Summary:
A bus of preschoolers blows up, and one of the victims, Hikaru, used to come play at the orphanage. Her friend passes Ouri a drawing to place in Hikaru’s casket at the wake, but unfortunately Hikaru has turned into a shikabane. Makina stops by the wake to investigate, and is spotted by Ouri (whose coworkers appear to also know about shikabane). The initial battle doesn’t go that well for Makina and she gets a shikabane spine thrust into her belly.
Ouri is surprised to find Makina bleeding all over the place, but goes along with the Hikaru-shikabane. Hikaru leads Ouri to a playground with other shikabane from the accident and they all want to play. The three shikabane gattai and try to rip out Makina’s hair, but Ouri distracts them with the drawing from earlier. This allows Makina (with some help from Ruo Minai and that scratch-face monk who is not Honda) to kill the shikabane. Ouri is glad that Makina put the children to rest, but is still upset that the shikabane had to be killed.
Reaction:
I had mixed feelings about this episode, as I felt it was a little messy and confusing. I guess since Ouri doesn’t really know Makina very well he would trust Hikaru instead, but didn’t he find it odd that Makina had a gaping bloody hole in her abdomen? I am not sure I understand how all those kids were totally obsessed with going to the playground to the point where they became shikabane. Does that mean that pervy otaku who suddenly die also become shikabane because of their intense will to buy NSFW figurines and dakimakura?
I was disappointed to find that Ouri’s boss and coworker seem to be rival shikabane hunters who respect Keisei. It’s like everyone and the cat all know about shikabane. Only Ouri is kept in the dark so that Keisei won’t have to make his little adopted brother do unpleasant tasks. It will be interesting to actually see Keisei in action one day, since most of the time you just see him doing stupid stuff like mimicking gravure poses. I suspect that Minai is also a shikabane, since it seems like most monks travel with a shikabane girl to do all the dirty work.
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7 Comments
The three-part zombie looked like the baby-creature from the beginning of Shana for some reason but otherwise I really enjoyed this episode. A bit more info is tossed out and the atmospherics are still excellent – who wouldn’t be chilled to the bone after seeing a dead kid climb out of her coffin?!
The gags relating to figurines and porns mags break the mood a little, but otherwise this is solid stuff. I’m liking this a bit more than I expected actually.
I thought the part where Ouri looks into the sandbox and notices body parts sticking out was particularly good. It was a bit odd that he didn’t notice any of the dead people at the wake, though.
Exactly, that didn’t make any sense to me either. How could he just walk past all those dead bodies too. I mean the girl was dead and she came back alive. What’s the matter with you idiot! Little girls are always the villains in horror movies.
I have quips about our protagonist guy…just don’t like him on many levels.
Hopefully it’ll “get better” or “improve,” I’m inclined to say otherwise…
or rather, hopefully I’ll like it more.
Yeah, so far Ouri has not been much of a main character. As far as I can tell, hugs restore Makina’s HP, and so Ouri is nothing more than an extra med pack.
At least for the first volume of the manga (which is as far as I’ve seen of it = Dynasty has scanlated) he barely even shows up, and distinctly fails to get meaningfully involved in any funny corpsey business…
Somebody’s been monkeying around the scripting dept again, methinks. The marketing guys probably. Which would certainly explain quite a bit regarding why Ouri seems so bleh here.