Inuyashiki – 11 (Fin)

Early in this final episode, I was deathly afraid Hiro would somehow repair himself and pay Ichirou and his family a visit, and there would be no way Ichirou would be able to fight Hiro off and save his family; indeed, they’d likely be part of the ample collateral damage of such a fight.

That fear was only amplified when Ichirou showed his entire family the machinery within him, confessing to them that he might not be their Ichirou, but a fake. When his wife asks him to describe their honeymoon, he recalls every detail with such emotion both she and Mari end up bawling and embracing him…of course he’s their Ichirou. Only his son stays away, still understandably weary of this shocking news.

As for Hiro, his arms aren’t coming back, and he seems to have given up on destroying Japan. He shows up in Andou’s room to read the latest Jump, but Andou can’t allow the charade to go on, and calls Ichirou. Hiro splits before he arrives, and later watches Shion and her grandmother from afar, not daring to get too close lest his awfulness infect them any further. Hiro is also constantly hearing desperate cries for him to just effing die already for all the horrendous shit he’s done. He’s not in a good place.

As for Ichirou, honesty proves to be the best policy, as his family quickly embraces him (I love how his office didn’t even acknowledge him as the healing god on TV). He takes the fam out to eat and they take a riverside stroll afterward, in a wonderful display of family camaraderie.

In an earlier talk with his boy while walking home, Ichirou tells him how death makes life precious, and that now that he’s a machine he realizes he took being human for granted.  Even so, you can’t deny his family is being a lot nicer to him now that he’s a machine, when before, only his dog Hanako seemed to care whether he lived or died.

At the same time, perhaps they weren’t ever as disdainful as the earlier episodes depicted; maybe we were just seeing things from Ichirou’s woe-is-me perspective. It wasn’t as if he was the only member of his family feeling underappreciated or downtrodden.

In any case, that odd ominous sense of finality to the family interactions is explained by President Donald Trump of all people on the TV: Remember that Giant Asteroid? It’s still headed to Earth, where it’s expected to wipe out all life in three days. Trump basically tells the losers of the world to pound sand; he has no regrets about his life.

Such a comforting voice in trying times, is the Trumpster’s. A good chunk of the masses respond by engaging in widespread illegal activity. Something has to be done, and we know who needs to do it.

While I know the asteroid has been mentioned for some time, the shift from the Ichirou-Hiro conflict to Stopping the Asteroidocalypse still feels very sudden, and once this episode ended, I felt a bit like an entire arc had been awkwardly squeezed into one episode.

That being said, the execution, while hasty, still made an impact, what with Mari’s tearful farewell of her father (who promises he’ll be back) and the gorgeous shots of Ichirou floating around space. Unfortunately, even his formidable arsenal is ineffective at altering the asteroid’s course.

Enter Hiro, who followed Ichirou into space, and who believes the course will shift if he self-detonates on the asteroid’s surface. As horrible as he is, Hiro doesn’t want Andou or Shion to die, so like Ichirou, he’ll do all he can to stop that from happening.

When the night sky turns to day for a few minutes, both Andou and Shion seems to sense their friend is gone. For all the hundreds of people he killed in various awful ways (and if looking at things dispassionately), sacrificing himself to save the entire population of earth seems like a sufficient means of redemption.

It’s too bad then, that Hiro alone can’t save earth; he only blew up part of the asteroid; to finish it, Ichirou has to blow himself up as well. While I’m sure he didn’t like breaking his promise to Mari, he’d have liked her being incinerated by a meteor even less.

Also neither Ichirou nor Hiro in their current states were anything that should have been anywhere near humanity; they were simply too powerful, on both the good and bad side of things. They should have died when that alien ship squashed them. Turns out they got some bonus time, but now that time has ended.

The simple, quiet epilogue of Mari learning her manga won the competition in Jump (to Andou’s surprise as well) is the product of Ichirou lovingly supporting his daughter’s creative dreams, and earning back her respect and affection in return. No doubt the next work she publishes will be dedicated to her father’s memory.

Inuyashiki – 10

Turns out the woman, father, and baby we met last week weren’t the ones in the plane that crashed. Hiro has taken control of dozens, many of which find targets on the ground below, but Ichirou is finally able to take action,  commandeering and soft-landing ten planes in the bay – including the one with the woman, father and baby.

But Hiro has already caused much carnage, and hundreds if not thousands of casualties. And perhaps more pressing to Ichirou, Mari calls him to say she’s trapped atop city hall in the observation deck, where there’s a fire raging and where oxygen is running out.

Ichirou could probably save Mari and the others in City Hall in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, but there’s a problem: Hiro has found him. In their first encounter, he bolted as soon as Ichirou got up from Hiro’s bang; here, he wants answers, and isn’t satisfied with the ones he gets.

Hiro is upset that he’s the villain, while the old man is the hero, and so lashes out like a child would, first by grappling with Ichirou, then by bang-bang-banging him mercilessly. Finally, Ichirou counters with a bang of his own, but Hiro is only momentarily stunned.

As previewed in the show’s OP, a no-hold-barred battle between Hiro and Ichirou, nobody wins or loses except the city crumbling around and below them. When they’ve finally beaten and blasted each other unconscious, their “fail-safe”/”autopilot” systems kick in.

It’s here where it’s indicated that for all of the carnage and mayhem Hiro has caused, Ichirou’s system may be the superior of the two, and not necessarily due to any mechanical differences. Rather, because the original human that was copied by the mysterious aliens was older and more experienced.

This enables Autopilot Ichirou to destroy the hapless $100 billion space station in orbit and use the falling debris as cover for a sneak attack. He essentially scalps and literally “dis-arms” Hiro, and both fall back to earth with a crash and a splash.

At this point, I didn’t have very high hopes for Mari’s survival, and indeed she looks to have succumbed to smoke inhalation and asphyxia by the time Ichirou finally arrives. We watch him quickly descend into a new sub-level of despair as Mari’s life flashes before his eyes, but after much perseverance he manages to revive her.

Mari reacts to learning her father came when she needed him most with a big hug and a lot of tears. There’s no time fo Ichirou to explain or try to hide what he is; he must save the rest of the sightseers atop the building, including Nao, and after sending Mari home, he’s all over the city, saving as many as he can as those around him call him “god”.

Meanwhile, Hiro’s in a bad way, but he’s obviously not dead. Two good Samaritans encounter find him in an alley, and when he manages to mutter “water”, they give him some juice from the nearby vending machine, unwittingly helping a potential country-destroyer get back in the game.

I hope Ichirou realizes it isn’t ovr between him and Hiro, and that he isn’t so caught up in helping strangers that he neglects his family’s safety.

Inuyashiki – 09

The day after he kills an entire gaggle of press and an entire station full of police, Shishigami Hiro is all everyone is talking about. Due to his attractiveness, a number of fan clubs crop up, and many girls aren’t ashamed to voice their admiration for him. It’s a chilling reminder that this kind of “villain worship” happens in real life all the time.

Meanwhile, Hiro hacks all screens in Japan and makes an announcement: because Japan will never stop hunting him, he has declared the entire country of 120-odd million his enemy, and intends to kill every last one of them. He starts picking off targets from his rooftop vantage point, but also uses the screens of televisions and smartphones to execute people.

Andou gets Ichirou to send a hack of his own warning people to put away their smartphones, but it’s too late. In a half an hour, 100 have been murdered. He intends to kill 1,000 tomorrow and cheerfully asks the people to “look forward to it” before signing off.

Needless to say, it was hard to watch Hiro “gun” down throngs of people down in one of the busiest business districts in the world, and a place I spent a lot of time walking around. That sinking feeling is made worst by the fact he knows Chakko betrayed him (but wrongly believes he’s working with the police).

Hiro has also completely lost whatever goodwill he had with Shion. When he contacts her she begs him to stop the killing, but he responds as a machine would: there’s a problem, and they can’t live together in peace until he’s fixed it. He talks of eliminating Japan with the detached urgency one speaks of tying one’s unlaced shoe.

I doubt it will be long before even Andou and Shion enter Hiro’s crosshairs. The next day, as anticipation mounts as to whether, when, and how he’ll kill 1,000, we watch a pretty young woman board a plane, and once in the air, pacify a baby with a YouTube video.

Meanwhile, Mari is playing hooky with her friends in Shinjuku, but wants to keep the promise to come home with a treat for her dad’s dog. With Andou using Ichirou’s last name so often during their phone convos, it’s only a matter of time before Ichirou’s family is at risk too.

All the while, Mari seems to suspect/realize her father is the hero trying to stop Hiro, but is so unused to communicating with him she can’t seem to bring it up to him, or even thank him for going to bat for her over her future.

But that’s assuming she, and the rest of Japan, have a future. That plane with the woman and the baby? Hiro pulls it down in the middle of Shinjuku, in a sickening echo of 9/11. As his destructive capabilities increase, 10,000 dead tomorrow isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

Ichirou HAS to find him and stop him. But right now, he seems over-matched and overwhelmed, and it’s hard to blame him. If there’s a mark against this episode, it’s how ineffectual and unprepared Ichirou was against Hiro’s slaughter. He sent Andou’s warning to phones, but that just wasn’t enough.

Inuyashiki – 08

Hiro never bothered to cover his tracks that well, and so it was only a matter of time before a SWAT team showed up. In their attempt to capture him, Shion and her grandmother are killed, and the ostensible sociopath, who has chosen them as tethers to his humanity, is clearly very upset and guilty about that.

The police empty clip after clip into him but of course cannot penetrate Hiro’s skin, and he’s able to escape with Shion and her grandma and, I assume, heal them. Still, he leaves them behind, with words of apology, and will likely never let them get in harm’s way again—which means never coming near them again.

It’s a busy episode of Inuyashiki that checks in on just about everyone, even a random cop duo who hope to catch Hiro soon. But its focus is on Ichirou’s daughter Mari, who gets some welcome development beyond the thin outline we’d gleaned thus far of a girl ashamed to have such a poor, pathetic old-looking man for a father.

Turns out that was not nearly the whole picture. Mari’s grades aren’t great, and isn’t that interested in going to college. Instead, she wants to strike out as a mangaka, utilizing a craft she’s honed in secret since elementary school. She’s motivated by her neighbor and classmate, the rich and entitled son of the famous mangaka Oda, and she resents that he’s trying to follow in his footsteps simply because it seems like the natural thing to do.

Meanwhile, Ichirou continues to explore and refine his abilities with the help of Andou, another classmate of Mari’s, and it isn’t long before she spots the two walking and talking together. She stalks them, and dismisses the wild (and hilarious) theories that initially enter her mind (Andou is asking for permission to pursue Andou; her dad is into younger boys; Andou is his bastard son).

She keeps following them, watches them go into hospital rooms, then Googles the “miracle worker” who has saved over 120 lives. Then she sees her father launch himself into the sky like a rocket, and nothing will ever be the same.

By that, I mean Mari immediately starts to think of her father in a different way. Not much time is spent on her processing what she’s seen—it would understandably take some time—but when her mother confronts her on her low grades and insist she abandon the manga hobby and go to college, expense be damned—Ichirou walks in and immediately takes her side. 

Granted, Ichirou probably has no idea Mari knows anything about his abilities, so there’s no leverage at play here. Indeed, a pre-transformation Ichirou may have taken his wife’s side instead, because he struck me as a bit of a pushover. But not now. Now he’s willing to let his daughter embrace her dream, because he wants her to be happy.

As for Shion and her Grandma? They’re alive and well, in a new apartment, receiving payments from “him.” He healed them, but apparently could not wipe their memories. My money is on Shion trying to reach out to Hiro again, perhaps to her peril…again.

But being apart from Shion, her grandmother, and their quiet, simple life, not to mention the reason he had to leave it, has an immediate and strong negative impact on Hiro, who slips back into his old homicidal ways. The ones he cares about may still be alive, but it doesn’t change the fact that the police killed them, obviously lacking the knowledge he could repair them.

Had the police left him alone (whether that was the right thing to do or not), he may have continued on his peaceful course. But now he wants revenge, and to lash out at those who dared hurt Shion and her grandma. So he heads to the station and starts systematically slaughtering every policeman he sees—including the two cops we saw earlier.

When he’s done inside the headquarters, he goes outside to find a huge force waiting for him. A sniper knocks him down, and SWAT teams riddle him with bullets anew, but they can only slow him down; they can’t stop him, or really even hurt him. Even when “unconscious”, his defensive systems deploy and eliminate all threats with grim efficiency.

All of this unfolds before the video cameras of the media, which it seems Hiro doesn’t kill. Indeed, he leaves one defiant policeman alive so he can witness him killing all the other police around him, to prove to him he will always win in the end.

But because those cameras are capturing him, Ichirou and Mari are watching on the news, and Ichirou doesn’t see the boy who fought to protect Shion and her grandmother, or saved as many lives as he killed (though he’s now clearly “in the red” again). Ichirou just sees a butcher only he can stop.

Inuyashiki – 07

No Ichirou at all this week, giving the episode ample time to continue developing Hiro. The high of offing over 50 2channelers to avenge his mother has largely worn off, and he spends most of the time in bed. He remembers perhaps the first time he saw someone die—a track jumper—and how he felt a light going out when the life was extinguished.

A very patient and caring Shion still wants to believe Hiro is not the killer, but Hiro can’t go on that way, and tells her the truth, as well as shows her that he’s a machine now. When she refuses to accept it, he takes her for a harrowing ride and almost drops her.

Shion doesn’t explicitly beg for her life, she merely begs Hiro not to leave her and her grandmother. The indication being, no matter what he’s done, he has a home with them. Hiro looked very ready to drop Shion to her death, then proceed with the extermination of Japan’s whole population.

He does this because killing people makes him feel alive, and perhaps makes him forget that he’s not a person in the same sense anymore. But up there in the sky, Shion changes his course. She believes even if he doesn’t turn himself in, he can try to make things right by saving as many or more people than he’s killed. The flight is a baptism of sorts into the Church of Goodness.

Cut to the life of a salarywoman with terminal cancer being consoled by her co-worker/boss, considering jumping in front of a train like the guy Hiro once witnessed, but she doesn’t. She wants to live, so desperately that she heeds a tweet directing her to Hiro, who eradicates her cancer in moments. She’s back at the office, good as new.

Hiro doesn’t stop there, and Shion accompanies him as he heals one infirm or chronically-ill person after another, gaining their eternal gratitude. His twitter presence starts to expand, and before lone, he’s achieved the goal of saving more people than he killed.

Shion wants to keep it going. She and Hiro go on a celebratory flight, and when Hiro asks if this has gotten boring and Shion answers in the negative, don’t think I didn’t wonder whether he’d turn evil again and drop the poor young woman to her death.

Instead, Hiro seems to have filled the void left by his deceased mother with Shion, committing himself to her “forever.” Shion doubted she’d live a long life, but being with Hiro will likely change that, both from a medical and emotional standpoint. She’s no longer alone, and no longer has to worry about her cancer-prone genes.

All she has to worry about is the SWAT team stealthily arriving at her apartment in the middle of the night, likely ready to strike without regard to collateral casualties. Either Hiro can take them out without Shion or her granny getting harmed, or they do get harmed and he’s able to save their lives.

Either way, staying in that apartment is no longer an option. No matter how much good he’s done, it hasn’t erased the bad in the eyes of the law, which will never stop hunting him.

Inuyashiki – 06

Hiro manages to escape the cops without killing anybody, but the damage is done: his mother has seen him treated the way a terrorist would be treated, and that’s going to be hard to explain, especially when his face and deeds are all over TV, the internet, and word-of-mouth.

Hiro lands nowhere in particular, but it isn’t long before he comes across Watanabe Shion, who is willing to harbor him in the cramped apartment where she and her grandmother live. Shion, the poor lass, doesn’t believe the news…except the part about his “complicated” family situation.

This served to endear him even more to her; she’s an orphan. Both her parents died of cancer, and she believes she won’t live long either. Her classmates may ultimately conclude Hiro was a bad egg despite being cute and nice, but Shion can’t do that. And you really feel for her and yes, worry about something on the TV or internet setting Hiro off on another rampage.

After a quiet, polite dinner, and in a scene reminiscent of Leon, Hiro gets up and points his finger at the heads of Shion and her grandmother…but in a genius bit of cutting that leaves you hanging for just a moment…we see he didn’t go through with it, as he’s having a nice breakfast with them the next morning.

This is an 80-90% Hiro episode, but the bit with Ichirou and Andou serves as a nice, lightweight intermission from the tense and emotional goings-on with Hiro. Very lightweight, as it happens. Andou, being very scientific in helping Ichirou maximize his powers, has Ichirou interface with is phone so that he can communicate hands-free at any time, like an iPhone in his brain.

Ichirou’s bewilderment and panicky reactions are always a great source of laughs, and this is no exception, as Andou recommends Ichirou test the range of their comms, which he does by launching himself into orbit. An spacewalking astronaut spots him; whether this will be trouble later depends on whether there was any kind of video feed.

Back to Hiro, who doesn’t have much to do besides “watch” TV and surf the internet, specifically chat rooms like “2chan”. He gets sucked in and is unable to “turn off”. The online dialogue is naturally quite vicious, and in his absence, it turns against his mother, who is so upset and ashamed she commits suicide.

Hiro learns this on a breaking news graphic during a comedy show he was actually managing to laugh at. Turns out there’s no escape from his torment, even when he launches himself high into the sky to scream. As I said last week, losing his mother would mean losing the one thing keeping him tethered to a degree of humanity—though we’ll see if Shion steps in to fill that role.

My only nit to pick this week: Why didn’t Hiro locate and rush to his mother the moment the news dropped she’d committed suicide? You’d think he would have at least tried to resurrect her. Then again, if she was totally dead at that point, perhaps even Ichirou and Hiro’s healing powers can only go so far.

Hiro intends to take revenge on those who caused and celebrated the death of his mother. He slaughters a media circus outside his father’s house, sparing his father, despite his role in abandoning his mother for another woman. I guess he still has some boundaries.

However, there are certainly some boundaries that he can easily break through—like the boundary between the legion of trolls and real-life, real-time consequences for their words and attitudes.

Targeting a particularly nasty chatroom, a member of which gave the media his address and name, he first hacks in and tells them that he’ll kill them all. Then he kills the one who ratted him out (even though he insists he was only trolling), then systematically kills each and every member of the room.

The nature of their real-life isolation from each other made it impossible for anyone to credibly warn anyone else, and the speed with which Hiro works makes it impossible for anyone to even process what the hell is happening, let alone defend themselves.

While these trolls were undeniably assholes, they didn’t really deserve to be executed, and Hiro certainly wasn’t the one to pass judgment on them, considering the extent of his own crimes. The grand irony of it all is that if only he hadn’t been caught, Hiro might’ve actually stopped killing; and redirected his life to protecting and providing for the mother who bore him.

Inuyashiki – 05

Ando may have ended his friendship with Hiro, but in the eyes of the school, the two of them killed the guys who were bullying them, despite the absence of any physical evidence. The rumors take Hiro and Ando’s motives, the fact that just the right people died, and connect the dots. Of course, they’re only half-right. Ando had nothing to do with the killings, and he certainly didn’t ask Hiro to go so far to protect him.

After some aimless searching on the internet, Ando finds an uptick in “medical miracles” nearby, and remembers Hiro can heal people. At first he wonders if Hiro is the one both killing and saving people, but then considers that maybe there’s someone else out there with his abilities, only doing good instead of evil.

Remembering Hiro mention his superhuman hearing, Ando cries out for help…and a shirtless Ichirou is at his door in moments. It clearly relieves Ando to no end that Ichirou can do what he does. It means that perhaps they have a fighting chance of stopping Hiro – something both agree must happen.

Perhaps sensing that viewers needed a bit of a break from the hard stuff, this Inuyashiki doesn’t have any home invasion, grisly murders, or sexual assaults. Instead, much of the episode focuses back on Hiro, who seems to be taking a break from the home invasions as it’s all over the news.

His classmate Shion confesses to him, even after he calls her “pube-head”, and he thanks her and walks away. But I imagine Shion isn’t going anywhere.

We also get a closer look at his family life. Specifically, the fact his father and mother are divorced, and his father has a big fancy house and a whole other family. He attends his stepbrother’s birthday, then goes back to the tiny, drab apartment he and his mom share.

ne night, Hiro wakes from a dream that he gets a papercut, indicating he’s human again—something he dearly wants—his mom tells him she has terminal cancer and a month to live, so suddenly it’s a good thing he’s not human.

Ichirou insists to Ando that he’s no true hero; he does the heroic things he does like saving people because he’s afraid that his ability to do that is secondary to the overarching reality: that he is a machine built for killing and destruction.

Ando doesn’t agree with that assessment. He’s certain—as we are—that Ichirou is a true hero (the humbler the better), and they fly to a dump where Ando has Ichirou practice using his physical abilities, which certainly require fine-tuning after he makes a giant crater. (I loved the little chat the two were having on the way; with Ando complimenting Ichirou’s daughter.) Later, Ando accompanies him to a hospital and witnesses him saving a boy’s life firsthand, further galvanizing his opinion that he’s a hero.

While consoling his mom with a hug, Hiro succeeds in totally curing her cancer, and decides he’ll use his abilities to support her from now on. He lies about having invested his part-time job pay and made 3 million yen, and uses that cash to get them a new, fancy apartment with a view. His mom is grateful…but also a little scared. She should be.

After all, I can’t forgive Hiro for the crimes he’s already committed any more than Ando or Ichirou can. They are quite literally unforgivable, which means Hiro tries to skip ahead to redemption way too early.

When he hears his mother condemn the monster being reported on the news, he tries to come clean, only to find his mother incapable of understanding what he’s talking about. But it does fill him with guilt, to the point he resolves to stop killing.

That’s great to hear, but it doesn’t change the fact he’s already killed…a lot, and horribly. He must answer for that, which is why I was happy the cops showed up in force to arrest him. With his mother standing right there watching, there’s no way he could unleash his abilities on them. If he did, he would likely lose her (even if she isn’t killed in the fracas) the last person tethering him to his humanity.

As for who the “material witness” is, it’s strongly implied to be Ando, again doing what he can to help Ichirou stop him, but I wouldn’t rule out Shion, the girl he scorned, either. Whoever it was, Hiro is in deep shit…all of his own making.

Inuyashiki – 04

Inuyashiki’s fourth episode opens with a ruthless, towering yakuza boss ordering his men to dispose of the naked body of an overdosed woman on his bed, then making another yakuza perform oral sex on him as a form of submission. So…not a good guy.

Then things switch gears completely to the diminutive but lovely Fumino and her boyfriend Satoru, who love each other deeply and agree to get married and have kids. As nice as all that is, I immediately suspected this was either a flashback, and Fumino was that body, or she’s the yakuza boss’ next victim.

The latter turns out to be the case, as Fumino is suddenly abducted while walking home, and wakes up naked on the boss’ bed. He immediately gets on top of her, telling her he’ll “make her his”, but Fumino fights back, getting away and even managing to slash the brute’s wrist with his own katana. While his men tend to his wound she slips out.

She manages to get all the way back to Satoru’s worried-sick arms, but it’s not long before the boss, named Samejima, and his henchmen break into their apartment. Satoru begs for his and Fumino’s lives, promising to pay any price, no matter what it takes, but his pleas fall on deaf ears, and Samejima picks him up by the throat and starts to choke him out.

Enter the Hero, Ichirou, who no doubt heard what has been transpiring and will not have it. After sending the henchmen flying, he puts Samejima in a bear hug, but “shuts down” when a clip is emptied in his head. When he wakes up, it’s just him and a nearly-dead Satoru.

When his magic body won’t heal him, Ichirou uses CPR to revive him, and then uses Satoru’s phone to locate Samejima, who is enjoying a meeting with other yakuza bosses at a luxurious inn.

While his initial encounter with Samejima was not fruitful, Ichirou has clearly gotten the hang of flying and forcing his way through crowds. When Samejima takes him aside, Ichirou does what he should have done the first time: sock the guy in the face.

The other yakuza respond by emptying clip after clip into Ichirou with automatic weapons, but it only stuns him. He activates his flight mode, targets everyone in the inn, and takes out all of their eyes with a fusillade of particle beams.

It’s wholesale justice; Ichirou laying down the law, and before leaving, Ichirou makes sure he properly verbalizes what he’s done: deprived all of them of the means to walk, eat, see their children’s and grandchildren’s faces, touch them ever again…or even take their own lives.

Rather than execute them, he hopes they’ll live long lives, in such a state that he hopes they one day feel remorse for the horrible things they’ve done. I for one am not that optimistic, but at least they’ll won’t hurt anyone—including his family—ever again. The cycle of dead bodies on beds has been stopped; at least with this clan. Obviously, there are many others.

After contacting those watching her with Samejima’s phone, Ichirou locates Fumino, apparently heals her of the harm done by the drugs, and flies her back to her love, Satoru.

I’ll point out that Satoru is nothing special in the looks or money department—indeed, he’s very much a young Ichirou—but love, like that yakuza scum, is blind. Satoru and Fumino have good and gentle souls, and I was bowled over with relief and joy to see them reunite.

Ichirou slinks off into the night, claiming he’s “nobody special”, but in reality, he was this couple’s savior. It’s good to see him getting better at this hero thing, especially not getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of evil in the world and the impossibility of stamping it all out. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do as much as you can, and he will.

And so, Inuyashiki continues its M.O. of putting its audience through hell before showing them a glimpse of heaven. Whether it was the intro of Ichirou as a feeble sadsack or the stunningly awful but thankfully temporary twist in Fumino’s fate, the show has no qualms about putting characters and viewers alike through the ringer, but rewards us for sticking around by delivering breathtakingly righteous justice to evildoers.

Only Shishigami Hiro has escaped retribution…so far. But the strongest yakuza boss in the world is a cakewalk compared to Hiro. If Ichirou can’t defeat him and he can’t defeat Ichirou, they’ll have to figure…something else out.

Inuyashiki – 03

As soon as Hiro realizes the old man he killed wasn’t effected by his “air gun”, he bolts, and by bolt I mean launch into the sky and scream off like a fighter jet. Thus, the big standoff between him and Ichirou is postponed. But as he wakes up from a nightmare of the death he witnessed, Ichirou knows he’ll have to find and confront him sometime.

This boy is like him, but whether his powers have twisted him into a monster, or he was always a sociopath and only now has the means to do as he pleases, Ichirou knows he’s the only one who can stop him. Essentially, some whippersnapper needs an ear-boxing.

Hiro isn’t the first evil, nor is he the only evil in the world, or even in the vicinity of Ichirou’s home and work; far from it. You don’t need to be killed and reconstructed by an advanced alien race to be a dickbag that doesn’t care about anyone or anything, as evidenced by the kids who attacked a homeless man, or a group of athletic young toughs who plan to kill a man for daring to tell them to wait in line.

Like any and every great hero, Ichirou doesn’t buy into a world where the strong unrelentingly prey on the weak. Why should he? He may be one of the two strongest beings on the planet. No, with strength comes not carte blanche, but noblesse oblige. Just as Hiro was a bad person before getting reconstructed, Ichirou was always a good and just man.

It’s only now, like Hiro, that he’s able to act on his kind and virtuous nature. When it looks bad for the poor man surrounded by much larger ones, Ichirou takes out the trash. But he doesn’t kill anyone, nor is there any malice in his actions; only a desire to stop a great wrong from being committed, and ensure the safety of those who cannot ensure it themselves.

Once his “Grampy-sense” detects a family struggling to escape a house fire, he wills the machinery within his back to come out and propel him to the danger in time to save them. He does so by singing the theme to Astro Boy.

At first, his built-in jetpack is a little too much to handle; he screams bloody murder as he’s flung every which way, a scene that’s as awesome as it is frikkin’ hilarious. In a show that gets as intense as this one, it’s nice to know we’ll always have some moments of levity.

He gets the hang of it pretty quickly, and manages to save not only the crying children’s father, but their grandmother as well. Instead of thanks and praise, he asks that they not mention him to the authorities, and having just been miraculously saved by him, one hopes they would respect his wishes.

Ichirou is an unconditional hero to all, not because he can, with his wondrous new powers, but because he feel he must. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he stood by and did nothing when his actions can make a positive difference in the world. Compare this to his pre-transformation, when he was just trying to maintain, and was diagnosed with terminal cancer for his trouble. A man of inaction, no longer is he.

Hiro, while a monster, seems to remain tied to his humanity through his best friend Andou, whom he finally convinces to come to school, promising to protect him. He is, or at least is trying to be, a hero of one…unfortunately for the rest of the world, not to mention Andou.

When the bullies return to Andou’s desk and threaten him, Hiro wastes no time taking the wrist of their strongest and squeezing it hard enough to make him cry, apologize, and insult himself and his friends.

I can’t tell whether Hiro is using laser-sharp precision to apply just enough pressure to the guy’s wrist, or struggling as hard as he can not to squeeze to hard, snap his arm off and expose himself at school. I like how there’s uncertainty in something like that.

Hiro takes Andou to the roof where the bullies initially told them to meet, but they already left with some girls. Hiro gives Andou some binoculars and starts pointing out into the distance and saying “BANG.” Eventually, Andou pans to where Hiro was “shooting”, and finds the four bullies dead, all shot in the head with invisible bullets that leave no trace; the scared-shitless girls having no idea what just happened.

It’s too far. Andou is a gentle soul; he can’t take this shit, and wastes no time rejecting Hiro and warning him to stay away when Hiro refuses to turn himself into the police. All of the things Hiro did to that point to impress Andou—humiliate then kill bullies, boast of his ability to nuke China with US missile, steal thousands of dollars from the ATM—only serve to disgust Andou and push him further away.

Their friendship is over, but Hiro reacts the same way he does to everything, save his brief encounter with Ichirou: calmly. Too, calmly, if you ask me. Without Andou to provide even a semblance of a tether, Hiro’s monstrous acts may only increase in scale and scope.

Inuyashiki likes to punch below the belt, as when an adorable mama cat and her kitten walk past a charmed Ichirou, only for the mom to get hit by a car right in front of him. Exhibiting uncommon goodness that makes one’s eyes well up, he takes the cat into his arms, even though he can’t do anything for her…then learns that he actually can.

Ichirou scans that dead cat and fixes her right up, and she and her kitten stride off like nothing ever happened, giving Ichirou the one thank-you he wished he always got: no thank-you at all. Ichirou is overcome with joy and gratitude for the gift he has been given, and immediately stops by a hospital to heal as many people as he can.

And yet, as he’s been going around left and right saving lives, his opposite Hiro is out there taking them, as if the universe itself were maintaining the balance from suddenly having two such immensely powerful beings in such close proximity. If both were evil killers, humanity would be toast, but Ichirou is as good as Hiro is bad.

Witness the ending, in which the camera mercifully doesn’t follow Hiro inside another house for another routine family-killing. It just stays there, frozen, and we realize just how goddamn quickly Hiro purges the house of all life before walking out, spotting two passing boys—clearly friends—running past, and thinks long and hard about killing them too.

By holding his fire, was he trying to prove to himself that he can control himself when he needs to even without Andou? Perhaps he still has a degree of restraint, owing to the same sense of self-preservation that induced him to escape from Ichirou. But that restraint can’t last.

The first two episodes introduced our characters: the third explored their powers further and illustrated how far they can take those powers—in both moral directions. Hiro seems to be on the path to ruin; Ichirou, on the path to sainthood. But in a universe of balance, perhaps neither will ever reach their destination.

Inuyashiki – 02

Last week I watched with intense interest and wonder as Iyunashiki suddenly received a new lease on life out of nowhere; this week we get to know the other person who was killed and reconstructed by the alien ship: Shihigami Hiro. Ironically, he’s not the hero, but the villain, as is made quite clear by the end of this episode.

With a calming, pleasant lilt to his voice (he is excellently voiced by live action actor Murakami Nijirou), and on a mission to convince his recently beat-up friend “Chakkou” to come back to school, at first Hiro doesn’t seem that bad…but when he mentions there’s a slasher who’s killed eight people, I knew immediately he was talking about himself, well before he opened his face to show Chakkou what he’s become.

Hiro demonstrates his new powers to a shocked, amazed, and slightly freaked-out friend: he kills a bird by pointing at it and saying bang; then makes all the TVs in an Ikebukuro electronics store broadcast porn. Harmless fun, right? Well, no…harming animals for no reason is a telltale sign of sociopathy, which  I’m willing to bet our lad had before his transformation.

The only thing that’s changed is that with his new body, he now has the ability to make his twisted impulses a reality. He can make dozens of cars crash into each other, and he can kill anyone by pointing at them and saying bang. He’s like a far more efficient Yagami Light, only without even a hint of justice.

His only glint of humanity is that he considers friends and family off-limits (at least for now), even if he couldn’t care less about anyone else, and offers to kill the one(s) who beat Chakkou, which Chakkou, not being a sociopath, obviously doesn’t want. Unfortunately, he has little choice in the matter; Hiro is a force of nature now and his appetites are formidable.

Case in point: in one of the grisliest, most fucked-up scenes I’ve seen in an anime in a long time, Hiro randomly picks a house and goes room-to-room executing its occupants: a mother by the stove, a father bathing with his young son (his body pins the boy under him so he drowns in the bath…just awful), and finally, the teenage daughter upon coming home.

The father and daughter have time to beg for their life, but Hiro gives them an order they can’t obey—don’t cry or beg for your life—and punishes them with death. First, he asks the girl his age if she reads any manga, and is momentarily excited that she likes One Piece and has a favorite character he approves of.

The casualness with which he carries out his rampage leaves no doubt: Hiro is an irredeemable monster that needs to be put down before more families suffer his wrath.

But with that body and the weaponry and defenses it contains, there’s only one person who can be the hero to slay this beast: Iyunashiki, the titular “Last Hero.”

Upon coming home, Ichirou can hear the last screams of the daughter Hiro is torturing, but the fact he still doesn’t have much luck is demonstrated when he gets stuck in traffic and is too late to save her. Clearly, he hasn’t explored the extent of his own abilities yet, or he would have, i dunno, run really fast or flown to her aid (unless his body doesn’t actually allow that).

In any case, upon inspecting the house and the family of victims, Ichirou discovers Hiro is still lingering there. Hiro assumes he’s the grandpa, and shoots him in the head before leaving, but Ichirou isn’t the grandpa, and while he was knocked down, the bang didn’t seem to cause any other damage.

I’d hope that with our hero meeting the villian, the slaughter of innocents will cease…or at least slow. But who am I kidding? These two are, at worst, equally matched, and with Ichirou’s clumsiness and Hiro’s give-no-fucks attitude, quite a bit of collateral damage will be in order. Hiro believes he’s a god. He won’t give that up easily. But neither will Ichirou.

P.S. While I love the visuals of the OP, the rap metal theme (which may owe a bit to Rage Against the Machine) and its English lyrics is a bit cheesy. Ah well. 

Inuyashiki – 01 (First Impressions)

Inuyashiki Ichirou has, at least to me, a pretty impressive name, but his life is depicted as…less impressive. Like Japan, he’s old. It’s worse: even though he’s just 58, he looks more like he’s in his 70s or 80s. His kids are in high school, and they’ve never been that impressed by him.

He finally makes enough money to buy his family a new house, and they’re underwhelmed by its size and the fact it’s next to (and in the shadow of) a much bigger house owned by their neighbor Oda, a successful manga artist.

Ichirou’s family abandons him and has dinner at a family restaurant (ironic) while he’s stuck with all the boxes.

Speaking of boxes, Inuyashiki Ichirou would seem to have checked off a lot of the ones he was expected to: got an education, a salaried job, a wife and two healthy kids. He finds a tossed-away dog and names her Hanaka, but the family just sees her as a nuisance and a burden.

He’s alone. So alone, when he’s cavalierly diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer and given three months to live by a doctor with one of the worst bedside manners I’ve ever seen, not one member of his family answers his phone calls.

He doubts they’d even cry if he told them; they’d probably just curse him for being so weak and frail and ineffectual. His daughter tells her friends he’s her grandfather, for Christ’s sake. This is a sad man on every level; thank god he has Hanaka to hug.

But while out walking her, he and another younger man with dark hair we only catch a glimpse of are apparently flattened by a crashed alien ship. Willing to take responsibility despite their tight schedule, Iyunashiki is painstakingly reconstructed with non-organic material.

He looks exactly the same, but Ichirou doesn’t feel right. He’s very thirsty; he no longer needs glasses; oh, and his arms, back, and head all retract to reveal various types of bizarre machinery, scaring the heck out of Hanaka.

I couldn’t help but think of the changes the MC of Parasyte went through, only rather than being infected with an alien parasite, Ichirou is only alive because the aliens were nice enough to rebuild his body, and mind, in perfect detail…only better.

One could say he’s been given great power, and with that comes great responsibility. When he encounters a gang of youths attacking a homeless man (who they call a “cockroach” with fireworks and with metal bats at the ready, Ichirou steps in to stop them.

First of all, I sorely hope roving gangs of kids beating up the homeless isn’t, like, a thing in Japan. That’s doubly distressing considering how much respect elders are supposed to be shown by youth in Japan, and how large a proportion of the population the elderly are becoming.

Ichirou is quickly beaten into the ground by the kids, who believe they’ve killed him and figure they might as well kill the homeless guy too. Honestly, this is the scum of the earth.

But in a hilariously, thoroughly satisfying, absolutely righteous climax to this sad tale of an old, weak, ineffectual man, his body acts on its own; targeting all the bad eggs Terminator-style, plotting firing solutions, and launching a non-lethal barrage of “fireworks” that spook the kids into scattering before they do any more harm.

Even better, his body’s OS uses its scan data to discover the identities of the young assailants and broadcasts a posted video of their activities on every screen in the city. They’re eventually found out and likely to be caught by the police and punished for their crimes. It’s probably better than they deserve; I was fully prepared for Ichirou to kill them.

But he’s not a killer. What he has become is a hero. More importantly, by risking his life to save another and becoming emotionally overcome by the weight of that sequence of events, Ichirou cries tears of joy. He may still look like a spent old man, but he’s never felt more alive, and I sincerely doubt this will be the last of his heroic acts.

Inuyashiki paints a pretty bleak picture of Japanese society, to the point it was pretty damn unpleasant to watch how Ichirou was treated by everyone in his life. The show is clearly on his side, and, well, so am I, even if I agree with his kids that the house he chose is a little depressing. It’s refreshing to see an anime for once not focusing a bunch of teenagers, instead starring a family man desperate to catch a break.

Due to the extreme nature of his transformation, he’ll likely be keeping this a secret from his family and everyone else, which means he’ll still have to play the role of the man he used to be. Hey, every hero has to have an alter-ego, right? They also have to have an arch-nemesis; my money’s on that younger man at the sight of the alien crash serving that role.