[RERELEASE] [ENG SUB] Hard-boiled Egg (Moon, 1995)

[nightless_castle]

Summary: Alex (Amami Yuuki), a non-selling author, has trouble writing. Throughout his daily life he keeps up a mental conversation with Simon Emett, a figment of his imagination and the cool and manly hero of a hard-boiled novel he’s working on. Meanwhile, the police are having a hard time catching a serial killer dubbed “Crime Buster” who's out killing thugs around town and who Alex draws parallels to his own novel’s character. Alex’s unofficial girlfriend, Rosemarie (Asano Kayo), tries to help him out of his writer’s slump, but things just get more and more complicated as Alex struggles between his own emotions and the cool and heartless Simon Emett he strives to be in his head.

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A 1080p HD upscaled version of this show was aired recently, so I thought it'd be a good time for me to go back and update these subs to go along with a rerelease. The audio is a looottt more clearer and I could hear much better this time so I fixed a bunch of mistranslations I made the first time. These are really old subs (I think the first one I ever made) too so I knew there were bound to be a lot of amateur subbing mistakes.

Updated review, including some musings on gender and masculinity in this show below.


Review

Otherwise known as the transmasc cult classic.

Maybe it’s the wonderfully made sets and the way it was shot but Hard-boiled Egg is so immersive that it really just feels like an actual movie from the 90s rather than a musical. In fact, I often forget that Hard-boiled Egg isn’t a movie. I do prefer watching the VHS recording of this though, just because I think it adds to the charm (which is why I made the subs’ font that old school yellow color). Something about this musical feels very home-y and comforting to me and watching an old VHS tape is more in line with that sentiment rather than a sharp upscaled recording with a TV watermark on it that you know was broadcasted on air in 2022. The audio is a lot better though, and you can hear a lot of background music you couldn't in the VHS version.

There’s more talking than singing in this musical, but most of the songs it does have are pretty enjoyable 90’s jazz/rock bops. The plot is pretty simple, it’s more Drama than Mystery but it has all the elements to keep you engaged throughout. The heart of this story really is the characters and their relationships. The main character Alex is an idiot of a man, but an idiot you feel for nonetheless. He’s a protagonist who’s full of flaws and although sometimes you want to scream at him for being a dense mfer, other times you just can’t help but root for him. Also he’s played by Amami Yuuki, who was perfect in this role. These types of characters are her specialty and she’s just charming no matter what she does. She was especially entertaining during the scene where Alex gets drunk off his ass and dances in the diner. I thought the entire cast felt very real and natural as their characters but Amami Yuuki as Alex especially.

I was also really invested in Alex’s uncommitted relationship with Rosemarie (Asano Kayo). It's quite an unusual type of main couple dynamic and relationship in Takarazuka. Though they’re in a rough spot in the show and spend a lot of it arguing, it’s obviously from a place of love and it’s really bittersweet to watch. Asano Kayo’s acting as Rosemarie felt so real you’d wonder if she was actually going through this relationship IRL. She was great. I wish there was more to her character outside of her association with Alex, though.



There’s also a heart-breakingly sweet platonic relationship between George (Kuze Seika) and Cindy (Kazahana Mai) on the side that made me cry. I love love love Kuze Seika’s acting here… Though the story uses hard-boiled elements it’s also very connected to the soft and fragile emotions of its characters, which makes for a nice contrast.




Being a hard-boiled story, this musical also touches upon themes of morality and how unjust the "justice" system is. There was some anti police sentiment and an even stronger prison abolition message. It didn't go into depth regarding these themes but good enough for a Takarazuka musical from 1995. On that note, the buddy cop duo Floyd and Lawrence played by Wakao Risa and Shizuki Asato was very entertaining (and they were definitely gay for each other).

All in all, an enjoyable 2 hours. I recommend watching this musical late at night just for the vibes. Also you can wake up the next morning thinking the giant spider dance number at the beginning was a fever dream.

Some Discussions on Gender & A Queer Reading on Hard-boiled Egg

This show might have the highest concentration of toxic masculinity I’ve ever seen in a zuka show ever. But like I said, we also joke that it's a transmasc cult classic because this show is undoubtedly about Alex going on a self rediscovery of masculinity. Almost every male character in this show struggles from toxic/fragile masculinity and is striving to achieve some form of the hegemony, whether it be Alex trying to be the cool Simon Emmett, Floyd and Lawrence trying to be competent policemen, Matthew trying to be a hero who saves girls from gangsters, or Crime Buster who (SPOILERS). Stories about men specifically dealing with issues of masculinity have an extra layer of nuance when performed by non-men since of course, it further emphasizes gender as a social construct and can be a quite powerful and effective way to do it.




We get a very telling song sung by Alex that explores the complex emotions of confronting one’s own masculinity and men's gender role in society. The loneliness, shame, and fear surrounding it.



This line in particular was quite straightforwardly sad.

Throughout the whole show, Alex chases after an idealized version of masculinity in his head, represented by the character Simon Emmett. Simon influences most of his actions and decisions, leading him to disregard his own feelings and lose who he is as a person, or more specifically as a man. Which is what makes him the center of a story about what is essentially a crisis of masculinity.

There’s a really interesting conversation that Sydney and Alex have after Alex gets into a fight with Rosemarie. Sydney tells Alex that "women are stronger" because unlike men they aren't emotionally constipated. Alex (still toxic and #cancelled at this point of the story) goes “yeah right”. Sydney then asks Alex if he would have rather been born a woman instead, to which Alex after a long pause answers no. There are a number of ways you can read this scene and what Alex was thinking during that long pause. To me though I think he was just realizing that women have it infinitely harder after putting himself in their shoes for one second (props to him for beating the misogynist allegations), and second, it was him realizing that despite it all, he's only comfortable being a man and nothing else.



So then he sings a song with Sydney about exactly that, about how despite it all they’re happy to be men. Which I know sounds questionable but the way it was done was very interesting. It wasn't a song about machismo nor did it glorify hypermasculinity (that would be the buddy cop duo Floyd and Lawrence's song). Instead Sydney and Alex sing about a positive ideal of manhood, a young boy’s “pure” idea of masculinity before it was shaped by society. The lyrics talk about how little boys are forced to “give things up” because of societal pressure and ideals, but deep down men still dream of those things they lost. Whatever "things" are is left vague. It even goes as far as to describe being a man as "wandering aimlessly in an impossible dream".





More than anything, to me it seems like if the first song was a song lamenting and questioning masculinity, then this one is a song about redefining masculinity, and to an extent (if we all got our trans goggles on) a song about gender euphoria.

Because the show is more about its male characters, unfortunately it doesn’t really allow its female ones to have a lot of depth. The girls sort of just exist while the boys’ inability to process their own emotions leads to their downfall and gets them into all sorts of trouble/danger. I just wish there was more to the female characters and that they didn’t just exist to serve as a contrast against the male characters, which unfortunately enforces the gender binary.

Though there was one scene where Rosemarie talked about how difficult it was for her being a woman in the company, so despite the show focusing on hashtag Men’s Struggles, it at least explicitly acknowledged (once) that women do have it harder. And I guess it's a little funny to see how men just dealing with emotions are so dramatic and take 2 hours of runtime to figure themselves out while the girls just live their lives.

This show can very easily be gender essentialist (and don’t get me wrong, it very much is at times) but I really do think that a queer reading of this show makes it a lot more enjoyable and nuanced. Making sense of a character's fragile masculinity by reading them as trans and interpreting that as gender dysphoria instead is something a lot of trans people do (or at least I do) quite often lol (sometimes for coping, sometimes just because a queer engagement with media will always do everyone a little good).

And also. The title of this musical is Hard-boiled EGG.

I rest my case.

Translator’s Notes

There’s a few misogynistic remarks here and there that I chose to translate differently to Spare Us All. During an argument with Rosemarie, Alex says 女のヒステリー (lit: “female hysteria”) which I translated to “a woman’s emotional outbursts” instead. I know this is probably in character for Alex but I just hate that term personally and I don’t want to keep it alive.

In another scene Alex beats himself up and calls himself pathetic and “like a girl” ( 女々しくて) for having emotions, which I just changed to “soft” (I’m sorry feminism). You’d think it’s fine because he follows that line up with “being a man starts from recognizing your “girliness” which out of context COULD sound like a positive thing against toxic masculinity… maybe.. but the choice of words just could be better…