SAYONARA PIANO SONATA

DESCRIPTION

CAST

CHAPTERS

MANGA DramaSayonara Piano Sonata
NOVEL DramaSayonara Piano Sonata: Encore Pieces

REVIEWS

• 

  Josso

  60/100
  An unsteady flight that sticks the landing every time

  If there’s one thing anime has taught me over the years, it's that things are much simpler when they’re either “good” or “bad”. It gets complicated when you blur the lines. This isn’t about grey morality; rather, it’s about really good stories tainted by the kind of terrible slop that this medium is infamous for. In a way, this review is my reckoning with all the anime and manga I’ve consumed over the years that made me think “Hey, I liked it a lot, except for those weird bits”.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

  Sayonara Piano Sonata is a bit of a mess. It has moments of genuinely gripping drama, and it plays with many interesting ideas (and by the time I finished the first volume I had great expectations for it), yet the bulk of it is often so dull and questionable in a very unnecessary way. Its flaws hurt particularly deeply because many of them are inessential; they could be edited out without any change to the plot, yet the fact they exist means they can’t be ignored.

  Of course, there can’t be mixed feelings without positive feelings, so it’s important to denote what’s so good about this first.

  At its core, this series is a soap-opera, in the sense that it’s full of drama and emotional intensity, yet it’s never so deep that you’d risk drowning in it. It’s a roller coaster ride, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s an engaging one, too! I was dancing to the story’s tune at all times. If the novel said “Oh no, she might quit the band!”, I answered “Oh no, is she gonna quit the band?!”. It’s reminiscent of Clannad in a way, though it never reaches the same powerful heights, and it doesn’t have the same gripping atmosphere. It’s a fun level of drama to play with for a few hours, and sometimes that’s enough.

  Another source of my complicated feelings is the fact that, even when the plot stalls, or starts to get repetitive, or just plain sucks, it always nails the ending. When you pick up a volume of Sayonara Piano Sonata, you’re guaranteed a stellar finish every time. It always gets the last word, so to speak, and thus, even if you complain about it endlessly as you read through, you’ll at least leave with the impression that it was pretty good.

  It’s not all fun and games however, and it’s unfortunately time to discuss these flaws I’ve been hinting at all this time.

  There’s a pervading horniness throughout the story that’s very uncomfortable. This isn’t unheard of in anime, but the particular way it expresses itself here is what’s problematic. It’s not just the girls wearing revealing clothing, or flirting with the protagonist, but the way the “horny” characters are often full-grown adults. It’s the protagonist’s father, it’s the guitarist they met, it’s a DJ. It’s adults sexualizing teenagers, always played for comic relief, and it sucks.

  But it’s not just full-grown adults who are horny in this novel. No, if we want to talk about this aspect more deeply, we unfortunately have to talk about Kagurazaka Kyouko.

  This is more of a petty complaint of mine, really. Kyouko is an upperclassman character, and (at least throughout the first volume) one of my favorite characters ever. You’re telling me this shabby-looking novel has a character who’s a cool chuuni pansexual communist guitar player? That is somehow so novel and so cool it made me wonder why no one had thought of it before. Unfortunately, this infatuation didn’t last. Not because she stopped being “cool” (I would’ve dropped the score by a point or two if it turned out she was super sensitive and wanted the MC to see her “as a girl” or whatever), but because, starting from volume 2, a good half of her character is being a comic relief pervert. You could have endless discourse about whether that’s homophobic or not, but I think we can at least agree it’s not very funny.

  The comic relief is, thus, a huge part of my distaste for this novel. Not because comic relief is an inherently bad thing, but because here it’s mostly unfunny. Worse than being bad, it can detract from the parts of the story that are good. An example is this character called Yuri, introduced in the third volume, who’s supposed to be a bit of a femboy. There are many genuinely good and sweet moments involving him that are unfortunately peppered with instances of the protagonist going “Yo, this is a dude, but he’s pretty, isn’t that gay as hell?”. Not that I’m expecting a 2000s Light Novel to be a bastion of progressiveness or anything, but I at least expect some restraint. Great scenes are dampened by these poor attempts at humor.

  But really, does any of this matter? Can't most of this novel’s flaws can be observed in a plethora of different novels and manga and anime? That may be true, but it’s still disappointing. I don’t want to have to sit through hours of terrible, generic trash just to get to the nuggets of quality hidden in between. I’m not asking for a masterpiece every time, but it’s sad to see so much potential squandered by completely preventable and unnecessary problems.

  In the summary to this review, I compared Sayonara Piano Sonata to an unsteady flight. That’s because the story's particularly fond of the song Blackbird by The Beatles, so I thought it’d be fitting. But really, it’s more like a perfectly good bird soaring through the sky, constantly being shot at from a distance. Sometimes the bullets land. It’s pretty good if you can get through the bad bits, though.

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