Holy plot twist.
There are certainly some very good shows airing this season (most of them on Sunday, sadly for me). One can argue which is the best overall (or not – it’s this one). But I don’t think there’s much of a case to dispute that Karasu wa Aruji o Erabanai is the best-written. When you grow up reading fantasy, your palate becomes pretty sensitive about it. Some series just have it – that essence of greatness in creating a living, breather folkloric world that seems more real than real. There is a particular Japanese subset of this – The Moribito novels are the most obvious example in anime or out, and Shin Sekai Yori is another masterpiece. But they have more in common with great Western fantasy than differences from it.
In makes sense that the series which has easily the grandest literary ambition in anime at the moment would go big when it comes to its major plot twist. It’s a whopper, no question about it. But this episode takes its sweet time building up to it. There’s the matter of survival to deal with for starters. Nazukihiko has dispatched the monkey that was throttling his young comrade, but there’s more where it came from – and he and Yukiya are on the clock to escape the caverns before Saku’s incense clock (what a cool concept that is) chimes their funeral knell.
As it turns out, Wakamiya has sent a message to Saku. He’s basically bypassed Tobi, knowing Natsuka’s approach was doomed to fail. But the idea was for Saku to prevent Natsuka’s meeting from failing catastrophically, with Wakamiya investigating the caves on his own. Sending the boy in was Saku’s own twist – as Yukiya says, they’ve been dancing to the old man’s tune. Yukiya has laid down a thread to find his way back (well-read in Greek mythology or just clever that way), and he and the Kin’u follow it towards the exit, with Wakamiya ordering Yukiya not to focus on what might be behind them.
The issue – one King Saku surely knew about – is that all or most of the caverns exist outside the boundary protecting Yamauchi. This “thin membrane” of protection let them leave, but it’s not about to let them back – suggesting it’s not a conscious entity in its own right. This is obviously a problem, all the more so when the pursuing monkeys catch up to at the dead end the barrier has been herding the pair back to. Perhaps Saku intended this as a test to see if Yukiya was clever enough to think his way out of trouble (though why he felt the need to test the boy in such a way is a puzzle in its own right).
Nazukihiko designates Yukiya to think of the solution while he fights off the monkeys. Which the lad does, albeit as he’s mid-plummet after a misstep (was there simply no time to transform, or is transforming even possible if a Yatagarasu is outside the boundary?). They escape the simian horde when Yukiya kills the ghost light (not even monkeys can see in total darkness) and he tells the Kin’u the solution – follow your nose. The clue to survival Saku gave Yukiya was sandalwood and cassia incense, the smell of which leads them back into Yamauchi and towards the clock.
Yukiya having survived his challenge, the onus is on Saku to share what he knows. And it turns out that Wakamiya knows a fair bit too, and this is where the huge plot twists really start raining cats and dogs. I think it helps to think of Yatagarasu as a chronicle of a very smart young boy being educated about just how little he knows (which is definitely one of its core identities). It makes sense that the world outside Yamauchi should be much larger than what’s inside the barrier. But Yukiya has never really though about it in those terms. The bone he’s brought back for Saku didn’t belong to a monkey – it’s human.
Yukiya has never heard the term “human” before – which seems odd at first but then, why should he have? The world of the Yatagarasu is just one small, sheltered bubble in the human world. A world the Kin’u or his predecessors has seen – and documented, in texts Yukiya has seen even if he didn’t understand what he was looking at. That changes everything, obviously. But in fact as terrifying as that is from a Yatagarasu perspective, humans aren’t the problem at the moment – if anything they too are “victims”, Nazukihiko says. The monkeys are like Yatagarasu – creatures who mimic human form (which suggests both are connected to humans in some way). But they feast on humans – and to them, a crow in human form may as well be one.
There’s one more bit of information Saku by rights should share, given the terms of his deal with Yukiya. And Wakamiya isn’t about to let him off the hook. By this point I’d guessed that the Yatagarasu working with the monkeys was Jihei. By Saku and Wakamiya’s reckoning, he brokered a deal to trade village girls for human bones – bones which hold no value for the monkeys, but are valuable in the drug trade. They, it seems, are the basis of sagecap – the “senningai” drug (I can’t find any evidence the word actually exists in Japanese so I have no idea how it was translated) so dangerous the Underground won’t allow anyone under its control to traffic in it.
Whew. That’s a lot to take in, especially with only two episodes remaining. This was going to be hard for Koume anyway you slice it (I don’t think there’s any way she knew), but it appears Jihei may already have met his end after he was made the subject of a bounty. These events make it absolutely clear – both to Yukiya and to the audience – just how great a burden Nazukihiko has been bearing. Yukiya’s loyalty to him has been steadily growing, based on an increasingly personal connection between them. But it seems safe to say that the boy is now as staunch an ally as the Kin’u could ever hope to have.
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