In April of 1997 Nippon Cultural Broadcasting debuted a new late-night radio show titled Saint Luminous Jogakuin/St. Luminous Mission High School, a two-person broadcast starring Kaihei Kijima & Sister Akane, who were voiced by Tetsuya Iwanaga & Mifuyu Hiiragi [now Tomoko Ishimura], though the voice actors' real names weren't actually revealed until the final episode (though that didn't stop magazines like Newtype from spoiling the surprise early). The concept of the show was that Kaihei had just inherited an all-girls school from his recently deceased grandfather, one that's been suffering a decline in enrollment to a newly established rival school. Kaihei & Akane decide to solicit the listeners for ideas & advice that would help keep the school afloat & raise enrollment, but instead of simply calling in listeners would submit their responses via pager/beeper; it was the late 90s, so pagers were still more than popular enough in Japan. This radio show would run until March 1998, but a few months later, in July, St. Luminous Mission High School returned to Nippon Cultural Broadcasting's airwaves, now in the form of a 12-episode radio drama that was broadcast as a part of the radio show Manabi Mizuno's Harapekopai, with there being a segment on the show after each episode where Mizuno spoke with the voice cast of the radio drama. The entire radio drama would be released on CD on October 9, 1998, along with a new bonus episode, but just a few days earlier on "October 5 at 25:15" TV Tokyo debuted the first episode of a TV anime version of St. Luminous Mission High School, which replaced Serial Experiments Lain. Unfortunately, I can't tell if the anime was simply an adaptation of the radio drama, or if it was its own unique interpretation, though it was produced with help from Genco (this being one of its earliest productions, in fact) & Pioneer LDC. In that regard, it's interesting that Pioneer Entertainment (or its later incarnation, Geneon) never licensed this anime for English release.
The St. Luminous Mission High School anime was only the fourth TV anime made by the now defunct Triangle Staff, following Hareluya II BØY, Shinkai Densetsu Meremanoid, & Serial Experiments Lain, and today remains one of only two TV anime from the studio that has never seen official English release, alongside Meremanoid. However, there were still yet even more St. Luminous Mission High School productions made, as there would also be both light novel & manga adaptations of the anime, while on May 25, 2000, 17 months after the anime's 13th & final episode aired on December 28, 1998, a romance simulator for the PS1 came out by Xing simply known as St. Luminous. However, aside from being about a young man who inherits a school from his grandfather it features a completely different cast from any prior interpretation, & features none of the mystery aspect of the anime's story. It's pretty amusing that the only two Triangle Staff TV anime that have never been licensed for official English release are the two that both had notably different video game tie-ins released by Xing that came out long after each anime had ended. They were also both conceived of, in some way, by legendary writer Kenji Terada (Final Fantasy I to III, Kimagure Orange Road TV), though Terada had no direct involvement with the St. Luminous anime, unlike with Meremanoid. Without a doubt, a lot of attention was given to St. Luminous Mission High School for the better part of four years in Japan, from its debut as a simple radio show in 1997 all the way to the PS1 game in 2000, so it's kind of remarkable at just how forgotten & obscure the entire thing has become in the decades since, though the anime is at least streaming in Japan... which makes the late-night 1998 anime interpretation the perfect kind of title for me to cover here!
Therefore, my year-long celebration(?) of the 30th Anniversary of the modern-day late-night anime infomercial continues with a review of St. Luminous Mission High School!
St. Luminous Mission High School is an all-girls private academy that prides itself on giving its students the freedom to study the craft that they feel most comfortable with & is the best fit for them. However, it's also recently gone through the passing of its chairman, Watabe Kijima, and in his will Watabe requested that his grandson Kaihei inherit the school as its new chairman. It's a bit of a bizarre request, though, as Kaihei is a high school student himself & hadn't seen his grandfather in 10 years. Regardless, Kaihei comes to St. Luminous to act as its chairman, and backing him up is Sister Akane, the head nun at the school, & his friend Ryuzo Tanami, who accompanies Kaihei with the intention of enrolling (so he can be around a bunch of beautiful young ladies).. but can only do so by pretending to be a girl himself, as only Kaihei can enroll as a guy. However, Kaihei & Ryuzo arrive at St. Luminous three days after one of its students, Melina Scafissi, suddenly disappears while taking a shower with fellow student Asako Sato.... and then Asako herself disappears a day after Kaihei's arrival while swimming in the school's pool. Combined with the lack of any sense of distress or urgency from either the students or staff regarding these disappearances, there's clearly something a bit off with St. Luminous & Kaihei will do everything he can to solve the mystery, especially as more students start disappearing over time, all while getting cryptic but assistive messages from an unknown sender to the pager that his grandfather also left behind for him.
St. Luminous is immediately interesting for one main reason, but it's admittedly one that's only interesting in retrospect due to what are now preconceived notions. I mean, come on, it's a story about a somewhat meek young man who gets put in charge of a location that's filled with nothing but young ladies... that's literally the basic concept of Love Hina. However, St. Luminous not only predates the debut of Ken Akamatsu's iconic, genre-redefining romantic comedy manga simply by nature of its origin as a radio show back in 1997, but the anime itself actually debuted on TV mere weeks before Love Hina's first chapter appeared in Weekly Shonen Magazine; the similarities are truly just pure coincidence. Also, while there certainly is comedy to be seen throughout St. Luminous, the focus of the anime is very much on the mystery of the disappearing students, with Kaihei playing more the role of the detective (& responsible chairman of the school) than a hapless rom-com lead surrounded by a harem; that being said, Kaihei still exemplifies some elements of that, here & there. Ryuzo comes off a bit more like the kind of character you'd expect in this kind of rom-com, i.e. the horndog best friend who just wants to be surrounded by women, but he's also played a bit more subdued than you'd expect. Sure, you get the expected kind of gags early on with him, like wanting to enter the women's showers when he thinks girls are inside or getting annoyed at hearing all of his classmates gossiping about how cute Kaihei is. However, he's also very quickly established as being a true, generally stalwart friend to Kaihei who accompanies him around in trying to figure out the mystery, & his relationship with his female classmates is completely chaste, friendly, & supportive; for all intents & purposes, "Ryu" is just one of the girls.
By that same token, the various girls seen in the show are only similar to a harem show in that there is a wide variety of them & their interests, which match with the school's somewhat open ended educational system. By that I mean that if a student wants to do do & learn something then they actively do so, resulting in things like a broadcasting club that regularly puts on radio/TV programming (complete with charmingly awkward camera usage, since they're students), or the school having a literal restaurant where the food is cooked by members of the cooking club (&, from all indications, is pretty good). The most recurring girl would be Noriko Kijima, Kaihei's loving cousin (though she refers to him as "Big Brother", despite her being two months older than him), who's a part of the cooking course & winds up being the one seen most with Ryuzo, since he also joins the cooking course. The second most recurring girl would be Catherine Deboucoillet, a quiet artist who prefers to paint on large surfaces like walls (which often gets her in trouble, due to it technically being vandalizing) & winds up being a girl that Kaihei may or may not have prevented from disappearing early on, but in turn she's willing to open up more to Kaihei (as well as her fellow students) over time. Then there's Noriko's best friend Elizabeth Ryoko Bryan, the head chef of the cooking course who almost instantly starts eyeing Ryuzo from the start, which later gets revealed as her quietly crushing on "Ryu"; to be fair, this show has a handful of lesbian-adjacent relationships throughout. There's also Sister Akane, who like Ryuzo is always ready & willing to support Kaihei, but also has her own secrets, namely nights when she enters the nearby forest in a trance-like state without her trademark headpiece & veil, though she has no memory of her actually doing this, plus moments where she feels like she's left adrift in an endless ocean... like Kaihei also sometimes feels, at points.
As for the rest of the girls, many of them make appearances throughout the show on a regular basis, but the show kind of goes with a semi-anthological format where each episode (up to around Episode 10, or so) has what amounts to a focal point girl, though even that isn't always strictly enforced. For example, Episode 3 is Catherine's focus episode, but Episode 4 (though technically focusing on sculptor Shizuku Kabe) kind of winds up also being focused primarily on Catherine as well, though Catherine & Shizuku become a constant pair afterwards. Still, this allows for an interesting & honestly quirky group of characters to be showcased, & occasionally focused on, throughout the show. Asako Sato is in the Phys Ed course but prefers to skip classes to instead surf on the beach, often getting her in trouble with Jasmine Kouda, the PE teacher who's the most strict of the educators at the school. Shanon De Pye is part of the music course & loves composing new piano pieces... usually in an attempt to summon UFOs. Almost always with Shanon is Yukine Koshinzuka, her BFF who literally doles out various fragrances to people, often to match or improve people's moods. As for Cher Ringwald, she also believes in aliens due to her allegedly having been abducted once as a child, and her sudden disappearance results in the gang wondering if aliens might actually be involved, at least for a tiny bit. Lita Ford (Coincidence? Reference? You decide!) is the head of the broadcasting team, often accompanied her "Three Mermaids" (Maako, Mei, & Dona) & senpai Naoko Matsushima, & while she's a good investigator she also isn't beyond creating her own story, if need be. Then there's Fumiko Makuragi, a student in the PE course who hasn't been to class for two months due to her instead deciding to camp out in the vast forest outside of the campus; when she meets Kaihei she starts to mack on him pretty hard, possibly due to all of the isolation. Finally, the last of the notable girls is Irina Goinov, who's immensely shy & prefers to focus exclusively on her studies, due to an admittedly messed up childhood of abandonment, but when Kaihei hears her say that she "doesn't want to be here anymore" he does his best to make her feel wanted... which in turn causes her to crush on him hard, which totally wasn't Kaihei's intention; if this was School Days Irina would have 100% pulled a Kotonoha Katsura on Kaihei.
Again, had this anime come out maybe just another year or two later it'd probably be more akin to the harem-based rom-coms that would be popular in a post-Love Hina world, but here they're just high school girls with their own respective quirks and/or emotional baggage, and while there are a handful of moments where romantic feelings bubble forth toward Kaihei the lead character here seemingly has no interest in romance. Hell, Ryuzo even points out once that Kaihei spending time alone with a girl won't result in anything happening.
As mentioned, St. Luminous is a series very much focused on the mystery of the disappearing girls, with at least one new disappearance happening during the climax of almost every episode, and it's here where the true themes & general vibe of the series, & the school itself, really comes into play. Simply put, there's a generally "off" nature to St. Luminous Mission High School itself, which in turn also applies to both the students & staff that inhabit its grounds. For example, aside from the general quirkiness of the student body, there's the bizarre nature of everyone to just treat the disappearances as more of an odd inconvenience, at worst, than something to truly get scared & freaked out over, something that even Kaihei points out at least once in the first half. In fact, it's Irina that Kaihei points out this lackadaisical response to, the girl who's most focused on her studies, and it's only after some thought that she admits that while she doesn't know the missing girls too well personally it is sad that they've gone missing, & she even provides some assistance when Ryuzo & the other girls need to do some research. Even someone like Noriko, who knows full well how weird this whole scenario is (& even saw some girls literally disappear in front her once), doesn't feel anything beyond "Huh, that's weird" until it happens to her bestie Ryoko in Episode 5. By that same token, the teachers at St. Luminous are an equally odd bunch, whether it's Mr. White being a known sexual harasser to the students (yet he gets to keep his job... boo!) or Ms. Kouda seemingly being more obsessed with proving Kaihei's incompetence than actually trying to figure out where the disappearing girls went. Ms. Kouda even starts planning things with Shotaro Kazami, a freelance writer, to potentially ruin Kaihei's reputation in the later part of the series, so that Kaihei will resign, as that's seemingly more important to her than finding the students. Then there's Moe Suzuyoshi, an old lady neighbor who continually rides her bike through the school grounds, often going "I know something about that" as though she knows what's going on at any specific moment... but it's never really made clear how much she truly does know.
Then there's the seeming recurring theme of the disappearances, which (for the most part) can be interpreted as a bit of self-existentialism. Right from the start with Melina's disappearance it's heavily implied (& sometimes outright stated) that the girls that disappear want to disappear, for one reason or another, but a common thread tends to be an issue of existential unsurety. When a bunch of girls disappear in Episode 4, for example, it's after they all contemplated how unsure they were of their own futures, while in Ryoko's case it seemingly came down to her feelings toward Ryuzo & how she never felt comfortable with being honest about them, & much later with Irina it's her interpreting the fact that Kaihei wasn't actually in love with her as him abandoning her, like she had been as a child. In fact, that's why I said that it seems as though Kaihei managed to prevent Catherine's disappearance, as before she was talking about "disappearing into her work" as she paints, often with resistance to allow her to work as she pleases, but when Kaihei provides her with a chance to fully embrace herself she sees no reason to disappear. Now, to be fair, not all of the disappearances have a strictly existential bend to them, as when Lita disappears in Episode 6 it's while she's literally trying to figure out if there's a link between all of the locations where prior girls were last seen, or Shanon disappearing in front of everyone in Episode 8 during a performance upon (possibly) realizing what's responsible for the disappearances. However, by & large there's a common existential thread of "Why am I here?" linking most of the disappearances, with even the final episode literally having that question as its title.
The St. Luminous Mission High School anime was directed by Tetsuro Amino (Hotel Inhumans, Macross 7), and by & large this series is a notable improvement for Triangle Staff's TV output compared to the last TV anime I reviewed from them, which was Hareluya II BØY; I love that show, but it could get really damn chintzy looking at points. The show is obviously still a product of its time in many ways (i.e. produced on the cheap, because late-night), but overall is generally consistent enough with its animation, while the character designs by Hisashi Kagawa (SaiKano, Hataraki Man) are filled with a lot of variety for the girls at the school, which is great at making sure viewers don't confuse any for one another; Shanon & Ryoko are probably the the most similar, but can still be easily told apart from each other. However, there is one exception to the visuals in this show and that's Episode 5, which just looks terrible from start to finish & is filled with off model character drawings to no end. However, that episode was also one of only two (alongside Episode 9) that were produced in cooperation with the now defunct E&G Films, of Slayers TV fame, which itself had just finished up Lost Universe, i.e. the show that had the infamous "Yashigani" episode that was so poorly made that it became one of the earliest anime internet memes; granted, Episode 9 looked fine enough, but Episode 5... oof. St. Luminous was also one of Satelight's earliest productions, back when the it was still solely an assistance studio, doing digital animation for 10 of the 13 episodes; Satelight wouldn't produce its own anime until Arjuna in 2001.
As mentioned early on, while Kenji Terada is credited for the "Original Story" of St. Luminous Mission High School he actually had no direct involvement with the anime, so in his place as the one in charge of series composition was the late Akira Okeya (H2, Grenadier), who alongside Katsuhiko Koide (Shaman King 2001, Ambassador Magma) wrote the entire story for the anime. The end result is a series with a strongly relaxed pace to it all, which allows scenes to kind of flow through from one to the other without any strong sense of urgency, with the exceptions to that hitting just that little harder, due to how they go against what's expected. There's also a strong emphasis on not really bothering to explain much about the mystery of the disappearances, or who's sending Kaihei the messages via pager, for the longest time, instead focusing more on establishing the quirks & existential situations of the various girls, with Kaihei pretty much being focused more on doing what he can to help make the girls feel like they belong with the school & want to stay; again, Kaihei finding romance is kind of the furthest thing away from this show's collective mind. Even when some moves start getting made towards revealing the truth in the second half it's still slow on doling out that info, & while I can see some maybe get a little flustered with that kind of pacing I can tell that it's very much intentional & methodical here. As mentioned, there's an off feeling to St. Luminous itself from the very first episode, and the pacing & flow of the story really do match that feel.
All of that is just enforced even more by the soundtrack, which was composed by Mikiya Katakura (Maria Watches Over Us, Princess Resurrection), one half of the gothic art/prog rock band Ali Project. Simply put, Katakura's score for St. Luminous focuses primarily on delivering a very ethereal feel, with a heavy focus on slow & melancholic synth mixed with the occasional wind & percussion instrument, plus sometimes the piano, or even what's likely bandmate Arika Takarano doing some simply wordless vocalizing for effect. There are some tracks which don't carry that feel, like Sister Akane & Noriko's personal themes or a track for more comical moments, but for the most part Katakura's soundtrack really does match the generally downbeat & low key mood the anime most often goes for. Even something like a literal "Theme of Love", composed in-universe by Shanon, has this powerful, almost tragic sense to it, while still managing to instill the overall positive feeling of a sensation like love. Easily the best song from Katakura's score would be "Luminous -Theme of Disappearance & Mystery- v1", which also doubles as the show's OP theme of sorts (there is no actual OP sequence, but it's used at the start of each episode), and best encapsulates everything I mentioned before, including Takarano's vocalizing emphasizing the ethereal & ephemeral feel. Without a doubt, the soundtrack to St. Luminous is one to check out, even in isolation, and it was certainly nothing I could have expected.
Naturally, since the music for this anime was composed by one-half of Ali Project then it makes sense that Ali Project itself would perform the ED theme, "Labyrinth"... but this song isn't what most anime fans would think of when they hear the name Ali Project. You see, there are actually two sides to Ali Project, with the side that's become most known to anime fans, i.e. harsh, wild, & intense gothic rock, being what's known as "Black Ali", which is the type of Ali Project song that almost all anime that feature the band have utilized since 2001. However, Ali Project also produces what it calls "White Ali", which are more upbeat & refreshing songs, and St. Luminous Mission High School (along with CLAMP School Detectives before it, which Katakura also did the score to) wound up with a White Ali song, creating quite a dichotomy. By Ali Project's own admission, "Labyrinth" is one of the group's most upbeat White Ali songs, and for those who are only familiar with the group via their Black Ali songs it's almost mind blowing to hear Arika Takarano sing to such upbeat & breezy music. However, "Labyrinth" is a really damn good song, and admittedly works rather well as a nice way to get your emotions back up after watching an episode with Katakura's more (generally) melancholic soundtrack.
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| Again, the show has its moments of visual roughness, but I've certainly seen way worse than this. |
Finally there's the voice cast, and considering how many characters there are I'll just focus on the most notable & interesting actors. In that regard, the most "interesting" would easily be Soichiro Hoshi, in one of his earliest major roles, as Ryuzo... and it's simply because Hoshi didn't even bother to attempt a more feminine voice at all for "Ryu" throughout the entire show. In fact, Hoshi seems to use his more natural voice here, so Hoshi actually sounds a little deeper than the higher-pitched voice he tends to use for his most iconic roles, and yet literally no one in the school even questions whether or not "Ryu" is really a girl or not. Even when Ryuzo starts saying "Ore" more often in the latter half of the show (before always correcting himself to "Atashi") the most you get is Ryoko once going "Ore?" in response, but never truly realizing that her girl crush is actually a guy. It's honestly rather hilarious, especially since Ryuzo sleeps in the same dormitory as pretty much all of the girls, but at the same time it actually fits the "off" nature of the school & its denizens. Anyway, just as it was back with the OG radio show in 1997, Kaihei & Sister Akane are voiced by Tetsuya Iwanaga (Kensuke in Evangelion, Marik in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters) & Tomoko Ishimura/Mifuyu Hiiragi (Rumiya in Pretty Sammy, Mutsuki in Aoi & Mutsuki: A Pair of Queens), and both do very solid in the anime, which would make sense considering how long they had been voicing their characters by this point. The next notable performance, for me, would be Yuu Asakawa as Catherine, who plays a neat mix of seemingly aloof yet really cool that results in some fun moments with her, & does help showcase her development throughout the show as she opens up slightly to more people, especially Kaihei & Shizuku. Personally, Catherine was my favorite character in the show, & Asakawa's performance played a big role in that.
Then there's Mayumi Iizuka as Noriko, who does play up the generally upbeat & chipper little sister type, but not to the point of annoyance, & she gets moments in the latter half to show a little more range. Masako Katsuki also does a good job with Ms. Kouda, as while Kouda's not a "villain" by any means she's clearly the most antagonistic character when compared to Kaihei, & Katsuki does a fine job balancing things out by making her antagonistic, but not actually downright uncaring. Easily the most memorable of the "quirky" characters are Shanon & Yukine, and the duo of Yumi Takada & Ai Uchikawa absolutely nailed the generally offbeat vibe of those two characters, with Takada even giving Shanon a slight Kansai accent to push how she's not Japanese, due to how she said certain words & the like. Again, the amount of recurring characters in St. Luminous is rather gigantic, so I'll just finish up by mentioning that the rest of the notable cast include the likes of Asako Dodo (Ryoko), Chiharu Tezuka (Fumiko), Hiroko Konishi (Shizuku), Mariko Suzuki (Cher), Nami Miyahara (Irina), Yui Horie (Lita), Yuko Sumitono (Melina), Shiho Kikuchi (Asako), Showtaro Morikubo (Shotaro Kazami), Ai Orikasa (Kaihei's grandmother), & Rikako Aikawa (Moe), among others.
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| Granted, I think having this many girls around the male lead (plus his friend in drag) would make most harem shows blush. |
St. Luminous Mission High School was an anime that I was familiar with by name alone for the longest time, and that's really only because the name itself is so straightforward yet nondescriptive that it's almost bland. However, I did eventually hear about it being a bit of a mystery series starring a teenager who becomes the chairman of a school, so I at least knew something about it before going into this review. But it wasn't until I had to research more about it for my overview of 1998's late-night anime output earlier this year that I truly started to understand where it came from, and I have to admit that its history as a radio show-turned-radio-drama-turned-anime actually made me all the more curious to check it out for review. I had already long decided that it'd be one of the shows reviewed for my year-long celebration(?) of modern late-night anime's 30th Anniversary, but that was simply because I wanted to finally see what the show with the bizarrely generic & bland sounding name was actually like. Of course, the actual show itself was almost anything but generic & bland, what with its avoidance of almost every harem-style rom-com tradition that's become expected of a story where a young man finds himself surrounded by a bunch of young ladies, its focus on telling a supernatural mystery covered in themes of existentialism, & a soundtrack by half of Ali Project that's focused primarily on delivering a melancholic & ethereal mood more than anything. Had this come out only a year later I imagine it would have been radically different to fit a post-Love Hina harem rom-com world. There's even a bit of unintentional new reading to be found in the show, as Ryuzo eventually tells Kaihei that he's "gotten used to being a woman" & would still stay at St. Luminous if Kaihei was to resign as chairman. By the end of the last episode Ryuzo is seen as a guy again, so his development is not intended to be taken as a trans allegory... but that's what The Death of the Author is for, right?
Now, to be fair, I still wouldn't necessarily call St. Luminous a "hidden gem", or anything like that. By far, its slower pace will likely turn most people off (especially those more used to modern-day pacing), it's cast of girls may be a bit too quirky & weird by most modern trends (though, admittedly, they probably have more personality than some modern rom-com/harem girls), its animation isn't anything to write home about (though it honestly kind of tracks with most late-night anime of its era), & those who enjoy a good mystery will probably find it annoying that there's really no way for the viewer to truly figure things out for themselves before everything gets revealed in the final two episodes; you can certainly logic the cause of the disappearances, but not necessarily the how or why. Finally, there's no doubt that the show, as a whole, has more than a bit of an offbeat feel & nature to it, which when combined with the way it handles its storytelling would definitely annoy those who want something a bit more straight to the point. Still, there's definitely something interesting to St. Luminous Mission High School that I think manages to make it worth a watch if you like to go off the beaten path & explore the much lesser known reaches of the anime world, and much like how the school itself encourages its students to find their own way through life on its grounds it's an anime that should be allowed the freedom to go down its own path; as the viewer you're simply along for the ride it takes you on.
Anime © 1998 Kenji Terada・St. Luminous Mission High School Production Committee/NBCUniversal Entertainment/TV Tokyo
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