in exchange for leaving the Sakura family. However Furato reveals that Tetsu’s grandpa is the only survivor from his family in WW2 and had no kids. Teppei is actually a demon, Kiseno is a ghost, and no one knows where the hell Tetsu came from but legally Sakura isn’t even their last name. Tetsu doesn’t know this so he still fights and gets the deed back. A pervert narcissist from the mirror dimension shows up, don't worry about it. Then a guy who controls dreams makes all the characters fall asleep. Alice and Tetsu are in the start of fire punch an ice age where everyone is dead, and everyone else is in hell. Furato checks in on what’s going on and accidentally lets them out. Unfortunately this manga is really fucking weird and confusing, so the manga fairies get together and decide it must be cancelled. The only way they can think to do that is by isekai-ing a reader from the real world and telling him that he has to kill tetsu and end the manga or he’ll never go back.
  • 
    
  • He shows up and starts pointing out that he’s in a comic like he’s Grant Morrison’s Animal man or something, fighting Tetsu until he realizes he doesn’t want to kill him so the Manga fairies just send him back home anyway. Then Heidegger, the manga god appears, telling Tetsu that he fucked up by putting him in this manga, that he’s the wrong kind of protagonist, and wants to put him in a different one instead. Tetsu and Furato pretend to get married and leave their families when Tetsu gets placed in a different series. Welcome to shonen flop chibi! A first impressions mini episode where we talk about the first chapter of a series we’ll be covering in depth next week. Now let’s get into the plot summary of Chapter 1 of the Desert Wilderness: Not a Single Drop of Water by Shin Ryu Fujisaki. The evil monster Ushiro wants to take over a desert oasis protected by the powerful Don. In the process of fighting him, Don’s two best friends sacrifice themselves and turn into a sword, allowing him to defeat Ushiro. Then Don looks over and sees his house as well as his sister Kusan and remembers that he’s actually Sakura Tetsu.
• Characters
  • Sakura Tetsu (Saku-rah, Tetsu)
    • Sleepy boy
    • Messy
    • Hard working to make money
    • Super strength
    • His super strength literally comes from being a manga protagonist
  • Furato
    • Friends with Tetsu
    • On the up and up with the tropes
    • Can teleport?
    • Kineso twin brother studied abroad in the middle east
  • Queen Alice
    • Future people leader
    • Somehow
  • Firebent
    • Space pirate
    • Picks things by chance
  • Jikmant
    • Mole person
  • Neitzche
    • Demon from hell
    • Idot
    • Lives in box
    • Softboy
  • Kusan
    • Reminds me of palm from hxh
    • Older Sister
    • Likes shopping
    • A land spirit
  • Teppei
    • Talks like jarjar
    • Younger brother
    • Apparently he's a spirit
    • Giant hands and feet
  • The reader
    • Summons Luffy
    • Just wants to go home
  • The manga god
    • Named Heidegger for some reason
    • The author insert

Why it failed

• I feel it takes a bit too long to actually get started on a plot
• This has shown how manga trends have really evolved in the last 20 years
• I can’t follow what the fucking point of this manga is
• Lame most of the cast left in the second chapter
• I feel there's no real plot scaffolding like idk what this series is really building to
• The asshole chapter was funny for like 5 paged it did not need to be an entire chapter
• The pacing is really frantic
• There's really no connective tissue in chapters or character growth
• I feel the siblings need excuses to exist in the plot. Oh they get explained kinda but it's so confusing how they work it needed a translator page

What it did well

• I like how Tetsu is so dumb he just focuses on schoolwork vs a magic tree
• Testu is so over this dumb plot bullshit
• Art is pretty good,. It kinda feels like anime screencaps though
• The art is REALLY good tbh
• The root idea of a bunch of people claiming his house is special is actually hilarious
• This physical comedy is rare to find like the tree freaking out about being cut out
• Going meta wasn't that unsurprising but it is fun to see it shit on itself
• The 4th wall break fucking ruled. It somehow turned the manga being extremely flawed into a plot point

Where it could have gone

• I'd have loved to see them go to court
• Some universal monsters be great
• Establish the fake family thing sooner which explains the weird shit going on like everyone there is already some sort of trope
• Just have the format of some weirdo laying claim on the house antics to get them to leave or join the cast and some minor plot progression it's not that hard

Misc Thoughts

• This fucking translation lmao, it’s weird how it’s high effort but has a bunch of typos
• This feels like a Level E story
• Luffy shows up, yep
• Why Neitzche and Heidegger? Were Hegel or Merleau-Ponty going to show up at some point?
• Maxy Bee thoughts:
  • You’ve covered a lot of notable authors on the podcast, whether through their canceled works or when you’ve indulged in a hit. Fujisaki is somewhere around the top 5 of all those creators in importance and reputation. We don’t talk a lot about him in the west for whatever reason, but he’s got a hell of a body of work, and is one of my personal favourite authors of all time. Regardless of how you rate Sakura Tetsu Taiwahen, I hope you’ve enjoyed the experience, and will hopefully return one day for his other translated failure, Waq Waq. You’re safe from Psycho+, which is actually quite bad. No-one seems to want to license or scanlate it.
  • Astute readers will spot that Ryu Fujisaki’s career to this point mirrors Yoshihiro Togashi to a scary extent. Both had flops out the gate that no-one remembers, a one-shot collection, then a HUGE HIT, then pivoted into weird sci-fi. They diverge a lot from here, with one doing lots of different projects and the other doing a lot of stuff within one giant never-ending project. It’s weird.
  • The replacement manga at the end continues a gag from Hoshin Engi where Ryu Fujisaki’s comics always gets replaced by comics by NEW Ryu Fujisaki.
  • The series numbering gets weird, with four different chapter 11s and such. This was the same in the magazine, and is confusing as hell. I’d blame it for the cancellation but there’s a LOT you can blame long before that started happening.
  • He gives this manga five stars, despite it being stupid, stupid, dumb, stupid chaos.

Final Verdict

• Six Word summary
  • Community
    • Tucker: Gag manga becomes self-aware and self-destructs
    • Maxybee: Sakura Tetsu’s Dialogue gets me a-talkin’!
    • Duderocks: What happens when you ignore A.P.L
    • Basscarrier: The housing market never improved 😔
    • Dragoniitti: An elaborate left-field ending. Yay?
    • The Laughing Fool: Just three words: location, location, location
    • The MF Yeti: Kirby's existential acid trip turf war
  • David: about homeless punchlines looking for housing
  • Jordan: I really just don’t know dude
  • Guest:
• Flop or not
  • If flop, what they could read instead ye this is a flop read witch watch for the same zannyness but done super well
  • It’s definitely, diegetically, a flop but it also kinda rules. Watch Xavier Renegade Angel.
  • If not, how it compares to Chainsaw Man
• Is this the best/worst series we’ve talked about