Two episodes, no spectacle, and it still pins you to the chair. This is the side story that assumes you already love the guy everyone writes off as a dim-witted ex-con, the one who sat in a prison audience, watched Yakumo perform his death-haunted rakugo, and decided that was worth the rest of his life. Rakugo on screen lives or dies on whether the camera has the nerve to hold on one man kneeling on a cushion with a folding fan and a hand towel, and this holds, letting a shifted shoulder or a dropped register carry an entire second character. The Showa air does the rest: smoke, tatami, a country still deciding whether it wants this art to survive. And you can hear Yotarou pushing too hard, all volume and heart, and hear exactly how far he still is from the master who terrifies him.

A man released from prison on good behavior during Japan's Showa Genroku era already knows where he wants to go first. He has fallen for a rakugo master's telling of "Shinigami," the tale of the grim reaper, and he is set on becoming that performer's apprentice. Yakumo has never accepted a pupil before, yet to everyone's surprise he takes on the eager former convict and gives him the nickname Yotarou, a word for a dim-witted man. As Yotarou happily starts his new life in the world of comic storytelling, he meets the people around Yakumo, including his ward Konatsu, the daughter of a famous storyteller who died tragically. Konatsu loved her father's performances and dreams of taking the stage herself, but that road is closed to women. The two-episode drama OVA was bundled with special editions of the manga's seventh and eighth volumes.