There was a stretch in the middle where I was convinced the unavoidably frantic pacing was going to hamstring Kowloon Generic Romance pretty hard. But it’s recovered to the point where things feel quite natural again. Naturally that’s delightful, because everything else about the series is top-notch. Director Iwasaki Yoshiaki and writer Tanaka Jin are not huge names despite being very experienced (especially Iwasaki) but they’re really doing a great job here. Mayuzuki Jun’s work doesn’t have an absolute auteur like Watanabe Ayumu behind it this time, but it’s still getting the treatment it deserves.
Xiaohei continues to be a major presence in the story. Yuulong is pushing hard to get him to “kill” Reiko, but Xiaohei is unpersuaded by the argument that she’s just a generic. When money doesn’t seem to be greasing the gears, he tries another tack. What if Xiaohei could “go back” to how he was three years earlier? It seems pretty clear now that Hajime mistook Xiaohei for a girl because he was still enough of a child to easily pass as one. Puberty exerted its toll, he outgrew the clothes and his voice changed to Rurouni Kenshin’s (which is sort of ironic), and now Xiaohei is the young man we see. And his generic exists even with him in Kowloon, apparently because of Kudou-san’s mistake.
It remains to be seen if Xiaohei will actually try to do what Yuulong is asking, and what exactly Yuulong is offering him to do so. But while Xiaohei constantly being around Reiko is ominous, in the end I just can’t see him doing something like that. Reiko, for her part, is seriously freaking out about what happened with Kujirai-B’s glasses. But she can’t stop reaching for them, almost like an addict. She wants to know, but she doesn’t want to know. As usual she confides in Yaomay, who encourages her to keep investigating but then pulls back when they head for the rough-and-tumble of North Kowloon to research one of the “random” megane scenes. That’s something both Reikos have in common – they were told never to go there and ignored that advice.
One of the key takeaways from the visions is surely the talismans. Kujirai had a habit of peeling them off – Reiko follows her trail north to do the same. There she sees a “403 – Forbidden” message on the back of a talisman. She winds up peeling a bunch more – 30 in total – from around the city. 20 are blank, 9 have the 403 error, and one says “202 – Accepted”. That one is something like a pending message – “The request has been accepted for processing, but the processing has not been completed”. And finally, one last message – “Don’t look for it anymore”.
All this more or less confirms what we already knew, this is a Genetic Terra-related simulation. The devil is in the details, which are still fluid. Another interesting tidbit of new information is that Gwen never liked Kujirai-B, allegedly because he could never tell what she was thinking but also because she hurt his friend. As such his hostility towards Reiko wasn’t because she was replacing Kujirai, but because she might hurt Hajime as well. And that reinforces the worry that’s been tormenting her, that her mere presence was too painful for Hajime and that he’d be better off without her around.
Gwen says one more thing about Kujirai-B – that she always “had a scent of death” around her. That’s way too nebulous to be interpreted and way too pointed to be meaningless. One last twist finds Yaomay, blood sugar crashing, pop a chocolate from her purse and seemingly regain the memories Kowloon food has been wiping. Presumably the chocolate was from Hong Kong in the “real” world, but what’s interesting is that would imply real-world food has the ability to nullify the effects of Kowloon food.
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