Reo and Mabu are partners who live and work in a police box in Asakusa. They keep the peace by arresting purse-snatchers, helping lost tourists, etc, typical police work. But now, after finding a baby left on the sidewalk, who they name Sara, it looks like they’ll now have to balance fatherhood with police work!
Kuniko Ikuhara works are always weird, that’s the name of the game. Ikuhara also likes to work with other creatives, both in shaping the anime in creating somewhat divergent alternatives in the forms of manga and light novel adaptations. The question of canonicity sometimes comes up in fan circles about these other pieces of media but usually the line is more clear-cut, like with how both the Revolutionary Girl Utena and Yuri Kuma Arashi manga are both known to be wildly different from the anime of the same names.
Sarazanmai: Reo and Mabu doesn’t contradict the story of the main Sarazanmai anime in events or tone per-say but, thinking about the timeline for Reo and Mabu’s story in the anime, I’m not sure how it can fit in without contradicting what we learn later in the anime. To be clear, I’m not ruling out the possibility that this unconnected, light-hearted slice of life story about two gay cops raising a baby they found on the street can’t be a part of the main timeline, I just think it’s unlikely (it’s much more likely that the mysterious twitter account created before the anime is canon). I also think it’s unlikely that newcomers to Sarazanmai are going to get much out of this story.
There is a beginning, middle, and end to this one-shot manga volume but not to the story of Reo, Mabu, and Sara. The characters are already set in their ways, although now that Reo and Mabu aren’t the villains we’re able to see more of their real personalities (which anime viewers would have guessed that Mabu would be the weirder one of this couple by a long shot?). Their daily lives at the police box they are stationed at are often silly, like when they go looking for cooking ingredients or have to juggle carrying a baby while chasing criminals. There aren’t stakes, there aren’t consequences, there aren’t even really answers besides “this is just how the situation is, roll with it.”
Sarazanmai: Reo and Mabu feels in some ways like a fluffy vacation from the darker tone of the anime, a vacation for both the fans and the characters. It doesn’t make for a bad vacation but I think it’s a story that I’m satisfied with having read only once, something I never say about an Ikuhara anime.