Kakushigoto – 06 – Pride and Privilege

Someone keeps giving Hime expensive backpacks every year, despite the fact her dad already bought her one. Because she’s a kind and gentle soul, Hime tries to wear both at once, inspiring Kakushi. But to him, giving a kid a backpack is a privilege that must be earned and appreciated, not an obligation to be fulfilled.

When this philosophy is applied to the manga industry, Kakushi imagines a kind new world where everything is a privilege to be grateful for, whether it’s the artists being grateful for the privilege of having their art published, or the readers being grateful for the privilege of that art. But when taken too far, Kakushi ends up overextending himself, having accepted the privilege of too much extra work. Rasuna thinks he sounds like a corporate slave, but as he’s self-employed he’s more of a “man-slave”. 

We eventually learn that the mysterious serial backpack provider is Kakushi’s father-in-law, who judging from the Toyota Century is some kind of big shot. Kakushi still seems to hold a grudge for the man’s reluctance to allow his daughter to marry a gag manga. But now that Kakushi has been a father for ten years, he would feel the same way if Hime brought someone like him home. As Kakushi says, he’s “a freakin’ paradox.”

One of the extra tasks Kakushi took on to realize his Kind World was an autograph session, which is booked the same time as his day-date with Hime at the very popular and sought-after Kidzanira, where kids get to try out a bunch of adult jobs in a controlled environment. Fortunately, the bookstore where he’ll be signing autographs and the Kidzanira are in the same mall. But that also means a risk of Hime finding out his job, so his assistants take turns keeping an eye on her.

During the morning session Kakushi is convinced everyone in line is either someone he knows (Ichiko), a friend of someone he knows, or people paid by his editor to stand in line. The way he phrases his questions to the latter group furthers his misinterpretation of events. It’s not until after spotting a poster for a famous painter that he realizes that those in the line are there because they are legitimate fans who love and respect his work. Even a father and young son are united in their love of Balls of Fury.

Just as his confidence returns and he yells “I’m a manga artist, damnit!”, his exuberance accidentally knocks down a partition, revealing Hime in a cloud of smoke. For a moment it looks like the gig’s up, but Ichiko swoops in with a tremendously creative save, telling Hime she and Kakushi are at the “Kidzanira for adults” trying out different jobs. Even so, Hime doesn’t even recognize her dad in his manga uniform, so he didn’t have to worry. What he may have to worry about? Hime wanting to work in a bookstore!

Fast forward to the future, where the older Hime opens the “17” box to reveal envelopes full of manuscripts. At first she seems unmoved by the manga, which is about a father, mother, and daughter. It’s all so boring and ordinary…which is why as she continues to read the tears start welling up. There may not be swords or magic on those pages, but there is a bunch of real life; a life very familiar to Hime.

This closing scene is one more emotional “bomb” that had been intricately constructed in the “past” sequences that preceded it. All those mundane moments of her and Kakushi just living life together given gain deeper resonance in the future where he’s suddenly absent.

Despite Kakushi’s reservations—not to mention his father-in-laws about him—Hime may well fall for someone like him. Not because that person will be a gag mangaka, but because they’ll be kind and loving, and consider loving and caring for her to be an honor and a privilege…because that’s exactly what it is.

Kakushigoto – 05 – Bathrobe Party!

Tomaruin has signed Kakushi up as a judge for a manga competition. Despite his gag manga specialty, he actually proves quite astute at judging his assistant Keshi’s manga (which is far too verbose), impressing the other assistants. He’s initially against being a judge, but convinced by Hime that he should do his duty, or “society will crumble.”

Tomaruin makes a big mess of things, first by almost burying Hime in boxes of submissions (though only one submission per box, Amazon package-style), then adding “(LOL)” to the end of every one of Kakushi’s published assessments, leading to internet ire about him not taking the duty seriously.

Speaking of duty, we see Kakei delivering manuscripts to the hilltop house Hime visits in the future, since it’s Kakei’s turn for that particular duty. The sight of a chore wheel confirms that Kakushi, his wife, and Hime lived together there once.

When the editorial board demands the last eight pages of a manuscript be redrawn, Tomaruin seals Kakushi up in a fancy hotel room, where he’s to stay until the work’s done. He’s worried about Hime being lonely (and unattended), so asks Nadila to stay past her usual time. When she can’t, Tomaruin volunteers to watch her. But for him, “her” is Nadila, on whom he has a crush, not Hime.

Kakushi is surprised when Sumita exits the shower of his hotel room, but she came to help him with his work. Because he can’t work in a suit, he changes into a bathrobe, and Sumita follows suit. As other assistants arrive to help throughout the night it gradually becomes a bathrobe party.

Meanwhile, Nadila arrives to watch Hime (her other client canceled) but Naru is already there, having run away from a fight with her parents. She and Nadila have a fun sleepover with Hime.

Tomaruin continues stalking Nadila until he’s caught by Ichiko (seemingly always on predator patrol), and Nadila, Hime, and Naru all identify him as someone different based on their past dealings with him.

While this sequence is fun, and it’s good Hime wasn’t lonely, Kakushi should probably be a bit more on top of, ya know, who comes and goes in his house, and who watches his daughter!

Another night while watching an athletic medal ceremony, Hime presents her dad with a gold medal she made. Kakushi knows that it’s likely that one day Hime will fall in love with someone and Kakushi will be relegated to “silver medal” status, but he writes the date on the medal so that when that time comes—hopefully years from then—he’ll be able to bear it.

Fast-forward to the future, when older Hime recalls when her dad wrote on the back of the medal she gave him. She realizes these newer boxes weren’t prepared by her mom, but by her dad. Tearing up, she pulls out the “17” box and hugs it, as if she were hugging a part of her dad…who it seems stills holds the “gold” for now.

Because really, she is. That eliminates any lingering doubt that she’s now an orphan. I wonder if we’ll ever learn what happened to Kakushi and more about what future Hime will do. Perhaps in the future timeline some combination of Ichiko, Naru, Nadila, and the assistants continue to figure into her equation.

Kakushigoto – 04 – Somewhere Far Away

This week’s time leap occurs at the beginning, with 18-year-old Hime explaining that the boxes her mother left her were full of things she’d need for the age labeled. Because everything was pre-stored, some if not most of those items were out of date by the time Hime attained those ages.

But she doesn’t mind. Thanks to the boxes, she’s able to experience a unique closeness to her mother she couldn’t have experienced. They serve as both time capsules and something like prophesies about a future Hime’s mother couldn’t possibly see…and yet at the same time, could.

But it’s back to the more lighthearted present-day of the show, when an assistant notes Kakushi is signing unimportant documents with “Kazushi”, assuming it’s his real name. However, Kakushi is his real name, and used it when he got published, so it’s his pen name as well.

When Kakushi’s editor Tomaruin goes to the EiC to declare his artists’ wish to change his pen name, the higher-ups are worried Kakushi has fallen in with fortune-tellers who may brainwash him not just to change his name, but start a cult! While having lunch with Ichiko, considers what it would be like for people to name their children after characters he created…only to find a woman named a dog after one of them…purely coincidentally.

Also coincidentally, Hime gets into onomancy (divination through names) and determines that while her pop has 5-star luck in just about everything, he should avoid the artistic fields at all costs. Later, Tomaruin stops by Kakushi’s house to find Hime engaging in Nadila’s native version of fortune-telling.

The editor is immediately smitten with Nadila, and returns to the bosses with the glazed cult member look, declaring his new name is “CEO”. But at the end of the day, Hime tells her dad they can rest assured, because there’s a guardian spirit watching over them both. That spirit is, of course, her mom.

When Hime comes to her father with an art assignment and asks for help with the background, the subject of “can dad draw?” comes up, something Kakushi would really rather avoid. That said, his assistant worry about his background skills as he hasn’t had to draw them in years (to say nothing of coloring).

While at first Kakushi wanted to balance helping Hime create an impressive work of art and exposing the fact he’s a professional artist, the assistants bring him back down to earth, making him raise the question of whether he can cut it with non-manga art after doing nothing but manga for so long!

The answer is, well…not really! Not because he’s particularly bad at backgrounds or coloring, but because his manga background unconsciously influences his style. He discovers this when on a lark he attends an art class run by none other than…Future Idol Senda Naru, who assumes he’s there to see her!

Naru is pretty good herself, and it’s she who gets Kakushi to realize manga has been so absorbed throughout his artistic language, he’ll sketch a stone bust like a shounen hero without even trying. But this is all moot, as Ichiko informs him when he leaves the class: he’s not allowed to help Hime with her drawing at all!

Now Kakushi isn’t worried about embarrassing Hime with manga-style backgrounds, but of Ichiko and Hime’s peers questioning her integrity. To avoid any question of him directly aiding Hime with her drawing, he arranges to have Ichiko accompany them to the zoo.

Ichiko rightly sees this as a date, belieiving Kakushi wants to keep them at a distance in case people see a teacher on a date with a student’s parent and get the wrong idea. Of course, this is the wrong idea, and Kakushi is just trying to protect Hime’s honor, but by the end of the date Ichiko thought the date was wonderful!

Kakushi’s odd date parameters also cause Ichiko to pay a different price with her other students: when she tells them her date is “far away” while looking wistfully up in the sky, they assume she’s gone crazy from the grief of a dead lover, and promise to behave in class from now on!

The myriad misunderstandings—some positive, some negative—are all a matter of the perspective of the observers. And so it is with Hime’s drawing: when the tigers don’t come out of their cave, she decides to draw herself and her dad from the tigers’ perspective—an idea both beyond her years and just the kind of creative thinking a kid would come up with organically.

Kakushi proceeds to buy the most gaudy, expensive frame for the drawing and hangs it prominently on the wall, despite Hime’s believe it disrupts the feng shui. Kakushi finds something very familiar about the drawing. Sure (and eerily) enough, the composition is identical to a photo he and his wife had taken with baby Hime at the same tiger enclosure, on the same bench.

In that regard Hime wasn’t just drawing what the tigers in the cave saw, but what her mother saw from her perspective “far away”, up in the sky: her daughter and father safe and happy, returning to a spot they once all shared. And so even without a time leap, the ending made me tear up all the same!

Kakushigoto – 03 – The Accidental Harem

I came into Kakushigoto hoping it would be a lightweight feel-good slice-of-life father/daughter comedy. Yet every time it jumps to a future where an 18-year-old Hime has apparently lost her father pushes it into striaght-up drama territory. Everything in the present and 10-year-old Hime exhibits a thin layer of wistfulness, lending even mundane or comedic scenes more emotional weight, like the shading of a manga frame.

This week only begins (and doesn’t end) with a time leap, so we can still ease into the present-day slice-of-lifeness. But we learn something definitively that I had been suspecting: the house at the top of the hill is the exact same plan as the one 10-year-old Hime lived in. Kakushi apparently had a copy of the house built to the exact specs of the older one…where perhaps he and his wife lived before Hime?

In Mangaland, Kakushi’s entire staff has injuries, a stroke of bad luck and coincidence, so his editor hires a substitute replacement. The regular assistants are impressed with his speed and efficiency, but Kakushi deems him “too efficient” for an assistant.

That confuses them at first—how could an assistant be too fast and efficient?—until they find that assistant published his first work. Once an assistant has reached a certain level of skill, there’s nothing stopping them from striking out on their own, without even mentioning how he worked for Kakushi for a few days or so!

As for the curious design of the house, Hime’s friends wonder out loud if Hime and her dad are poor (of course, one of them has an elevator and concierge in her house, so wealth is surely relative). Hime had never thought about finances before, but takes it upon herself to pinch every penny.

Kakushi comes home on a hot summer day to find the A/C suspiciously turned off and Hime pressing her body against the nice, cool floor. He proceeds to tell her he makes far more than the average salaryman, almost betaying that he’s not really a salaryman before recovering and saying he’s more like upper middle management. He also almost explains why the house looks the way it does, but stops himself.

Since Hime found not only clothes but age-appropriate cooking recipes in her 10-year-old box (her mom really went the extra mile), Kakushi allows Hime to cook with the housekeeper. Turns out the housekeeper is from Indonesia, and so puts an Indonesian flair on the recipe. This mirrors a situation at work where the studio is digitized and they receive a rainy day from a remote artist, only it’s an Indonesian day, not a Japanese one.

Hime’s school sports festival arrives, and Kakushi tries to get himself in shape should he have to do anything athletic. There’s a fun bit discussing the various muscle groups used while reading manga. Then he has trouble drawing a high school girl character aspiring to be an idol, only to come home and find a high school girl aspiring to be an idol in his house, the guest of her first-ever fan, Hime.

The girl, Senda Naru, is so surprised that an adult (and a man) is so eager to hear her story (because Kakushi needs material for his manga), that by the time they part ways she’s developed a bit of a thing for him. She won’t be the first!

As Kakushi openly expresses his worries about his daughter not having a mother around, he inadvertently compliments both his cooking teacher You and the local florist Kumi. When the clothier sells his salaryman disguise and he has to go out in public in white tie like a groom, he runs into Rokujou, who assumes he’s proposing and wigs out.

By the time the festival rolls around, Hime has an entire cheering section composed of her dad, and his rather sudden but diverse harem: You, Kumi, Rokujou (who turns into a demon when she sees Kakushi with the other women), and the aspiring idol Naru. Yet Hime is more bemused than appreciative; for all of Kakushi’s worries, Hime isn’t missing a mother in the slightest. If anything, she’d rather spend more time with just him!

The fact she’s so naturally mature about these things at ten years old (not to mention how quickly she learns how to clean and cook) makes be believe that despite having neither parent alive, 18-year-old Hime is going to be just fine. That means Kakushi did a great job, despite his insecurities … which makes the time leaps a little less sad.

Sagrada Reset – 13

After seeing the monster, and being told the monster is a monster by Dream Haruki, Kei wakes up…and that’s it for the monster this week. After a new, jauntier OP with a latin-inspired beat (replacing the old whispery one), the story jumps from place to place and opaque, metaphor-laded conversation to conversation seemingly involving everything and anything but the monster.

Kei talks with the revived Sumire about how he’s happy in the current situation (what with her being alive), but due mostly to his retained memories of the process by which she returned, it still doesn’t feel real to him, and he doesn’t see how he can stay living in that kind of world forever. Sumire reads it as a kind of rejection.

There’s also precious little Michiru in this episode, as Sumire visits her in the dream world and talks about things she’s not that interested in, and which Chiruchiru (in blue bird form) warns Sumire not to bring up around her. Chiru wants to protect Michiru by not upsetting her with things like the fact there’s a way to save her from her present state.

Rather than Michiru or the monster, Kei, Haruki, and Nonoo investigate the “Stray Cat House Man” (SCHM) who, the way he’s described, is nothing less than one of the most powerful beings in the world, as his ability is to write “The Script”, which governs all people, things and events in the world, even resets and predictions of the future.

He’s even ahead of the Witch or Sumire in that their ability is governed by his. There’s also the fact he’s more of a humble vessel for the ability than an arrogant braggart; after all, the pen in his hand moves on its own, filling books. His physical body has deteriorated to the point he can no longer write, so starting with Book No. 852, he’s worked in the dream world exclusively.

Nonoo remembers him (and he her) from their interactions about five years ago, when she was the only visitor to his house, and whom he tried in his own small way to guide her on how to exist, live, and be happy in the world. In the present she tells him he “saved” her, because now she has people like Kei and Haruki she can call friends.

Kei goes through the manuscripts for The Script, but can find nothing before No. 852, while Sumire instructed him to find and carefully read No. 407. That, and all manuscripts before SCHM entered the dream world, are in the possession of the Bureau, members of which arrive to basically cordially kick Kei out of the SCHM’s house.

Once Kei leaves, the leader of the Bureau members there isn’t coy about his true feelings about Kei: he thinks his ability is a nuisance, especially when used in concert with Haruki or others, and he’s generally an eyesore he’d like to “snuff out” if necessary. Who knows what that entails (he joked about stabbing him in the heart, but was that just a joke), but it’s clear this cour has a more reliable villain than Oka Eri.

Like many earlier episodes of the first cour and a few there in the middle, I only really understood a little more than half of everything that was said and done, but as I refuse to let my enjoyment of this deeply intriguing and offbeat show be governed by my level of understanding, that’s not really of great concern.

Still, moments like Kei calmly pointing out to Haruki and Nonoo that they should pay more attention to the fact they’re wearing skirts while crawling through a drain to get into the SCHM’s house, or Sumire’s apparent displeasure with how things are with Kei (hinted at in the new ED as well), are easier to understand and appreciated.

With all the different players and agendas in play, combined with the new dream world setting, Sagrada Reset is poised to have an even more ambitious, and possibly more baffling, second cour. I’ll be here to attempt to make some kind of sense of it.

Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry – 01 (First Impressions)

Fall 2015 is the season of battling magical school anime, and after previously sampling the very similar Gakusen Toshi Asterisk, I’m going to come right out and declare Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry the week one winner, and it wasn’t really close. Rakudai had the smarter, fleeter, more engaging intro, and featured far stronger characters and an actual arc. It even handled fanservice better, as Ikki manages not to use any boobs as handrests.

Stella Vermillion, like Asterisk’s Julis, is also a pink-haired princess with high-ranked magical skills and initially reacts in a similar fashion when Ikki, a much lower-ranked student accidentally peeps on her. But her later reactions are a lot more nuanced, as she’s actually impressed by Ikki’s “manliness”, and is disarmed by his appeal to her rare beauty.

The show is also pretty cheeky in witholding the reason Stella (finely voiced by Ishigami Shizuka) was even in Ikki’s room changing. The director of the school, in an effort to shake things up, brings together the strongest and weakest Magic Knights at her school by making them roommates. When the two quibble over house rules, she also suggests they settle matters with a mock battle.

The method in her madness becomes clear when the two knights clash in the arena. Ikki may have the least natural talent, but he works uncommonly hard to overcome his weaknesses.

Stella, who came to Japan to escape the box labeled “Genius” her people put her in, wants to prove she works hard too, and isn’t just gliding on her natural talent.

To Stella’s surprise, not only is Ikki not a pushover, but he notices how hard she works in the way she’s fighting. He also steals her sword skills in order to keep up, and uses a once-per-day trump card to nullify her coup-de-grace and nab the victory.

In the hospital, Stella realizes she wasn’t any better than her legions of worshipers, putting Ikki in a box labeled “The Worst One.” But as the director asserts, and what is proven in their battle, is that there’s no reliable way to evaluate Ikki’s true strength. And there’s value in sticking around someone like him if she wants to grow as a knight.

In a nice inversion of the scene where he walked in on her dressing, Stella almost grows up too much when she comes home to find Ikki asleep, and can’t help but touch him, curious as to how a man really feels. He’s a twist-and-turner in bed, so she gets snagged by one of his arms, and seems on the verge of having a crisis when he wakes up asking what she’s doing on top of him.

And that gets to the strength of Rakudai so far: its central couple, Stella and Ikki. When they meet they misunderstand one another, but they never outright hate each other, and by the end, they fully embrace sharing a living space and learning more from one another.

This is partly because Stella lost the duel and is merely honoring their arrangement, but also because she gained a lot of respect for Ikki, now that she knows more about him. And while Ikki does slip up early, he is, well, very chivalrous. This isn’t rocket science: decent characters can go a long way towards making a decent show.