Episode 3 – Sakuna: Rice and Ruins

Sakuna moves on, while our titular goddess and friends are still trying to figure out how to adjust to their new lives. Unfortunately for her, that’s easier said than done, as farming life turns out to be more challenging than she expected, and her new companions are of little help. Luckily for the show, this was the push it needed after a slow start in the first two episodes – and while it hasn’t won me over yet, it makes me more interested in where it’s going.

Sakuna learns that her and others’ only real chance of survival on the island is for her to learn how to harvest and cultivate the land herself. This leads Toemon to give Sakuna (and the audience) a lesson on the ins and outs of rice farming—from understanding how rice seeds germinate before being planted in the ground, to her difficult understanding of what exactly goes into manufacturing fertilizer. While the level of explanation here does come close to that of a game tutorial, it’s done naturally enough to overlook this, and, knowing very little about farming myself, it’s quite interesting to see just how much preparation goes into managing a rice field.

However, while Sakuna began to become more enthusiastic about farming, she was less enthusiastic about all the extra work it would bring her – since between farming and hunting, she was left to care for the group on her own. While Sakuna may still be a little too arrogant, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for her when Tao Meng is still too clumsy to help her work in the fields, and neither of them is able to eat a decent meal, Because Mills has been burning everything Sakuna hunts. Of course I felt slightly less sorry for her once I learned the fact that it takes a few years for the rice fields to become truly sustainable. Sakuna immediately tried to paddle off the island as fast as possible, only to turn around after she learned how rugged the rice fields were. Turn around. Even though it’s a terrible move, it’s still pretty funny. Now knowing there’s no way out for her, Saki has no choice but to put more faith in her new companions – who ultimately prove to have more talents than she ever imagined.

It turns out that although Toemon was not a farmer, he was an excellent negotiator and convinced the Ashun people on the island to let them use one of his fields. Meanwhile, Mills shows that while she’s not much of a cook, she at least knows how to preserve food, which means they’ll have something to sustain themselves in the long run. Even the children who would otherwise spend their time avoiding any real responsibility show that they have good craft skills by repairing Sakuna’s tools and making her a new hat. This doesn’t immediately solve their problem of working as a team, as they still bicker here and there, but they’ve reached their destination – the episode ends with them uniting over Tao Mong teaching them a song about rice farming Finish. It’s not the most exciting conflict, but seeing Sakuna and the others slowly sprouting up among the rice fields and potential makeshift families was better than I expected. At this point, it’s hard to say how much the show will gain from all of this, but there’s more potential for a good story here than the first two episodes left me with. So, with any luck, it will all lead to a good harvest.

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Sakuna: rice and ruins Currently streaming on Crunchyroll.