AKA: 怪異と乙女と神隠し (Japanese), Kaii to Otome to Kamikakushi

Genre: Supernatural / comedy / drama

Length: Television series, 12 episodes, 24 minutes each

Distributor: Streaming on crunchyroll

Content Rating: 16+ (horror, sexual content)

Related Series: N/A

Also Recommended: Mushi-shi, Otherside Picnic

Notes: Based on the manga by Nujima, currently running in Shogakukan's seinen magazine Yawaraka Spirits.

Rating:

Mysterious Disappearances

Synopsis

Sumireko Ogawa wrote a hit novel at 15. But now at 28 she's living alone, working in a bookstore and wishing for the inspiration to write another one. But a coworker named Ren Adashino seems knowledgeable about curiosities (objects and entities with supernatural mojo), and this may open the door to some new story ideas (and some disturbing occurrences).

Review

Here we have a classic mixed bag of a show, which made me vacillate AGAIN between three and four stars.

We'll start with the fact that Sumireko herself is interestingly constructed. She's a rather large-framed woman, especially obvious in the opening titles, when she's standing next to the diminutive Ren. Her eyebrows are notable too; they are thick, but rounded and stubby (Ren calls them "caterpillar brows", but I thought they looked a lot like the way the animators drew Starfire's brows in [b]Teen Titans[/b]. Both redheads, too.) But of course Sumireko's most, uh, OUTSTANDING feature is her boobs. When she's lounging in her apartment she tends to wear a scanty top that makes them even more obvious. While in the OP we have a pan over her lying in bed, and since it's dimly lit we can't be SURE that they're bare, but that certainly seems likely. I've seen few shows that are THIS self-conscious about their own fanservice. (Another character remarks of Sumireko: "Her breasts scare me.")

And yet I LIKED Sumireko quite a bit. One interesting thing in this show is that when someone gets some magical ability from a Curiosity, they get to keep it even when the Curiosity is removed from their possession or destroyed, and Sumireko gets a particular ability early in the show. (This is the first magic spell I've ever seen that observes the Law of Conservation of Mass.) And it seems that another Curiosity had a big influence on Sumireko's past - and Sumireko might be able to get her to help with her current life as well. (Curiosities here can be objects or persons, and can be either good or evil, or maybe sometimes a bit of both.)

Sumireko's adolescent "hit" novel, by the way, was titled "Walk Alone, Like A Rhino's Horn", which is not only cryptic, but not exactly accurate (the horn not being alone, since it's attached to the rhino). Ren reads excerpts to his "sister", Oto, and they do, indeed, feature people (and other creatures) walking alone.

And that brings us to Oto, who Ren is supposedly sending "home" (wherever THAT is). Oto is cold to Sumireko (I guess that's jealousy; Ren obviously has some attraction to Sumireko - I'll get into THAT some more later). She consistently calls her by a sexist insult I'd never heard before for a single woman living alone; "Apartment Wife." She even has her listed that way in her phone's Caller List. Oto ALSO gets some employment as a fanservice object (which is bad, since she's underage) - LITERAL employment, because she ends up working in a maid cafe for a "client" named Shizuku Hayami (who wants Oto, Ren, and Sumireko to help her find out what happened to her friend). Oto, by the way, "sees" Curiosities as diamond-shaped warning signs, bearing a single large exclamation point.

Here, the supernatural manifestations are influenced by public beliefs about them. If two or more types of Curiosities get mixed up in the public mind, they BECOME this kind of mixed entity. Ren seems to know enough about Curiosities to determine which ones have gotten confused, and therefore what the characteristics of the new "composite" Curiosity likely are. Ren, however, can also be a bit of a pervert toward Sumireko, declaring at one point that he'd like to see her in a "cow-print" bikini. (well, YES, we know why you'd pick THAT motif for HER.)

We find out Ren's backstory, and Oto's as well, in the final episode; but I AM pondering exactly what Oto is supposed to be returning TO. (Can't say more.)

I gather from the crunchy readers familiar with the manga that an encounter with a cat-spirit was severely altered in the anime (and kind of made pointless, really), while the ending is also anime-only (and there's not much more of the manga story anyway), so we might not be seeing more of this one.

I didn't particularly like the show's salsa-style closing theme, but that's a matter of personal taste.

But as I said, I liked Sumireko quite a bit - huge breasts or not, she's an intelligent and compassionate woman. And the show's SO unusual that I finally gave in on the star rating. — Allen Moody

Recommended Audience: crunchy says age 16, for "sexualized imagery" and "supernatural horror." I won't contest that.