Kakushigoto

main information

• genre: gag comedy, iyashi-kei, childcare, slice of life
  
• season: spring 2020
• number of seasons & episodes: 1 season, 12 episodes
• myanimelist / anilist

this post contains spoilers of its ending

i love sayounara zetsubou-sensei, and that's how i discovered about kakushigoto as both are created by the same author/mangaka kumeta kouji. i also checked out the ovas of katte ni kaizou, but that was kind of a miss to me, as i was not born in that generation to understand its humour. nevertheless, i decided to give kakushigoto a try as it's a more recent work of kumeta that i would probably enjoy myself more... and also because the main guy is basically a clone of zetsubou-sensei (even the cv is also kamiya hiroshi).

kakushigoto goes through a struggling manga author, gotou kakushi (a pun of the show's title, which also means "something to hide" in japanese), whose mangas are known for containing a lot of dirty jokes, hence tries to hide his manga job from his 10-year-old daughter, gotou hime (a pun of the word 秘め事 (himegoto) in japanese that means "secret").

to be honest, kakushigoto feels like a late bloomer in terms of the real story, as the first few episodes did seem a little bit confusing to me that i was wondering if the animation team knew what they wanted to do. like yes, it's funny and all, but since episode 1 the story already gave hints on hime growing up and finding out about her father's job, that they tried to intertwine both elements (10-year-old hime and 18-year-old hime) but the execution just wasn't the best.

regardless, the humour of kakushigoto did not disappoint at all, which is very much the zetsubou-sensei kind of dark humour that makes fun of real world problems. in kakushigoto, the humour is mostly based on the real life manga industry in japan, i wouldn't say that i am familiar with it enough to understand every trope to it, yet i still had a lot of great laughs during my watching experience.

the ending - i feel like it should've taken more episodes to build up to episode 12, instead of putting all of them into almost the end of episode 11 that suddenly changes the tone of the whole story from a funny slice of life comedy to something dramatic and tear-jerking. hime's mom's story is kind of rushed to bring up in the first half of episode 12 that it wasn't as impactful as expected, especially when they decided to bring up a new character at its season finale which made me go ???? honestly, i'd much prefer this story and hime's brother to be introduced in the earlier episodes, so they get more time to build up all the emotional moments in the later half of episode 12, which was kind of a shame.

however, i totally did not expect myself to cry this much at the ending. maybe because i also came from a single family, that it just kind of hit me to a very personal level. funny enough that i learned about family love and parents' thoughts via anime, and only truly understand them via anime as well.

kakushigoto is an anime that i would like to sit through with my single parent in my family and reflect on how the family has been over the years. although we may have secrets kept from each other, it does not affect the family harmony, we still love and care for each other; just like kakushi hiding his job from hime and hime hiding her interest in drawing from her dad, they still have a loving family relationship.

so, what is your secret? 隠しごとはなんですか?