#231: Ghost Talker's Daydream (2004)

 

Studio: Hal Film Maker

Director: Osamu Sekita

Screenplay: Katsumasa Kanazawa and Kenichi Kanemaki

Based on the manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro

Voice Cast: Masumi Asano as Misaki Saiki; Tomokazu Sugita as Souichiro Kadotake; Yukari Tamura as Ai Kunugi; Daisuke Kishio as Mitsuru Fujiwara

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

This anime adaptation had always been one of interest for me because I was a fan of the source manga. Found discounted in a British bookstore, the source manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro, whose work was adapted into Twilight of the Dark Master (1997), an obscure Akiyuki Shinbo helmed horror OVA. It is also lurid, about an albino dominatrix named Saiki Misaki who, in-between her sex worker career which also includes writing for a porno magazine, is using her ability to see and communicate with ghosts to help a branch of the local government exorcise buildings and environments. The source manga is violent, sexually explicit and sleazy, and tackles subjects like sexual violence. It was also however a work which looked exceptional, with the illustrations by Meguro, and had managed to be the right side of lurid by being smarter, building a world whose images could be ghoulish as much as it played to sex comedy. Sadly, published by Dark Horse, they only got to volume six before the series was cancelled for English language release, never continued up past through the remaining four volumes, and managing to end on the worse cliff-hanger as well to emphasis this fact involving a haunted apartment complex.

It will not defend its lurid content and neither makes a good case for the manga to people, as ten minutes in it depicts a near rape, involving a younger sister of a murdered woman and her male murderer, only for the lead Saiki, in S&G gear which she uses in her exorcism work for ease, to barge in and deal with this. Neither will some appreciate the blending of light comedy (including sex comedy) against the grim subject matter, as the first episode, introducing that high school girl character Kunugi Ai, a main character for the source, also deals with the murder of her older sister and the death of her infant daughter in the same incident, their ghosts haunting the world as much due to a plush bear with audio recording technology within it has compromising material recorded onto it. The premise, in spite of its lurid content and seen in glimpses here through all four episodes, is a good one in terms of how, whilst her career choice was a salacious one, Saiki Misaki's career choice is a day job which is frustrating and a chore. Some of the best moments here in the adaptation deal with how all her jobs, never touching on her writing career, are a grind, with exorcists like her quietly hired by the Japanese government, or a local government branch in the city, to deal with hauntings of public buildings and apartments as contract work, which is a fascinating premise to have just in envisioning this like a public service sector role. Even that the third and fourth episodes include a female sceptic, a cop in a certain case Saiki accidentally gets involved with, is contrasted in that this a job which is not spectacular even if the risks are dangerous.

The only unnatural aspect, never really elaborated on in the anime, is that she has a demonic rope, living, which co-exists around her body if pushed, but it feels neglected in this adaptation. Everything else in contrast is the banal struggles of being a working dominatrix or having to put up with annoying promotional work for her company like giving used underwear as a prize. It is lurid, but this banality is playfully absurd. This anime adaption, despite coming midway into the manga's run, feels like a slither of it which is also a handicap, especially as the four episodes are usual television episode lengths of under thirty minutes, which means none of the wider plot the manga was building up between episodic tales is seen, only two episodic tales and a final one taking two episodes. The anime is an adult work as its source, with explicit nudity and lot of sex comedy in-between the more macabre content, which was as much the reason this was released. Aspects from the source material are dumb and weird if anyone was to view this, like the running joke about pubic hair which is a source (or source lack of) of embarrassment for Saiki, and in the source manga there was the fact, though one which could be a compelling piece of drama, in that she is a virgin yet managed in this career alongside exorcisms. 

Like the source material never being fully released, it is a shame as inherently the show has an advantage for an episodic horror work of having a strong set of leads. Saiki herself, in spite of all mentioned, and that the manga and the anime are thirsty for her physically, is a great lead character to work with as, gimmicks aside, it is a young working woman who complains and is frank about this, stuck in a regular job which she is good at but sucks at times, or that she technically has a stalker, high school student Fujiwara Mitsuru, whose gag as a stalker may be far more tasteless nowadays, but comes off as a mere annoyance to her, one who is actually helpful in many times just in this adaptation, as well as coming off more as a frenemy for her especially in the manga. Kadotake Souichirou, the person connected to the exorcism business, is a great male lead - a scaredy-cat when it comes to ghosts, a meek and clumsy bespectacled employee and driver, but a killer in martial arts - and Kunugi Ai, when she comes in, is an idiosyncratic side character, developing her own ability to see ghosts and an eccentricity, as she carries a giant plush teddy bear with her everywhere called Popo. In the manga you had time to built this motley bunch and, one of the huge virtues of the manga was that, alongside these characters, it managed to avoid becoming offensive with some of its more lurid content and, when it wanted to be macabre and transgressive, it had the huge advantage of its illustrator Sankichi Meguro pulling the sequences off on paper perfectly.

The obvious issue is that, alongside being merely a slither of the premise, more a work to sell the source material, this is also an OVA in the post hand drawn era when the format was losing favour, so one of the hugest virtues for Saki Okuse's source manga, Sankichi Meguro, is lost as this has a very flat look.  Hal Film Maker, the studio behind this, managed some good work at this time in spite of this transitionary period - Princess Tutu (2002-3), so different to this as a sweet ballet fantasy TV series, had a distinct art style even if working around its budget, and Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan (2005), despite its stereotypical "anime" style, is not known for this, both for how gleefully perverse its premise is but also how visually the jokes, including an angel girl whose bludgeoning club does obliterate the male lead's cranium to mush as much as resurrects him, took advantage of its bright cute colours and style. Ghost Talker's Daydream does not have a memorable style, and a distinct thing for Sankichi Meguro's artwork in the manga was that black, not only in terms of a lot of night time scenes but even black outlines and detail regardless of the time a moment takes place in, is one of the first things I think of for the manga, whilst this has a brighter washed out look. Alongside that, tonal changes between the serious and humorous, and all the kinkiness, within the manga has a more concise tonal balance even if it is that manga, as pages to read, can pace itself differently and nothing else.

This is definitely the case that, for episodes three and four, this is dealing with a series of child disappearances which were clearly eventual murders, with the added complication that the person behind the crimes was a woman who was raped by her uncle, the anime carefully dancing around this even though it could be argued as purely exploitative. This is where I still hold the manga, again, having managed a daft hand, or the right tonal mood in its rich aesthetic and tone, around this, even if this is entirely of a personal opinion and can alter as I return to the source over and over This shows, like a lot of anime, that the blurring between comedy and extreme content is more common than you think, but this has the additional issue that, looking very light in colour and style, not heavy in aesthetic stylisation, the anime adaptation loses an advantage to its arsenal in being able to stand out and even get this balance between these two drastically different sides right.

It had virtues, and if biases from the admiration of the manga's virtues are here also, I will not deny that this is more a curiosity. As someone who wished as many titles were preserved, I would always be biased to have even an obscure title like this still be available, even if contrary to my initial beliefs, this did manage to get a Western release as there is an English language soundtrack. It unfortunately was a Geneon release, Geneon USA a side division of the Japanese Geneon group which, starting in 1993, closed in 2007, a DVD distributor that was entirely in the United States and, for many titles which were licensed rescued later also saw others, like Ghost Talker's Daydream, trapped in the afterlife never being recovered from it. The manga especially, whilst with content that might be difficult to defend, feels a greater tragedy just from never getting finished, falling into obscurity, to be found in cheap discounted copies on sale in bookstores and online as I stumbled onto the work. Manga especially has so many titles which never get finished for their English publications over the decades, which is miserable for anyone who was following them and collecting the volumes, a painful remainder of the business side of this art form.

#230: Hell Teacher Nube: Summer Holiday of Fear! Legend of the Sea of Suspicion (1997)

 

Studio: Toei Animation

Director: Junji Shimizu

Screenplay: Yoshiyuki Suga

Based on the manga by Shō Makura and illustrated by Takeshi Okano

Voice Cast: Emi Uwagawa as Shizuka; Kazunari Tanaka as Katsuya; Machiko Toyoshima as Noriko; Masaya Takahashi as Kisaki; Maya Okamoto as Nagisa; Megumi Urawa as Makoto; Michiko Neya as Ritsuko-sensei; Miina Tominaga as Miki Hosokawa; Rumi Kasahara as Kyoko Inaba; Ryotaro Okiayu as Nube; Takayuki Inoue as Kiyoshi Horie; Toshiko Fujita as Hiroshi Tachino; Yoshiyuki Kouno as Kainanhoushi; Yuri Shiratori as Yukime

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Hell Teacher Nube is a franchise I had never heard of, yet it has a full thirty one volume manga, penned between 1993 to 1999, has a forty nine episode animated series, an OVA series and three films, including this one, though this is a short film, closer to a “special” in only being forty minutes long. It is though a Weekly Shōnen Jump title, which argues why it managed to be adapted as much as it was, one from the nineties which clearly did not cross over into the West or missed the chance to. By the late nineties, Weekly Shōnen Jump, arguably the biggest of the publications for manga if at least one of them, would get Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece (which started in 1997 and was still going into 2022) and Naruto, so it feels that among the titles which became popular hits for the publication, Nube just missed the boat when more Shonen titles, including Shonen Jump itself, were commodities into the West as big selling titles to promote.

This special, produced by Toei, is not an inherently great work, a forty minute “special” in the sense that it has the main characters are in a scenario, for a big spoiler, where they are not going to be in trouble, and the character specifically for this special, who never returns, is the one with the emotional trajectory. The special is a concept which is especially common for Shonen Jump titles, including full length theatrical films, but they are a type of adaptation which can still succeed. This one, even as likely a minor piece of the Hell Teacher Nube franchise, was a great way to be introduced to these characters.

The titular Nube, one of a group of teachers who, when the series started, was a fifth grade teacher for Dōmori Elementary, teaching students normally but with a demon left hand kept gloved and having to fight demonic forces to protect his students. It is a premise in itself, just as someone who likes “occult detective” stories, or narratives about supernatural figures having to deal with supernatural entities each episode, which appeals just to imagine instead “occult teacher” in this case. The opening song to this special was as much a win for the show catching my attention, the female vocal song that is jaunty yet have double kick drum percussion, which is awesome and feels like a thrash metal song, a symphonic rock song, choral backing vocals and J-pop ended up in a blender. Perfect for a tale where, going on summer vacation as a class, the class make the ill-advised decision to go where there is a nearby island shaped like a spider nearby which is cursed, one of the male students spotting what he swears is a nude girl on the rock who will become important, the special’s character of importance connected to the curse of the spider island. Considering that spider island is said by a local to have spiders with human faces that turn into demons after 200 and eat flesh, this was a bad vacation choice for everyone.

The cast of main characters, barely glimpsed include a few archetypes. Ritsuko the female teacher Nube is smitten with, the trope (if here amusing) of the lame male teacher who is horny but will be reliable in the end; Yukime, a yuki-onna who became attracted to Nūbē and followed him; and a motley crew of students, the two who immediately stood out of note being Kyoko, the “tsundere” of the class who punches any male who is a pervert (and has access to hammer space in finding mallets) and Miki, who immediately won me over in her tiny little part in the special as, for her introduction, she breaks the fourth wall, aware of the audience and flirting with them out of jealously that one of the other girls in her class is cuter than her. As a result of this, yes, there is a bit of cheesy fan service here, but the few jokes here managed to land, even the fact that Yukime, alongside sunbathing on a block of ice, is in danger of having the sun melt her figure off.

There is not a lot to the special beyond this, except that this mysterious girl is tragically connected to those aforementioned demon spiders. Again, this is a slight story, though it is to the credit to this production, and tantalizing to explore the other animated adaptations of the franchise, this has a creepy and compelling aesthetic to it - hands coming out the sea on mass; a variety of demons in gristly forms; and another in a lone of animating a person turning into a giant spider. Even when it switches to comedy, this is played to such as the unfortunate moment of someone turning their head giant and swallowing the hero up. The people involved on this production would cut their teeth on such Shonen productions, so this feels like a continuation of a type of anime they would feel comfortable with and creating over the decades before and after, used to working with these big titles with big expectations to their animated adaptation – Toei Animation were knee deep in Dragonball titles alone; director Junji Shimizu would move onto One Piece animation, and screenwriter Yoshiyuki Suga was a veteran to penning for these ultra popular franchises with Captain Tsubasa, Hunter X Hunter, Saint Seiya, Slam Dunk and One Piece titles in his career.

Junji Shimizu and Yoshiyuki Suga worked on other Hell Teacher Nube anime, and so they would have gotten these characters over multi adaptations. Again, I suspect this is a minor inclusion in this franchise, but it was a perfect introduction for me, so it worked fully.

#229: Nightwalker - The Midnight Detective (1998)

Studio: AIC (Anime International Company)

Director: Kiyotoshi Sasano and Yutaka Kagawa

Screenplay: Genki Yoshimura, Ryota Yamaguchi and Toji Gobu

Voice Cast: Takumi Yamazaki as Shido Tatsuhiko; Emi Shinohara as Yayoi Matsunaga; Maaya Sakamoto as Riho Yamazaki; Ai Uchikawa as Asami Akiba; Akira Ishida as Shunichi; Ayumi Kida as Miharu; Chiemi Chiba as Yuki; Eiji Maruyama as Shuzo Akiba; Hideyuki Tanaka as Cain

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

[Major Spoilers Throughout]

Always a title I wished to get to, Nightwalker is especially a case of my tastes winning over some clear flaws with this thirteen episode horror show. It is also a curious chimera as, for four episodes, it is visibly clear this could have been a straight-to-video production if there was no success getting a television deal, a literal line between when it could have been and that which became the series, both in the look in little details of the show and having two different directors. It was also adapted from a video game for the PC-9801 personal computer in 1993, an eroge (“erotic”) production which should not be a dismissal as a surprising number of titles for anime are adapted from erotic sources which strip the eroticism out from them. Type-Moon, the creators of the Fate/Zero franchise, originally created it as an erotic visual novel game, only to adapt it into a multi-part work with a huge fan base, so they are a great example of this what Nightwalker attempted to do in the late 1990s, reaching a wider potential of fan base.

Nightwalker is an occult detective story, in this case a vampire named Shido Tatsuhiko who, centuries old, deals with forms called “nightbreeds“ who try to possess human beings’ bodies, such as one possessing an actress, promising talent to her in favour of a craving for flesh, local pets insufficient eventually for the victim of this Faustian pact in that episode. With him are Yayoi Matsunaga, a female agent for an anti-night breed group who is his willing blood donor, as an honourable vampire who does not attack humans and because, in her own back-story episode, she crossed paths with Shido and has a debt to him for emotional baggage. There is Guni, a sardonic demon fairy creature, their Greek chorus, who just appeared when he caught the boat to the city, and Riho Yamazaki, high school girl who, after a tragedy with her family he was involved with dealing with, is hired as a maid and coffee maker for his office. She is why there has to be a spoiler warning ahead, as the show is split between when she is mortal, and when she becomes a vampire when fate forces the hands of those involved.

The first four episodes begin as if this is like other occult detective/warrior/mystic anime I have seen, where it is a series of episodic tales of dealing with monsters and the dark forces where Shido has the advantage of being a vampire, including the ability to use his own blood as weaponry. Where it is clear there was a contingency plan, or this was a show that could have been extended for the television series, is that there is visible differences in things as simple (even compared to the opening credits) in the characters’ hair colour and small touches. More pronounced is that, for the final two episodes of this section, this show significantly becomes more adult suddenly. The antagonist for the franchise is Cain, a vampire who turned Shido, explicitly playing to them as lovers in a former life. The arch is quick to finish, but suddenly there is an escalation in eroticism with actual nudity, and in terms of the violence, becoming closer to an actual straight-to-video release in terms of some gore involved even if entirely of blood. If a significant change transpired in the creation of the series, which was jettisoned midway through the production, note as mentioned that there are two directors. Neither have considerable directing credits. Yutaka Kagawa is more a prolific story boarder, only really directing a few things such as Wonder Momo (2014), a bizarre Namco Bandai original net animation promotion for rebooting their old game catalogue through Western developed web comics and animation, which they just dropped a month after Wonder Momo's animated premiere. Kiyotoshi Sasano only has this and Legend of Basara (1998) credited to them on Anime News Network¹, which is a strange thing to see, causing one to speculate who they were and how they got involved twice in the industry in pretty significant roles on a production.

The first four episodes could have been an ending – as it does led to the fact that Riho is turned into a vampire when caught in the crossfire – if slight. What we get afterwards could be argued, to be honest, to be a drop in quality as it becomes a very conventional horror show. Like the Vampire Princess Miyu's 1997-8 TV series, this is a series of episodic monster tales driven by their mood, in that these slight episodes do not have enough time to really draw them out and relay on the tone of the series and its cast to flesh them out. Some of the episodes are good even in these twenty plus minute narratives. One is the moral implications when a nightbreed is a child. One involves Shido finding himself stuck in a well with a child and a demon, and another tells Yayoi's story, one of two female twins in an emotionally stark relationship when one was disfigured in a fire in their childhood. The best episode plays as a gleefully macabre tale where a family decide to bump off the patriarch of their family for his money, only for the body to have started wandering around town now possessed by a nightbreed, leading them to become paranoia as Shido and his team finds themselves abruptly involved, all because he and Riho were shopping and had the china tea set they were purchasing broken in a moment of pure chance.

Some of the content is fleshing out these main characters, including the moral implications of Riho's life, now having to severe her ties to her school friends and accepting her new life as it stands. This includes the final episode, which commits a sin found even in Western live action television of how it imagines the worse circumstances for Shido - in which Riho turns evil out of anger of her existence, attacking mortals, and eventually managing to kill everyone around Shido - before it turns out to be a dream. It is a cheap ending twist, but in this case, I can leave it as a guilty pass, in that it turns out to be the anxieties of Shido being fed upon, a slither of this throughout his characterization of his past being one dominated by lost family, an ill advised attempt to bring family to life, and trying to amend his sins. Here it least makes sense even if contrived, and at least leaves the show on a memorable moment.

A lot of the show is instead carried by its mood, both as a late nineties hand drawn series and in deliberate touches. The music is a great example of this. The opening song, an existing one, is Gessekai by BUCK-TICK, a band who started in the eighties and was clearly going through a creative metamorphosis at this point, their albums in the mid to late nineties as a Visual Kei band experimenting with electronica and industrial music in sounds like this, an appropriately moody and gothic song to start the show. The soundtrack by Akifumi Tada, throughout the series, descends into progressive jazz rock at times, like a seventies LP is about to break out, which is a curious if inspired choice for a horror show.

In terms of horror anime, this is not one of the significant ones from even that time, but I am glad to have seen it. A lot of the appreciation for me is from its style, the late nineties animated television screening after midnight on Japanese television, all purple and blacks and dark colours, mostly set at night, and with the monster designs all unconventional. For all its flaws, simply because it never gets a chance to expand and develop a greater weight, there was more than enough for me to enjoy.

=====

1) Kiyotoshi Sasano's Anime News Network biography.

#228: Darkness of the Sea, Shadow of the Moon (1989)

 

Studio: Visual 80

Director: Tetsu Dezaki

Screenplay: Koichi Mizuide and Sōji Yoshikawa

Voice Cast: Mayumi Shō as Lumi Kobayakawa; Rei Sakuma as Luka Kobayakawa; Toshihiko Seki as Katsuyuki Tohma; Ryusei Nakao as Mr. Kobayakawa; Seiko Nakano as Mrs. Kobayakawa; Tesshō Genda as Doctor Kaibara

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

I had never heard of Darkness of the Sea... until searching for horror anime, but this three part OVA is tantalising when you begin it. It is a shoujo story, a story of young women which combines romance against horror and over-the-top melodrama, all directed by Tetsu Dezaki, Osamu Dezaki's brother who can be credited for helming They Were Eleven (1986), a great sci-fi story from a legendary female manga author Moto Hagio, but also Mad Bull 34 (1990-2), the infamous and at times difficult to watch Kazuo Koike tale about New York City cops with all the ridiculous clichés and distortions you could imagine. Darkness of the Sea... starts off over the top in its own way when twin sisters Rumi and Ruki, already in a romantic triangle over Touma, the popular boy at school, go on an all-girl's trip to the coast with their school. Tragically, during a storm, they find a secret grave mass in the caves, and with everyone baring the sisters being killed by a strange air to the underground environment.

Ruki survives, but Rumi is distant, and now part of the only surviving girls of the sports team due to the horrible tragedy, the three remaining girls have to train with the boys. The third girl will die soon after, as Darkness of the Sea... does waste time with its plot, in which Rumi is now a psychic supernatural being, able in later episodes to infect people and turn them into her slaves, wishing to kill anyone who gets in the way to her and Touma. Even her own sister Ruki, the most melodramatic of sisterly rivalries possible transpiring as the core of the premise, whether it is trying to throw her off a floor on the emergency stairway, or turning their parents into brainwashed ghouls to do the job.

It is sad Ruki is an ineffectual protagonist, despite the inklings that she has supernatural powers too, even in mind that it befits that she is an ordinary person caught up in the most nightmarish of sibling rivalry, "Tutankhamen's Curse" a key reference to the plot exposition, referring to when in 1922 the British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, those involved having mysterious deaths afterwards helping a legend of a curse transpire. Most of the time, Touma is the one who has to save her, which is a shame even if the point that, helpless, she is (baring the unnatural ability now to float) a bystander in trouble, arguably the best protagonist for a viewer to be in the shoes of. Largely the repetition of Rumi's attempts to kill her over the three episodes is the biggest cause of this issue.

Truthfully, there are many silly aspects to the show, and so much of it, even in mind to what I have said as criticisms, does not detract from how entertaining this became. The real problem becomes that, even at three episodes, this sadly ends abruptly when it starts to reach a new melodramatic point. By the time the story ends, where the sisterly tragedy is greater, people have died, and Ruki is starting to fight back, only to not have a follow up, feels like a gut punch of the most abrupt kind as this became a rewarding film to watch. This is a shame as this, even when logic starts to fall away, is delightfully over-the-top and macabre. It also befits as a story with a romantic edge, as it is about a female protagonist, who is stuck in a nightmare, yet in a scenario intermingling her growing confidence, as she and Touma start to come closer as people, her own sister the threat adding to the symbolic drama. There is one dubious moment, where Touma briefly comes off as non consensual in the gym closet in terms of getting more intimate with Ruki, which is the one sour point, but most of this is the right kind of melodrama, even when someone stays almost comically stoic in spite of their parents just being killed, the exaggerated tone appealing.

Even the aesthetic tone of the show befits this, the contrast between its character designs, by Setsuko Shibuichi, prolific in the industry from key animator to director on titles from The Rose of Versailles (1979) to Space Adventure Cobra (1982), befit a romantic show in the characters' elegance but contrasted by the macabre (and openly gory) incidents that transpire, to even the countless demonic faces Rumi has trying to off her sister. The sense this was even one episode off a full narrative does suck, more so as, even as pure pulp, it does stand out as a delightful surprise, as obscure as you could get for an animated title. Like a grotesque fantasy tale, even its opening credits are more fantastical, with its echoing of the sisters being nautical entities, and its title (depending on how you translate it) was absolutely one of the reasons I picked it out due to how evocative it is. There is pure cheese, like explaining overtly supernatural powers to ancient bacterial mutation, but that befits the tone as well. As something with no context, this hit with the right impact, only making its obscurity sadder. A Bandai production, at least with their involvement, one can only hope that it is preserved somehow as this, even without the ending it should have had, stands out.

#227: Blood Reign: Curse of the Yoma (1989)

 

Studio: J.C. Staff

Director: Takashi Anno

Screenplay: Shou Aikawa

Based on the manga by Kei Kusunoki

Voice Cast: Kenyuu Horiuchi as Hikage; Hiromi Tsuru as Aya #1; Kaneto Shiozawa as Marou; Miina Tominaga as Aya #2; Banjou Ginga as Brawny Koga; Eiji Maruyama as Old Bonze; Hideyuki Tanaka as Kazami; Jūrōta Kosugi as Majuumi no Miko / Shiranui; Kazumi Tanaka as Chain-Wielding Koga; Kōzō Shioya as Shiratsuyu

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Among many straight-to-video productions made in the eighties, Blood Reign is set in the 16th century, marked by the fact, as in real life, Oda Nobunaga, a legendary figure in Japanese history who would eventually be mythologized and demonised in pulp stories, is alive and trying to unify the country through bloody conflict. Set within this period, Blood Reign stands out with interest for me that its source material, a one shot manga, is penned and illustrated by a female author Kei Kusunoki, someone I am immediately interested in after this adaptation, if sadly with very little of her work translated into English. "Kei Kusunoki" her pen name, born Mayumi Ōhashi, her work varies between drama, comedy and horror, to which, prolific decades on, from Blood Reign's 1985-6 manga, this would not be the last time the later titles were adapted to anime, as Ogre Slayer (1994-5) now stands out with great interest. If this has any of the semblance of her touches in the adaption, than she is an interesting figure I wish was more readily available. As much of this is knowing Shou Aikawa is penning the scripts; unlike his more notorious work from this era, like Urotsukidôji, this whilst a very violence and ghoulish horror tale feels much more melancholic and moody in tone, given flaws in the plotting that will have to be brought up.

In context of its real historical setting, a ninja clan member Hikage has to kill his childhood friend and fellow ninja Marou on behest of the clan. Their master, in the midst of the bloody conflict, is killed and, wishing to hid this knowledge from the outside world for least three years, Marou has to be killed by their seniors, as he has fled and will be able to spread this knowledge if he so wishes. There are far bigger concerns though, as demons were involved with their master's death, and if the rival Iga clan ninja were already a problem for Hikage, worse is to be dealt with in that Marou is connected to monsters and demons lurking. Marou, it turns out, was "born of the ground", not specified if this meant he was born of a mother already buried in the grave, or literally from the underworld and the soil, but his form is of demonic origins, and he is being protected by monsters wishing to help his rebirth into a demon leader to lead an invasion of the human world.

Blood Reign's source manga was for Ribon Original, a shoujo manga magazine, which means it was targeted for adolescent girls and young woman. It very much undercuts any gender stereotyping as, if this anime production faithfully reproduced the source material, that manga was as sombre as this two part OVA was, alongside the fact for this J.C. Staff production, they embraced its phantasmagorical period horror aesthetic. It is insanely violent and morbid when it desires to be, if slanted in a moodiness contrasting other violent anime of any genre from the time period. The first episode sets this up, set around Hikage tracking Marou down to a strange inn, in the middle of nowhere, where lost souls gather to get drunk, a place where Aya will cross Hikage's life, one of two women with the same name he will encounter like fate. A woman with a facial disfigurement he comes close to, this chapter unfortunately comes to a doomed narrative as the place is a location  a spider demon was drawing the suicidal towards the area, those in that state for them suitable candidates, giving a little happiness, to feed on and feed to others.

Episode two escalates the danger as Marou, fully demonic and acquiring demon henchmen, intends to conquer the land. There is also Aya, a female ninja now without clan who starts to fall for Hikage as he now has to stop Marou for greater concerns. Blood Reign, almost feature long, does suffer from the fact the narrative feels slight even if by ten to twenty minutes, a work which could have had an additional episode, if was possible with the source material, and felt fully fleshed out. There is not enough here to stretch into a series, but this feels slighter here than needed to get the most from the content. What helps against it is being a good horror piece, one which contrasts its real nasty violence and body horror, such as a spider monster turning from human form or being able to dismember people with one leg, contrasted with its evocative supernatural aesthetic. This shows the virtue of anime in depicting a variety of genres in its inherently heightened form, horror's unnatural side found fully played even here. There are monstrous butterfly women, giant snake demons, talking tree faces, and processions of the dead wandering abandoned villages in the middle of the night.

There is also a demon thunder horse named Majuni, who rules the sea, talks and laps human blood of those who he tramples on, so Blood Reign also interests, without exoticising the content, as an inherently Japanese work in its setting context and the subjects of its narrative, adding something different. The drama feels the slightest of the work, which is why this could have done with a longer length, such as how the two Aya are slight, the second coming off mostly as a woman in peril, or that Marou and Hikage's relationship, clearly the tragedy it plays up to, should have been allowed to have been fleshed out. (A random female ghost, connected to Marou sacrificing his humanity earlier before the narrative, is so slight as a major plot thread to that is shows Blood Reign needed a little bit longer in terms of narrative to have told itself.) Everything else about the production however, barring that the rock guitar and synth are definitely not period appropriate in action scenes, is eerie even when a ninja action work at times, with a very distinct aesthetic style even in use of colour. It is one of the many fascinating obscurities of this era, released by ADV Films in the VHS and DVD era, but forgotten and lost since then. For its storytelling issues, this is shame considering the many virtues within the time it has.

Bonus #15: Boogiepop and Others (2000)

 

Director: Ryu Kaneda

Screenplay: Sadayuki Murai

Based on the light novel series by Kouhei Kadono

Cast: Sayaka Yoshino as Tôka Miyashita / Boogiepop; Maya Kurosu as Nagi Kirima; Daijirô Kawaoka as Keiji Takeda; Ayana Sakai as Minako Yurihara / Manticore; Asumi Miwa as Naoko Kamikishiro; Mami Shimizu as Kazuko Suema; Kai Hirohashi as Kei Shinkoku; Tetsu Sawaki as Akio Kimura; Hassei Takano as Saotome Masami; Hideyuki Kasahara as Shirô Tanaka

Live Action Adaptation

 

This is not the 2019 animated series by studio Madhouse being covered, but a live action adaptation of the first Boogiepop light novel released the same year as the first ever animated adaptation, Boogiepop Phantom (2000). It offers an interesting layer in explaining Boogiepop as a franchise, in that it is a deeply unconventional story in terms of lore but also in its storytelling in just the adaptations themselves, all of them unconventional even if the 2019 anime series is the most cognizant and does heavy lifting in explaining the lore to its basics.

The live action tale is aptly a puzzle box as much as Boogiepop Phantom, immediately disarming in how it has jazz cocktail piano music set to images such as a high school girl seductively licking the eyeball of another girl who is clearly dead. It is one of a few abrupt fragments we see in the prologue, in this Toei Video co-production, introducing all the students we will follow, as this film is told out of order, told in fragments over a timeline in different chronology to how they actually played out. It is, thankfully, fleshed out fully in the end with only certain passages not seen until the end of the film itself, with interlude segments in-between which add additional context. Screenwriter Sadayuki Murai, whilst working in live action here, is predominantly a screenwriter for animation, including for Boogiepop Phantom. He also penned Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue (1997) and Millennium Actress (2001), so he is someone I have immense respect for, his craft on hand here in making sure this all makes sense in the end whilst taking a huge risk in depicting this tale in this idiosyncratic method of non-chronological storytelling.

This is also where the logic of Boogiepop is curious, just attempting it like any anime/light novel into live action as the Boogiepop costume alone, the titular figure a mysterious form who shares a body with a highschool girl named Tôka Miyashita (Sayaka Yoshino), looks really strange in the middle of a school or ordinary urban Japan at the time, looking like a Dune planet traveller is striking purple. Boogiepop, an urban legend presumed to kill people, is actually there to protect people from unearthly forms actually responsible for this, co-existing as separate entities in one body, and in terms of the tale being told, it tells the chapter in the 2019 anime which made up episodes one to three, Boogiepop Does Not Laugh. In this tale, there is a "manticore" disguised as a school girl, devouring the brains of fellow female classmates and whose tears, with an assitant, are being peddled as a mind sapping drug to bring more victims to her. There is the boy who loves Tôka who has to contend with how she is unaware of Boogiepop, and there is a girl who has found "Echoes", an alien entity in a human body connected to the manticore but is a form of good against them. And then there is Nagi Krima (Maya Kurosu), whose depiction here I loved. She is the other character of importance just in the Boogiepop adaptations alone - the daughter of a murdered novelist who, learning of the unnatural entities around her and Boogiepop, brings technology and her own martial arts skill to compensate for being a mortal young woman. This version as played by Maya Kurosu, as a short haired tomboy breaking students' arms, is a really cool one that sadly never was followed with and only has a short part to this narrative, one of the issues inherently with adapting merely a piece of this franchise when the series can expand on the character.

Telling a short piece of the source material, it is curious to see this version, which does have the limitations of a lower budget and the limitations of live action, stripping away some of the context and lore to its most practical version to adapt. Boogiepop is odd as a premise anyway, a sci-fi laced work with its horror touches and its esoteric world of artificial people, alien forms and monstrous entities picking on mortals. Boogiepop and Others, the 2019 version is the most conventional version as it is a series of four different stories like an anthology, whilst this live action version, because it shares a same screenwriter, is as esoteric as Boogiepop Phantom in how it plays out, which is a really unconventional experience even in context of this era's Japanese genre and horror films from the time. I have had ambivalence on all the lore, even as someone who admires all three adaptations as their own franchise without the source material, coming entirely from finding the 2000 Boogiepop Phantom an opaque and difficult anime in my youth, fully appreciating it now knowing it was a sequel novel adaptation which barely explains its world, becoming something abstract as a result and compelling as a result. It was also one where the real meat came from how the stories, no matter how unnatural, came from human behaviour, such as a plot line of someone who causes people to escape as their inner children, abandoning their adult selves as living husks in the normal world. Boogiepop Phantom out of all three also has the most distinct and incredible aesthetic and mood, but this live action interpretation glances at many of the franchise's virtues, including in how all these stories still connect to human folly and behaviour, slightly glanced over here with the subplot about the drug being taken for escape by students.

This does thankfully create its own atmosphere even in its own way. The urban Japan of this era of horror movies, especially the lower budget ones, has always compelling for me, more so in the case of this premise which, baring CGI which was aged back then, is having to work around its very unconventional content in the confines of what could be done practically and with the budget. It feels more compelling as horror and genre cinema that, hidden among the Japanese classrooms and in darkened alleyways, these strange visitors and incidents are transpiring, which you do not really see from lower budgeted North American films from the era unless with the lowest of budgets, always feeling restricted in their own confined sets as a result. Also the music, by composer Yuki Kajiura, is just as idiosyncratic as the two animated productions - not only does this have Boogiepop Phantom's opening theme at the end, sultry male vocal lounge music, but the smooth jazz score is delightfully unconventional, proto vaporwave, like the purple hue some scenes have.

Arguably this is the weakest of the three versions, even if the simplest of reasons that the others have longer to expand and shift with their narratives, whilst this has the time to tell just one of these tales. It is however a fascinatingly curious twist to low budget Japanese horror cinema from this era, even without the context of being an adaptation of a light novel, for how esoteric and unconventional the tropes of science fiction and horror are used within it. Able to see this, it is also the one adaptation of a source that became famous with its animated adaptations that managed to not come off as a compromised version. It struggles and it has to minimalize the more out-there aspects of the source work, but it manages to succeed in its own way to adapt the material, which is an achievement in itself.

#226: Gregory Horror Show (1999-2000)

 

Studio: Milky Cartoon

Director: Kazumi Minagawa

Screenplay: Naomi Iwata

Based on an original premise by Naomi Iwata

Voice Cast:

Japanese Cast:

Chafurin as Gregory; Ayana Inoue as Nurse Catherine (1st Voice); Minako Ichiki as Nurse Catherine (2nd Voice); Nao Nagasawa as Neko-Zombie; Rei Sakuma as Angel Dog/Devil Dog; Yoko Asada as Roulette Boy; Erina Yamazaki as James; Hitoshi Takagi as Mummy Papa; Jin Yamanoi as Clock Master; Maiko Itou as My Son; Masashi Hirose as Death; Mikako Satō as Cactus Girl; Naochika Hayashida as Judgement Boy (1st Voice); Naoko Matsui as Lost Doll; Natsumi Sakuma as Mummy Dog; Ryūzaburō Ōtomo as Hell's Chef; Susumu Chiba as Judgement Boy (3rd Voice); Yoshiyuki Kouno as Cactus Gunman/Judgement Boy (2nd Voice)

English Cast:

Dave Pettitt as Gregory; Chris Simms as Angel/Devil Dog; Elinor Holt as Nurse Catherine; Kris Rundle as Neko-Zombie; Mariette Sluyter as Roulette Boy; Steve Olson as Judgement Boy Gold; Angie Beers as Lost Doll; Brendan Hunter as Judgement Boy; Brett Bauer as James; Byron Close as Hell's Chef; Carol-Anne Day as Cactus Girl / Lost Doll ; Gerald Matthews as Black Duck 1 / Bonsai Kabuki; Jonathan Love as Clock Master / Mummy Papa / The First Main Guest; Keith Hamill as Egypetit / Fat Chicken

Viewed in English Dub

 

Do you know who I am, they call me Judgement Boy!

Gregory Horror Show, when I first of the franchise, was merely a fascinating video game which I never got around to, only to realise a time later it was a tie-in. Ironically it is this game, a Playstation 2 survival horror game, released only in Europe and Japan, which is the first on internet searches prominently, gaining a considerate following despite never getting a re-release. The game, produced by Capcom, a much esteemed company in video gaming history, was a fascinating production, with an idiosyncratic visual style and as a horror game where you have to stalk the bizarre characters of the titular Gregory's hotel, whilst avoiding them chasing you. The anime series, a micro-series of three seasons and one spin-off, is just as idiosyncratic, the creation in premise of Naomi Iwata. A creator of many characters, also children's work, Iwata was even involved with a spin-off in the Pingu franchise called Pingu in the City (2017), a CGI show based on the claymation series that was seen on British television, as it clearly was around the world in various incarnations, about a cute penguin.

The episodes for seasons one and two are twenty five episodes, season three for twenty six and the bonus series The Bloody Karte for twelve, each episode two minutes each however. The first two follow a season long story of a person ending up at a purgatorial hotel ran by Gregory, an anthropomorphic older mouse who barely hides his sinister nature. The first series, the leads both unseen in first person with their voice over, follows a husband with child, a workaholic, who has likely fled from his life to this perverse horror show, the second series about a woman returning from the wedding of a man who broke up with her when she choose her career over an engagement offer. It is clear these reflect real life, even if Gregory Horror Show is an eccentric and ghoulish tale, all reflecting in these characters' average working life, be it the salaryman in the first season, the second in mind to the place of women in work in Japan, that of marriage and children being potential barriers of ever getting to a comfortable place in business.

The horror show itself in contrast, however, whilst with the metaphors being there, is delightfully weird. Alongside being an early attempt at polygonal three dimensional animation, the first noticeable details is that everyone looks like box people you built from cardboard craft designs. Subsequent work, like the 2007 manga Gregory Horror Show - Another World, switched from this aesthetic, but Gregory Horror Show stands out for this cutesy box people style from, especially as it helps paradoxically for a horror tale, in how strange the denizens are, and how more morbid it becomes with this violent juxtaposition. No one is realistically human or even human baring the leads, which is creepy in its own way as much as the cast are the kind you would want as plush toys in a Hot Topic/Blue Banana Goth store, which in itself is a huge virtue to the world building and personality.

This is not a kid's show however, and that has to be emphasised, with the characters even as one episode guests are creepy bunch nonetheless. Gregory himself is a mother's boy brow-beaten by a mother who is stealing guests' souls with the intention of slurping them as a youth formula. Series two introduces James, Gregory's nephew who can be perfectly described in how he is in the game as a mechanic, that he will come to you shouting and skipping about excited when he spots you, which is not good when you are sneaking around or trying to avoid attention. There are a lot of characters throughout, too many to describe, but among the most distinct and found over the series include Catherine, a pink nurse dinosaur who, with giant needles, is not only fixated on drawing all a person's blood out of their bodies, but explicitly has a sexual thrill from this; Neko-Zombie, a horribly scared cat who is chained up near the guests' rooms and is an ally; the candle chef who hates "puff-puffs", smoking in general or anyone criticising his cooking, welding a giant knife; a young girl who is looking for her doll, which is the split personality with its own face; an angel dog who has an alternative devil side; and an assortment of zombies getting drunk in their graves, roulette wheel boys who play dangerous games of luck, a mirror who shows your real self, and even a bonsai tree man who enters your dreams for nefarious means.

One character needing a separate sentence, and part of the clear themes of the show's horror, is Judgement Boy, a sentient floating scale which weighs one's heart with materialism, clearly challenging guests and patrons with difficult moral questions based on their past transgressions as a guilt complex. There will be many Judgement Boys, and Season Two shows their factory/training camp, and they represent the themes of guilt, anxiety of work and life in general. Even the likes of Catherine represent obvious fears of needles, pain and judgement. Considering Death, actually an ally in all the episodes, has the Swedish flag on his hat, clearly a nod to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), does show that, whilst that example is a very silly tribute the Swedish auteur might have never expected, Naomi Iwata  had serious intent behind this creation of his even if mixed with the absurd.

The tone and cuteness helps more too in how the show, episodic in tone but following a progressive narrative of twists and turns in the first two seasons, has aged as early 3D animation. Baring some very dated moments which fulfil my passion for obsolete polygonal animation, it has managed to escape full obsoletion because the art style is deliberately unnatural and like a box character play set. Season Two still manages to get even more macabre than the first, between the more ghoulish content (Gregory getting an axe in his head, an attempting hanging) and the finale involving the hotel being burned down. Even if there is also a cartoonish logic, this is a creepy show of death and the grotesque, more so as it comes clear in the first two seasons the hotel is in a world outside of real life. This show has an existential side to the horror even if you do not find it "scary", with the final episode of Season One showing the real world on camera through real photos, and the drudgery within them, [Spoilers] which leads the male lead of that season to return to the hotel. [Spoilers End]

The third season of Gregory's Horror Show, with the subtitle The Last Train, takes the series in a different direction. Existing in a context out of the first two, Gregory himself is the lead, but he is not in the hotel with his mother. Instead, he is on a train, one which is sentient as he eventually has to communicate to it when things go amiss. Clearly, he is running away from his life, which becomes more increasingly obvious though the series, like before, continuing beforehand with having a gallery of unconventional figures enter through the cars of the train into his path. Moments are overtly absurd, such as that the train has to stop because the ghosts of samurai warriors, who will presume the first person they met is their master and demand orders, have blocked the rails, or that on this train, radioactive and genetically modified peanuts are available to consume even if it recommended not stick to the modified ones. The candle chef is the caterer, killing guests and serving them if they disagree with his cooking, and Gregory just finds himself bringing poison in his medical bag when needing a cure for illness. Like the other seasons, there is barring one cringe worthy sequence, where Gregory is revealed to like hip hop (which is not a bad thing) but proceeds to rap (which is a bad thing), a consistency here only matched by a very abstract conclusion as the others continued with. This has an ending, in another context, which would be called out as being a cop-out, but here makes sense to the series' logic.

The Bloody Karte was the last of these, following instead Catherine, the pink dinosaur nurse whose inability to not try to take all the blood from people is contrasted by her quest for love. For pure ghoulishness, this proved the funniest of the quartet for me, simply because, following the structure that each segment introduces a character for that moment, this becomes a cavalcade of incredibly morbid humour. Whilst Gregory gets off scot free with just being hung upside down in the cemetery off a tree continually, some of the male characters who break Catherine's heart for not being her ideal, or being gold plated rather than actually made from gold, are very dead when she has her revenge on them. It does offer the sweetest of endings, a women running the hospital eventually and bonding in their own world, the season more a series of farces about men in the end, but for pure twisted jokes, this one won me over without being too long to get repetitious.  

The main three seasons had US releases through Geneon USA, the ill fated physical media arm of Geneon who were shut down 2007. Sadly, Gregory Horror Show the series is caught in a limbo and was never re-released. Most likely knows this franchise for that video game which, paradoxically, has the same voice cast in the English dub as the animation, but never got a US release. This is a shame as, without wanting to talk of the video game, worthy of its own time devoted to it, these altogether are a unique piece of eccentric anime horror I was won over with. 

#225: Ayakashi - Samurai Horror Tales (2006)

 

Studio: Toei Animation

Directors: Hidehiko Kadota and Kouzou Nagayama (Tenshu Monogatari); Tetsuo Imazawa (Yotsuya Kaidan); Kenji Nakamura (Bakeneko)

Screenplays: Yuuji Sakamoto (Tenshu Monogatari); Chiaki J. Konaka (Yotsuya Kaidan); Michiko Yokote (Bakeneko)

Tenshu Monogatari adapted from the drama by Kyōka Izumi; Yotsuya Kaidan adapted from the play by Nanboku Tsuruya IV

Voice Actors:

a) Tenshu Monogatari

Hikaru Midorikawa / Kirby Morrow as Zushonosuke Himekawa; Houko Kuwashima / Willow Johnson as Tomi Hime;  Saeko Chiba / Tracey Power as Oshizu;  Yui Kano / Anna Cummer as Ominaeshi; Kappei Yamaguchi / Alec Willows as Kaikaimaru; Masaya Onosaka / Samuel Vincent as Kikimaru

Yotsuya Kaidan

Hiroaki Hirata / Brian Dobson as Iemon Tamiya; Mami Koyama / Nicole Oliver as Oiwa Tamiya;  Yūko Nagashima / Rebecca Shoichet as Osode Yotsuya; Keiichi Sonobe / Samuel Vincent as Gonbei Naosuke; Ryō Hirohashi / Lalainia Lindbjerg as Oume Ito; Wataru Takagi / Michael Adamthwaite as Yomoshichi Sato

Bake Neko

Takahiro Sakurai / Andrew Francis as Kusuriuri the Medicine Seller; Yukana / Kelly Sheridan as Kayo;  Tetsu Inada / Trevor Devall as Odajima; Chikao Ohtsuka / Scott McNeil as Clan Lord Yoshiyuki; Naoki Tatsuta / Paul Dobson as Lord Yoshikuni; Seiji Sasaki / John Novak as Lord Yoshiaki; Yōko Sōmi / Alison Matthews as Lady Mizue; Kozue Kamada / Tabitha St. Germain as Lady Mao; Yuu Shimaka / Ken Kramer as Katsuyama; Eiji Takemoto / Andrew Kavadas as Sasaoka; Yurika Hino / Tabitha St. Germain as Miss Sato; Kiyonobu Suzuki / Trevor Devall as Yahei

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Commissioned for Fuji TV's Noitamina block, highly regarded for its artistically and narratively different anime shows - where Masaaki Yuasa's The Tatami Galaxy (2010) or Princess Jellyfish (2010) came from - Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales befits the slot early in its existence, as it is three different horror tales between three to four episodes, of period set folktales and yōkai I am fascinated by. Two of the three are adapting classic authors for their tales too, adding to this an air of artistry, and even when the Noitamina started over the decades, from their 2005 inception to step away from a stereotypical young male target audience, to have more action and pulpier productions, this was not a bad thing either. This has led to shows like Samurai Flamenco (2013-14), and  with well regarded productions like The Promised Neverland (2019-2020) getting popular, the block can still claim respect for producing some of the best and most interesting in animated television series. My interest in Samurai Horror Tales beyond just horror anime would have been cemented by its connection to Mononoke (2007), another Noitamina block member and one of the most unique looking series of any genre, having been a spin-off from of the Ayakashi stories itself not based on a classic tale.

The three tales are very straightforward in what they are about, each taking very different directions to how to tell them however. Depending on how you watch this, the Discotek Blu Ray release, released on October 29th 2019¹, oddly has it that you can watch the second story's episodes, for Tenshu Monogatari, first before the others, but the structure was set up for broadcast as Yotsuya Kaidan (four episodes), Tenshu Monogatari (four episodes), and Bakeneko (three episodes). Going by how I had watched this, Tenshu Monogatari as the first watched is a supernatural melodrama, adapted from a drama by Kyōka Izumi. Izumi was a prolific novelist, dramatist and writer, who I am aware of for Demon Pond. It is a play even one of my favourite filmmakers Takashi Miike, in one of his many idiosyncratic leaps into any type of filmmaking he has wanted to try, tried his hand at filming, in a very good 2005 theatrical production he recorded, based on a Keishi Nagatsuka re-adaptation of the source material. It is a work too also adapted to cinema by Masahiro Shinoda in 1979.

In Tenshu Monogatari, a falconer named Zushonosuke, thanks to his evil feudal lord, has to retrieve a prized falcon only to find a mansion of forgotten gods, housing all women who as immortal beings, figures who succumb to hunger and consume the life force of any mortals who wander there. One, Tomi Hime, starts to fall for him, which has the issue that the more she is drawn to humanity, that will mean she loses her immortality, which is sadly also infectious to everyone else there in the mansion. The evil lord eventually catches wind of this, which leads to him sending his soldiers to take the mansion by the final episode, a tragedy of figures doomed to love each other despite them being different entities, or that at home Zushonosuke has a fiancée named Oshizu who is naturally heartbroken by all of this, becoming involved. This is the most conventional of the three narratives, but as a bittersweet story, that in itself is a curveball. It still has a ghoulish edge, and there is the fact that there are two monsters as a comedy duo and Greek chorus, two thieves who only help Zushonosuke out to steal from the mansion if they can. 

All the stories have their own distinct looks. Also of note is that, throughout the series, they have their own opening credits, with their own visual motifs and designs, even if they all have the same opening theme song. It is probably the least expected in such a context, HEAT ISLAND by Rhymester, a hip hop song with backing by a koto, a traditional Japanese string instrument, which is as strange as that songs but is yet an inspired choice, befitting a production which is idiosyncratic. It befits how, whilst Tenshu Monogatari is a very emotional drama at its heart, even the traditional ghost story, Yotsuya Kaidan, is not conventionally told at all, all the narratives here standing out with their idiosyncrasies. All the stories have their own authors, Tenshu Monogatari's Yuuji Sakamoto, who only has that one credit in their career strangely, Michiko Yokote for Bakeneko someone we will get to for that story later in the review, and a figure I know very well for Yotsuya Kaidan, Chiaki J. Konaka.

Konaka, someone I admired for his work, sadly has to be taken now by me as a fan with a pinch of salt in recent years. A divisive screenwriter for how obtuse he could be, from Serial Experiments Lain (1998) to one of the strangest narrative arches of Mononoke itself, I admire how esoteric and experimental his work is, even when, such as a live action film like Evil Dead Trap 2 (1992), figuring out what is transpiring and in what reality can be lost entirely even on multiple viewings. For a live reading of a script for Digimon Tamers, a follow up to the show that many of us (including myself) saw episodes of as a kid, he had a villain, which took on the form of "Political Correctness," that threatens the real and digital worlds, and had a special attack called "Cancel Culture"¹. Thankfully nothing from this raised concerns of far greater and more problematic ideas he has had, but at a time where his own personal blog expressed questioning views on COVID-19's reporting in worldwide news², sadly it did paint a picture for me of someone undermining himself when, if brutal to say, his work in screenwriting usually, even if frustrated viewers, was a lot more nuanced even with some of his hardest the grasp scripts in anime storytelling. When watching Yotsuya Kaidan even this came up here, as this is a really meta and clever retelling of the titular tale, which feels alien in comparison, originally written as a kabuki play by Tsuruya Nanboku IV, as Tōkaidō Yotsiya Kaidan, which becomes a story in itself as this version tells.

Nanboku himself is the narrator, and the play itself, as much as a new retelling here, is the subject. The story itself is about a woman Oiwa who, when her husband, Iemon Tamiya, is complicit in a poison she is given, which disfigures half of her face, and the disposal of her body after her death, taking revenge on him from the grave Iemon Tamiya is already established as a unscrupulous rōnin, who even killed Oiwa's father, pretending bandits had done so, to win her hand in marraige, before another woman wished him for her own and concocted the plan to disfigure and disgrace her. This is a morbid melodrama, where there is also her sister-in-law, lied to in a deceit by another man who kills her suitor and pretends bandits also did it, and the story takes on additional angst and wrought drama with its betrayals, seductions and heartbreaks. Konaka's take goes further in how the finale becomes Kaidan's lasting legacy, Tsuruya Nanboku IV revealed to have passed his mortal form and existing in an afterlife on the Earth, considering his story and how it has lasted in Japanese popular culture, even developing a curse around the plan where people adapting it have been maimed or even killed. Were it not for a certain tale coming afterwards which is clearly the gem of this entire anthology, I would hold this as a perfect piece in itself worth seeing. All three are, and Yotsuya Kaidan does feel like a perfect retelling of folklore in dissecting the text, something also for me to show Chiaki J. Konaka as a talented writer even if the real man stumbles in some bad ideas too in his thought process.

However it was Bakeneko which became a spin-off show in itself own right, and alongside that spin-off Mononoke, no anime looks and feels tonally like this these stories about a mysterious "Medicine Seller" at all. Bakeneko, alongside its distinct art style and character designs by Takashi Hashimoto, looks like it was illustrated on glossy waxed paper, done with digital animation as I aware of with Mononoke, but absolutely distinct in its composition. It is a horror story which yet uses bright colours, has a precise use of environment design (patterns, illustrations, even setting out locations), and where, clearly indebted to art styles from Japanese history, such as Japanese woodblock prints, it brings it into the modern era as a digitally animated production in movement. Even in mind that the series got Yoshitaka Amano to do the original character designs for Yotsuya Kaidan, and have his illustrations on the opening credits for that tale, one of the most iconic designers in anime and light novels who an acclaimed artist outside of the mediums, Bakeneko is an artistic masterpiece just in appearance, even in mind that this is a prototype to what became Mononoke the series.

It is also, with fair warning, a bleaker narrative than Mononoke could get, bearing in mind that the later series tackled heavy subjects, its first arch surrounding the ghosts of aborted foetuses of brothel workers. It says a lot in context however that Bakeneko manages to have the bleakest narrative of this world, introducing us here to the Medicine Seller, a figure here and in the later series whose job is exorcise demons, a magic sword on his person (alongside other tools) which can only be open when three criteria explaining the entity's existence come to light. A bride is killed on her wedding day in a proud samurai clan, and whilst suspicion comes on him, the Medicine Seller is quickly the only person able to deal with the problem, the Bekeneko. This is a "goblin cat", cats of supernatural form in Japanese mythology which are not necessarily as extreme as this, a monster claiming vengeance, but symbolically meaningful here with the context. This story will be uncomfortable for some, so fair warning is recommended, as this is the case as was in Mononoke that, as the truth and cause of the demon is revealed, it involves showing up the wrongs of human beings, alongside this explicitly dealing with how people lie, forget details or view it in a different perspective. Michiko Yokote was the screenwriter for this story, and whilst multiple writers all contributed good work to Mononoke, Chiaki J. Konaka, this is a great time, with the virtues she shows here, to praise Yokote. She is not someone I have frequently encountered, but I am aware of her, whilst not the only screenwriting contributor, for series composition, the person putting everything narratively together, for Princess Tutu (2002-3), an exceptional and unique fantasy tale about around ballet and fairy tales that, again with Konaka getting briefly involved, was a meta-text on fairy tales which was also a beautiful gem. Here, dealing with an incredibly umcomfortable subject exceptionally at the heart of this tale, the only not adapted from another source, I see another example of her talent.

And that is true as a warning for anyone interest. [Major Spoiler Warning] The cause of the bekeneko here is that the samurai patriarch kidnapped a woman, kept her in a cage as a sexual object, a peasant girl who was raped, beaten and left to starve to death, which is as grim a narrative reveal, too real for some, to consider. [Major Spoiler Warning]. All three tales to their virtue, but especially Bekeneko, show why I came to love these type of horror anime about folklore and figures like the Medicine Seller, stepping in to resolve supernatural entities, as they become morality tales and dramas with one-off characters, examinations of human beings which the Bekeneko pulls no punches in. Among them, for its artistic innovations, and how impactful the narrative in its centre is, clearly Bakeneko is the masterpiece of the entire set, though it is to the credit of the three tales altogether that they all succeed.

 

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1) Discotek Media's announcement of Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, dated on Facebook on August 13th 2019.

2) Digimon Tamers Writer Chiaki J. Konaka Responds to Overseas Backlash Over 20th Anniversary Stage Play, written by Kim Morrissy for Anime News Network, dated August 9th 2021.