| Story Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei revolves around a very pessimistic high school teacher named Nozomu Itoshiki who, at the very beginning of the series, tries to hang himself on a sakura tree. Despite this effort of self-destruction, he is saved by an extremely optimistic girl known only as Kafuka Fuura (though in her effort to save his life, she almost kills him). She explains to him that it is simply unimaginable that he would hang himself on such a nice day, especially in front of such beautiful trees. She decides to nickname Nozomu "Pink Supervisor", and offers to pay him fifty yen to call him by that nickname. After having enough of the strange girl, Nozomu bolts to the school and starts his homeroom class, but the attempt to escape was in vain as he finds that the girl is one of his students. Not only that, but Kafuka is just the tip of the iceberg: each and every student in his class represents a new personality quirk or bizarre obsession, posing challenges that the suicidally-inclined teacher must overcome in spite of himself.
Each chapter or episode of the series revolves around a particular aspect of life, Japanese culture, or a common phrase in the Japanese language. Typically, this involves the subject being taken either to its most logical extreme (a discussion of amakudari, the practice of "descending" from the public to the private sector, results in Nozomu "descending" until he reaches his previous life), or taken literally (in Nozomu's family, omiai, normally a meeting between a potential match in an arranged marriage, is instead a marriage concluded by eye-contact). On other occasions, Nozomu challenges his students to think about the negative aspects of something usually considered positive. These in-depth, off-kilter analyses (along with the reactions of the students according to their own personality quirks) are usually brought to a head with a punchline based on the overall premise, or more rarely, a non-sequitur gag or piece of fan service.
While ostensibly set in the present day relative to its original serialization, the manga uses a variety of aesthetic tropes that evoke the Taisho period, the relatively liberal period in Japan before militarism took over. Much of the aesthetics are themed from Taisho liberalism, Taisho Romanticism (see Japanese literature) and Taisho arts (see Hanshinkan Modernism). This is exemplified by Nozomu and Matoi consistently wearing a kimono and hakama (an obsolete style of Japanese school uniforms in the late 1800s), but is also evident in stylistic choices such as the anachronistic appearance of architecture, vehicles, and technology such as televisions indicative of the Taisho period. However, the hair of women is typically short, which is a break from the feudal era and signifies the style of the Taisho period. Chapter title pages are drawn to resemble karuta cards, with an illustration in a silhouetted kiri-e style. Chapter titles are oblique references to literature, modified to suit the needs of the chapter. The anime carries this further through a washed-out, grainy visual style that mimics film, and frequent use of katakana (rather than hiragana) as okurigana. The anime also regularly refers to the date as though Emperor Hirohito were still alive, such that Heisei 20 (the twentieth year of Emperor Akihito's reign, or 2008 by the Gregorian calendar) becomes "Showa 83".
This story has the part which was created by referencing Wikipedia, so the licence of GFDL is applied to this story. |
