This island arc is looking like a bit of a nesting doll situation. Anime and manga – and Japanese literature in general – have an interesting relationship with small-town Japan (and nothing is more small-town than an island). It’s revered and painted with a never-was rose-colored nostalgia. At the same time there’s an obsession with the terrifying underbelly of seemingly idyllic rural life – dark secrets, often supernatural, lurking beneath the idyl. As this way of life disappears from the modern nation at an astonishing pace, its mystical hold over younger urban Japanese only grows. They feel guilty for standing around and watching it die, but wouldn’t give up their big-city (mostly Tokyo) comforts for it in a thousand years.
Yaeko had the familiar sense of how stifling being a teenager in such a place could be, of course. But she seems to have had a pretty innocent view of life here. She certainly had no idea just how much ugliness was happening (and I don’t mean needing tongs and a spatula for mukade encounters – as son as I saw those I knew what they were for), but in Momoyuki’s realm and her own. Mori-kun – and his family – are at the heart of a lot of it. It’s not clear just how close the pair of them were (Mogura-san certainly jabs at Magi-kun over how much of an ikemen Mori was in high school) but they were certainly friends. She made a red panda doll for him, a character in a game he liked that had no official merchandise.
At the heart of the darkness is the Samejima family, the bigwigs from the fish plant we saw at the pre-matsuri. The son (58) and his granddaughter Yui show up for a visit – Yui attended high school with Yaeko – and offer to show the guests around town. The company president is silver-tongued but clearly dripping with deceit, and his daughter sets her sights on Momoyuki immediately (she has no idea what she’s getting herself into). The pair of them are tools in the hands of the 92 year-old matriarch, who rules over both her clan and the islanders in unquestioned fashion. The president is the mouthpiece, and Yui (with her battle suit) the seductress.
As to Mori-kun, the original sin of the family is being newcomers (six years) to the island. The father made the mistake of pointing out an inconsistency in the numbers from the fish processing plant, and brought down Samejima wrath on his family in the process. That’s the reason for the son’s downfall, and he’s being painted as a danger to himself and others. The ultimate aim seems to be to drive the Mori family off the island, but they refuse to leave. We haven’t heard the last of them, that’s for certain.
Yae-chan’s father passes off the “malpractice” of the family at the plant as a normal part of business. But it’s soon clear that he’s a sharp guy, and one not satisfied to be putty in the hands of liars. He encouraged Yaeko to leave the island to learn to think for herself (which earned him the suspicion of the Samejimas). On the pretext of going out for food Kyoushirou – with Shio in tow – heads over to the Samejima mansion and uses Nabeshima to eavesdrop on the creepy family. He intends to keep this information to himself for the moment, knowing Mogura-san will involve himself as soon as he hears it, but Mogura is too sharp to be fooled.
The paranormal side of things is messed up too, with the giant merfolk spirit swallowing up angry and despairing souls left and right and growing ever-larger. The Samejima clan aren’t directly responsible for its – and the folklore around it – existence. But they use it to their advantage, creating a bunker mentality on the island and painting outsiders as crooks intent on ripping the islanders off and destroying their way of life.
Kyoushirou was certainly right – there was no way Momoyuki would take all this in and not choose to act on it. If we know anything about him at this point it’s that he’s a serial helper – he gives of himself whether it’s asked or not. Both the mythological and human entanglements on the island practically scream out for his interference, and he’s not one to let such sleeping dogs lie. The Samejima may be all-powerful in their closed ecosystem, but they have no clue who they’re dealing with here – Mogura has seen a lot worse than them and lived to tell the tale.
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