Last week we learned the youthful residents of “Heaven” were cut off from outside world. This week we learn they’re also horny as all get-out. Girls are making out, Mimihime is sending nude photos to Shiro, and Tokio likes Mimihime and yearns for Kona’s drawings, while she’s oblivious to her friend liking her.
Later, one of the more adventurous of them uses maintenance robots to climb up a column, but when they shut down he falls from a great height onto his back and is somehow completely fine. Between that and how nimble Kuku is, these kids are special in more ways than one. In the meantime, Tokio can’t stop thinking about the Outside.
On that Outside, Hiruko wakes up from her drugged slumber and rouses Maru; there’s a monster out there. The inn manager tells them to keep away but they believe they can take this guy. We then learn the manager doesn’t want them to kill the monster because she believes it merged with her son Yuto when it attacked him, and won’t hurt her.
This is promptly proven wrong when the monster slices her to bits right in front of Hiruko and Maru, and with the Kiru-Beam already out of power, Maru uses his special ability to grasp the monster’s Nokker-like core and pop it, causing instant death. This whole scene was gorgeously, starkly lit and animated, and the monster with its razor whips was scary as hell.
The next morning the two continue their journey to “Tomato Heaven”. Maru demonstrates he’s a good boy when he hesitates to retake the batteries they gave the now-dead manager. He’s rewarded with a hair-muss by Kiruko, which makes him blush. They then lower a raft kept afloat by jerrycans down a great cliff that leads to their destination. Neither of them know if there are sharks or crocs in the water, so they row as quickly as possible to land.
We learn that there’s someone else out there someone with Maru’s face, to whom he must administer a drug in order to presumably heal him of something. In a flashback, we learn that a dying young woman named Mikura was the one to sent Kiruko and Maru on their journey to the place called “Heaven”, and the Kiru-Beam to protect him.
He believes his look-alike will be in “Heaven”. Signs outside the “Tomato Heaven” farm compound warn that trespassers will be “killed mercilessly”, but when some farmers spot the girl and boy they’re a lot friendlier, and take them to their leader, Kusakabe. He leads a commune and a good portion of their crops is cannabis.
That night while having dinner, Kiruko and Maru learn that the farmers entertain themselves by getting high each night. Kiruko determines that the look-alike isn’t there becaue no one recognized Maru, but ironically someone recognizes her. He even has a photo of the person he calls Takehaya Kiriko, an electro-kart racer believed to have lost it after killing their brother in a race.
When Maru sees the photo, he’s amazed by the similarity to Kiruko, who insists she’s not that person. They then spot the same three-footed bird logo on a box that is on the Kiru-Beam, but the stoner farmers aren’t really sure where the box came from. The bottom line is, this isn’t the Heaven they’re looking for.
That night, Kiruko and Maru take a boat back to Tokyo (a service I’m surprised exists in such a dog-eat-dog world), and Maru admits he doesn’t care about finding Heaven anymore. He just wants to live on the farm with Kiruko, to whom he confesses and then suddenly leans in to try to kiss her.
Not only is Kiruko not interested in farming and getting high for a living, but she also politely rejects Maru’s advance and confession. Then she tells him something neither he nor I expected: while she has a woman’s body, her mind is that of a man. Now we know why she tried to kiss herself in the mirror last week. Could it be Kiruko really is Takehaya Kiriko, or her brother?
The two end this episode having hit a dead end with the farm and no closer to the Heaven of Tokio, Mimihime, et al. But regardless of whether and when they do reach that place, I’m enjoying the 86-style split narratives in wildly different settings, where despite those differences teenage hormones are running amok.