Kakushigoto: My Dad's Secret Ambition

TD;DR : in spite of its good intentions and ideas, this manga suffers from pacing and length problems that spoil the emotions that should emanate from it. Fortunately, the anime adaptation corrects all its flaws while keeping the strength of its message intact. Go watch the anime, it's a masterpiece. Kakushigoto is a slice-of-life manga about a manga artist called Kakushi raising his 10-year-old daughter Hime alone (his wife vanished without a trace years ago). The twist is that he's writing "dirty gag mangas", so he's worried that, if Hime knew about it, she'd think less of him or be harassed at school. So he toldher that he's working as a salary man, and keeps the lie going on for years. The story Most of the stories show Kakushi in his workshop with his assistants and his editor, usually worried about something related to Hime and flying off the handle as he panicks, misunderstands or comes up with some harebrained scheme to solve a problem that, more often than not, didn't exist in the first place. So yes, it's before all else a comedy. But it has more depth than that. First, the relationship between Kakushi and Hime is a touching and heartwarming one. He loves his daughter deeply and would do anything for her, and she's a reasonable, level-headed kid that had to grow up a bit too fast after the loss of her mother. Father and daughter built a very strong unit that no drama ever threatens. Last but not least, the manga also shows a darker face in the first few and last few pages of each volume. Drawn in color, those pages show a 18-year-old Hime discovering her father's warehouse where all his previous manga-related work is stored. Why does she seem sad? How did she find out? Did something happen to Kakushi between the time where she's 10 and the time where she's 18? The characters Like most slice of life, there's very little change in the characters over the course of the story. Kakushi is extremely gullible when he thinks his daughter's welfare comes into play and that remains the main lever for most jokes in all 12 volumes. Hime is so reasonable that she's even a bit bland, and she never expresses either anger or frustration. Although this, in itself, is a important aspect of her personality (there's something sad in seeing a child bottling up so much of her own emotions after the loss of a parent, and trying to shoulder responsabilities she's too young for), she doesn't play that much of an active role for a main character. All other characters have very little substance and exist only to interact with Kakushi and Hime. This is really a story about two characters and no one else. The length and pacing problems! Seeing Kakushi and Hime interact is always a joy, in spite of Hime's relatively limited presence or impact in half the stories, and is enough to justify reading this manga. But I rated this manga 7/10, while I rated its anime adaptation 9/10. How come? The manga is far too long for what it has to say. The characters never change, no character arc is ever solved, and most stories follow the same construction. In addition, the author heavily reuses frames, postures and faces throughout the volumes, so there's a big sense of repetition. Moreover, until the last volume you never see the "past" story (funny, heartwarming) finding its way toward the "present" story (sadder, mysterious). All of this waters down the feelings that you could get from the manga. Sometimes I found myself bored seeing Kakushi panicking and rushing out of his workshop for the 100th time because of some worry for Hime, while I was impatiently waiting to reach the color pages to see more of what happened to 18-year-old Hime. In some volumes you can almost jump from the color pages at the beginning to those at the end without missing anything. But the good news is that the anime adaptation solves all of those problems. It's much shorter, more compact, eliminates a lot of the gags that repeated themselves in the manga, and gets a far better sense of progression alternating between the past and present storylines.