Aspirational cosmopolitanism in classical music anime: Adapting Romantic legacies in Forest of Piano

This article argues that anime about musicians specializing in western classical music offers a vehicle for questioning normative narratives that tend to exclude East Asian musicians from classical music culture beyond tertiary education. This article explores how the series Forest of Piano, the 2018 anime adaptation of Makoto Isshiki’s manga, utilizes competing Romantic models of genius to negotiate the protagonists’ positions as East Asian musicians on the global stage. In the series, the idea that the spirit of a piece is bound to the composer’s relationship to a specific place competes with the idea of a Romantic genius that channels the transcendent universal music of the world-soul from Nature.