Usagi Drop Essay - Playing Masako by Maaya Sakamoto

Last week or the week before, the Usagi Drop anime website unveiled a collaboration between Maaya Sakamoto and Gekidan Inu-Curry (the illustrator for the universe music video and Maaya’s Newtype column) as one of their website’s special sections. It was an interesting essay but parts of it were a little tricky! Anyway, here it is.

The original can be found here.

EDIT: This post is getting a lot of traffic, I'm glad people found it interesting! Enjoy!

Maaya Sakamoto: Playing Masako in Usagi Drop

Ayu Matsuura, who plays Rin, always stands straight in front of the microphone, her voice cool and relaxed. When I look at her I feel nostalgic, reliving my own days as a child actor, and strangely, I start to want to tickle her. She’s asked question after question from the adults around her, “What year are you at school?”, “Which school lunch do you like best?”, “How is your summer vacation homework coming?” And even this is somehow very familiar.

I wonder, when exactly did I become ‘an adult’?

I started this work when I was eight years old. It’s been twenty-three years from then until now and I’ve never done any other sort of work.

When I was a child acting and singing were simply fun, nothing else. But one day, there was a moment when I thought, “huh?” Wait a second, how did I did I do this acting thing up until now? For some reason I suddenly became unable to do the thing I had always been able to do without thinking. Despite enjoying it, or maybe because I did enjoy it, work stopped being just ‘fun’. And it was because of that I was no longer able to quit doing it. It’s difficult, I want to get better, I want to learn more…Those desires became the driving force for why I have done this for so long, and maybe they pushed me towards adulthood. It’s ironic but if it had just been ‘fun’ I probably wouldn’t have come this far. That’s how I feel now I’m 31 years old. For me, everything that happened was one thing in a long, continuous period of time with no relation to my age or experience, I never feel like I’ve become an adult. .

In Usagi Drop I play Rin’s mother, Masako. Even though she’s a mother Masako is still young and mentally very immature. She’s got a unique point of view and viewers might frown a little thinking, “What’s wrong with this woman?” A childish way of talking, her actions and words showing a lack of common sense…There are probably few people who can emphasise with a woman who has made the decision to keep her own daughter at a distance. She’s an elusive, difficult character. But it’s because she’s difficult that from an acting point of view she caught my interest. I feel like there’s a mysterious link between someone like me who was a child actor playing the role of mother who can’t become a true adult.

I know it’s a little presumptuous of me to put this in as an example in this essay but on this production I worked with Takkou Ishimori for the first time in a long time, and while we were looking at the children in the cast he commented offhand, “I was also a child actor and I started out at about their age. It’s difficult growing up, you know. It was really tough turning from a boy into a man.”

Those words where somehow really deep, and left an impression on me. As a pro he is on a completely different level to me so I was too shy to say ‘I know what you mean’, and could only stand there and nod silently but…Wow, so Takkou-san was also brought up with these two personas, the actor and the normal boy, and with time grew up into this wonderful person…it was a dazzling revelation.

Everyone starts to live as an adult without really noticing when it happens. Even though there are still lots of things you don’t understand or don’t know how to do, there are less and less people who will teach you or get angry with you. Even though you’re busy with your own problems people will rely on you. How others see you and how you see yourself…there’s so much you don’t understand.

“It was really tough turning from a boy into a man.”

Yes, it is difficult, really difficult. Even though I’m pretty much an adult at my age I still can’t catch up with who I want to be. In acting, in life. I think until I can say something like Takkou-san with the same gentleness, I think I will try one thing at a time..

Working on Usagi Drop, it seemed like I was looking at the distant future and the distant past at the same time. Then I came back to myself in the present once again and took a deep breath. I came to work on this show thinking, ‘ok, let’s take a step out into this new scenery’, in full knowledge of my immaturity, and giving it everything I had. Standing next to Rin, I think I started to understand Masako’s restlessness and passion. 

Fin.