#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.

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1) Kiyotoshi Sasano's Anime News Network biography.