Who knew four hours of infomercials about candy could be fun? There are plenty of slice of life shows themed around niche topics as of late, but Dagashi Kashi takes this to a whole other level of detail. Sure there are teenage girls and guys being awkward and clueless, going about their adolescence in the countryside drinking coffee and sprinting on the beach, but they also spend most of their time obsessing over snacks, giving snack history lessons, telling their fortunes with snacks, quizzing each other about snacks, doing blind taste tests with different snack brands, and of course, eating enough snacks to give a healthy adult diabetes every day. Dagashi Kashi is what happens when you take a normal slice of life cast and insert the one otaku who forces every conversation to be about sweets, and whether or not it grates on their nerves, for those of us watching it’s a round of entertainment with a surprisingly pleasant lecture of useless knowledge on the side.
Setting this show out in the sticks means that every shot is accompanied with an open rural landscape, both relaxing and unique enough to be believable. And nothing says rural town in the woods like a tiny local candy shop, with a worn wooden sign out front, the living room adjacent to the register, and stocked entirely with brand-name bite-sized morsels that cost 25 cents or less. Once or twice we see a few kids come in to the store to buy, but other than that the whole town feels completely abandoned. When the candy store owner’s son Kokonotsu runs to the 2D world of drawing manga and emphatically claims that he wants no part in succeeding the family business, just from the atmosphere it seems to make a lot of sense.
Yet he does have an eye for running a sweets shop, from the placement of the different types to a good sense of what flavors match well with one another, and some pretty good historical wherewithal to boot. It seems a shame that he won’t be the next store owner, both to his whimsical dad and to the mysterious purple-haired girl who shows up on the threshold of the store one summer’s day. She is Hotaru, heiress to the famous Shidare candy company who wants to recruit Kokonotsu’s father to leave the town and work for her company. But while Kokonotsu would love to leave the shop, his father refuses to move away until he agrees to succeed the store, and so Hotaru shifts her focus to convincing Kokonotsu to stay in the snack business for good. Of course her “arguments” revolve around trying to prove that deep down he loves sweets with all his heart, usually by forcing her own icky love of them on him first.
And so the two of them set about doing nothing in particular, lazing around the store with Hotaru forcing Kokonotsu to participate in games of luck, skill, and knowledge for the sake of her quest. Every episode takes on three or four different snacks, ultimately covering their history, packaging, flavors, and overall claims to fame. Whether it be by blind taste testing fugashi, playing Russian Roulette with Beware the Sour Grape, arguing over the appropriate nickname of Tamago Ice Cream, or telling the history of the end of Japanese isolationism through Ramune, these two and their friends Saya and Tou waste a whole lot of time teaching one another about the complexity and depth of Japanese snacks. Not that they had anything better to do anyway.
In terms of characters however, Hotaru completely steals the show. Kokonotsu is knowledgeable and has funny reactions, but mostly serves as to receive Hotaru’s joke and occasionally fire back with a quick tsukkomi. His best friend Tou is the classic sidekick character, wisecracking, perverted, and not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Tou’s sister Saya has the most interesting character design with helix piercings and good fashion sense, but her longstanding crush for Kokonotsu and lack of knowledge about snacks seems to dominate her character. But Hotaru is marvelous; obsessive and impulsive, always with a crazed smile on her face, and a single-minded focus on snacks. She sets the pace for every conversation she is in, is continuously optimistic in the face of being born devoid of all luck, and is unfazed by her own stupid antics. In one scene she appears from a tree for dramatic effect, and then is forced to slowly shimmy her way down while continuing to monologue on monjayaki. In another she forces everyone to stay in a hot closed room so she can eat boiling Butamen in the middle of the summer.
Even with her crazy pace, the show sets a very relaxing tone. The laid-back pace is a perfect complement to the calm shots of the countryside, and scenes like the summer street festival and a day at the pool pass without incident. The character designs have nice touches of realism, such as Saya’s piercing, the faintly visible frills on Hotaru’s bra, and Kokonotsu’s oversized hoodie. The first and last episodes contain a couple of subtle bookends that resolve nothing but give the open-ended slice of life show a sense of closure, of completeness. None of this has anything to do with candy in particular, but it sells snacks packaged with a sense of relaxation. There is no conflict, no antagonists, nothing but the sweets’ history, the culture, and the taste. Now I'll have an image of relaxing at a café in the countryside while I sit around sharing fun facts about candy until my friends are sick and tired of it.