Kyousougiga – 10 (Fin)

Koto and Myoue travel to the celestial plane and meet their grandfather, God, who tells them they’ll be the ones to replace Inari, who will then disappear. Not liking the sound of that Koto and Myoue leave the plane and travel through a time continuum until she finds Inari and Lady Koto and busts in with her hammer. As she beats up Inari for being selfish, Myoue restores Lady Koto. God agrees that the thirteenth plane will be allowed to exist, while Inari will not disappear and remain with his family.

Just as it always announced at the start of every episode (or in this case, at the end), Kyousougiga was a story of love, life, and rebirth; with the latter two being possible because of the first, a love that started with a rabbit that became a beautiful woman. Inari states that before her, he merely wandered the world aimlessly, separate from it. Lady Koto and their children became his real world, and the start of his real life. He went on to make a common mistake family heads often make, out of stubbornness and obligation: to arrange the future in which his offspring would live; a future that didn’t include him, as he’d pass his duties to them.

Armed with the wherewithal to challenge his unilateral decisions was Koto. Just as she wanted to spend a little more time with Myoue before carrying out his death wish, Koto loved her father too much to let him quietly disappear. This results in climactic celestial family squabble, and ultimately, a happy ending for all. Inari meant the transfer of his heart and soul to be his final act of love to his children, but the only love Koto wanted was to experience the love of her family all in one piece, including him, sharing sunsets, meals, and other good times.

For all its whimsical extravagance of its fantastical setting, Kyousougiga always remained true to its staunchly human, immanently relatable themes of love and family. It was a story that left us as warm and fuzzy as, well, a rabbit.

Rating: 8 (Great)
Final Cumulative Rating: 8.400
MyAnimeList Score (as of 12/22/13): 8.08

Kyousougiga – 09

Koto pleads her case with the chief priest that the mirror world should survive. She doesn’t make any headway, but Inari embraces and praises her for becoming “the other [him he] always wanted”. He stabs her with his sword, putting her in a trance, and she starts to destroy all of the planes. Myoue wakes up in a cave with Kyouko and Kurama, who tells him he was always supposed to rule the mirrored city alone when he was ready. Armed with the beads that contain the power of creation, Myoue rushes to find Koto, snaps her out of her trance, to create a new beginning together.

It only comes as a minor surprise that Inari is indeed a god, the brother of the cheif priest, who was tasked with creating the twelve planes and looking over them for their “lazy dad.” Inari got bored with that existence and a bit too creative, resulting the thirteenth plane, which was outside of his mandate. When he finally returned, preceded by Koto, it was to put an end to the current order of things and start over. He instigated the end, which is in progress as of the end of this episode, while it’s up to Myoue to see to it there’s something after that end. As Kurama tells him in a subterranean pep talk, the world won’t change if he doesn’t.

Kurama’s always been the one to deliver him cold truths, from the time he says he and Yase are “false siblings” to the day their parents leave. It’s fitting that the big bro, false or not, is there to give a sulking Myoue a slap in the face. For so long Myoue’s been fixated on the past and his own denied death. But the truth is that life is gone and won’t be coming back. But he does have Koto, and his prayer beads, and he won’t let everything end the way Inari has set things up…”probably”. Inari pulls a bit of an infodump early on, and the score goes big and movie-like, almost bordering on sappy at times, but after last week’s standoff it’s good to see things on the right track to a favorable conclusion.

Rating: 8 (Great)

Kyousougiga – 08

As the Mirrored City continues to crumble, a portal opens and the Chief Priest of Koto and Inari’s organization arrives with his adjutant, declaring that the city, or “13th plane” was illegally created for Inari and Lady Koto’s own selfish purposes, and it must be destroyed to keep the other 12 planes from being destroyed. Aun and Inari’s familiars turn against him, and Lady Koto is wounded protecting him. Koto despairs at everything being her fault, but before the familiars can get to her Myoue shields her and snaps her out of it. With her hammer at the Chief Priest’s head, Koto demands he help her save her mom and the Mirrored City, or she’ll destroy all the planes herself.

“I feel no uncertainty. I know what’s most important to me.” So says Inari after smashing his fox mask, and with it the “observer” position he surpassed long ago. His boss isn’t moved and dismisses his speech as nonsense and stupidity, but then what he deems most important is far different than Inari. He seeks order and balance among the planes he looks over; the Mirrored City is an anomaly that threatens all that. But Family was what was most important to Inari, a family he was never meant to have but made anyway.

While out preserving the world he built for it, he and Lady Koto had a daughter, who inherited her mom’s not insignificant powers. Once Koto stops blaming herself for being born, it’s simply a matter of properly leveraging those powers to get what she wants: to save her family and preserve the city. There’s no shortage of people telling Koto how special she is, and the time has come to prove it. Is there a way to get what she wants without the rest of the universe suffering? Surely there must be.

Rating: 8 (Great)

 

 

Kyousougiga – 07

Koto returns safely to the Mirrored City with her mother Lady Koto in tow. After a reunion and tour of the city, Lady Koto says it’s time for her to go back, surprising everyone. She tells Koto to help her older brother Myoue, but later that night a distraught Koto breaks down in Myoue’s room. Meanwhile, a portal opens in Kurama’s temple, and Koto’s first “sensei” Inari emerges. He arrives at Myoue’s house and removed his mask revealing himself as the original Myoue, Yakushimaru’s adoptive father. As a result of his entrance, the Mirrored City starts to disintigrate.

For something as momentous as Myoue, Yase, Kurama and Koto’s mother returning after who knows how many years away, her return is surprisingly low-key. Koto and Yase are the ones most outwardly excited, but Myoue and Kurama are more reserved. She’s glad everyone is all right, is pleased with what they’ve done with the place, and asks forgiveness for being gone so long. But she doesn’t solve everyone’s problems; in fact, she creates totally new ones. The original Myoue must’ve sensed her arrival and came back himself, causing serious damage to the drawing in the real world and thus the Mirrored City.

So what, is he the bad guy all of a sudden? Is he improvising, or was this all part of his original plan? Did he even have a plan? Is the city toast? There are just three more episodes to answer those pressing questions, but for now, despite the foreboding tone of the ending, we’ll be cautiously optimistic. After all, the family is finally back together; how could that be bad? Also of note this week: Koto finally protesting being constantly used and asked to do things when nobody is willing to give her any answers about her past. With her sensei back in the picture, that might change.

Rating: 9 (Superior)

Kyousougiga – 06

Yakushimaru isn’t happy about being revived and adopted by Myoue and Koto (of the “monster temple”) and tries to kill himself again, to no avail. Gradually he gets accustomed to his new life and even starts to enjoy himself, as the family grows to five with Kurama and Yase. In the present, Koto confirms that Lady Koto is her mother. During the Mirrored City’s festival, Kurama and Yase bring Koto before the Council of Three against Myoue’s wishes. Kurama takes A and Un hostage and make Koto fight the robot Bishamaru, as the three siblings fight each other. Bishamaru’s mouth opens to reveal a portal to another dimension through which Koto falls, floating through space before being found by Lady Koto.

The more we learn of Yakushimaru’s past, the more it seems like he was the unwitting victim of a mad scientist, or rather mad priest. His rightful fate—the same fate as his original family—was torn from him, and a new, far more complicated fate assigned to him. That Myoue’s act was more one of selfishness than mercy. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been right to allow Yakushimaru to die, but making it so he can’t die ever? Keeping him from joining his family in the afterlife? Locking him in a world where more and more he and his siblings get on each others nerves as their methods for reaching their goals conflict? Yakushimaru didn’t sign up for any of this.

But he’s stuck. Kurama and Yase are in no hurry to die, and are done waiting for Myoue and Lady Koto to return. After sizing her up, they’ve determined that their ‘sister’ Koto and her magic hammer are the key to locating and reuniting with their parents. As Koto says, this all happens very fast, and there’s a striking contrast between the playful bliss of the siblings’ past and their over-the-top sparring in the present. Myoue’s beads, Yase’s brawn, and Kurama’s tech smash into each other in a brilliant amplification of rough-housing. They’ve remained children in their dream-world, and now they need a time-out and a scolding, so it’s fortunate Koto finds their mother after all.

Rating: 9 (Superior)

Stray Observations:

• Now all that past pomegranate imagery makes sense: Myoue drew a magic one and Lady Koto fed it to Yakushimaru to revive him.
• The rabbit, frong, and monkey drawings are taken straight from the real Choujuugiga scroll in Kouzanji.
• Nice touch: A and Un are stuck in a Nintendo game.
• There have been times in this show when we thought the background score was a little to loud or schmaltzy, but it worked perfectly this week, including return of the techno battle music from the Yase-centered OVA.

Kyousougiga – 05

In the past, a young Myoue watches his house burning, lamenting his parents, and commits seppuku, but Myoue Shounin find him and brings him home as his son, later passing the care of the temple to him. In the present, Myoue waits by the station for his parents to arrive; Kurama compares him to Hachiko. A frustrated Myoue lashes out at Koto, but after spending a night alone, finds her at the station. They take a scooter trip to the fields outside the city, where Myoue tells Koto the rabbit she’s looking for is probably his (adoptive) mom, and asks Koto to kill him when they find her.

The Kyousougiga OVAs that ran last year were only brief tastes of what was to come, but they were enticing ones. Even a year and several dozen series since we last watched the fourth, the gorgeous environs at the end of Myoue and Koto’s scooter ride remain clear in our minds. This week represents the last of the material the OVAs previewed, in which we delve into Myoue’s story, which proves more complex than either of his non-human siblings. In fact, after keeping him on the margins for the previous four episodes, this episode establishes him as the unequivocal heart of the entire show. Everything revolves around him, and he’s the product of his father saving him from that fire. It’s not crystal clear whether Myoue Shounin saved ‘Lil Myoue’s life back then, or if he somehow resurrected him (that was a lot of blood), but we know Myoue would surely have died without Shounin, hence no show.

Myoue got a new life, new parents, a new family, and a new home; the parents left, and he’s lived in Mirror Kyoto for a very very long time ever since, waiting for them to return. We see Myoue’s increasing fatigue with his unending life, and when Koto arrives with the “beginning and end” his father promised before leaving, he apparently believe’s Koto’s presence to be the beginning of his end. They’ll find the rabbit – his mother – and then he’ll be released of his immortal burden, having lived a full and wonderful life—unlike that suicidal boy surrounded by flame. Up to this point the world was so wondrous and fun and peaceful that it never occurred to us Myoue would be ready to move on to…whatever’s next, but there it is. The episode closes before we can see Koto’s reaction to his asking her to kill him, but we wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t okay with it.

Rating: 9 (Superior)

Next Week: A live-action tour of the temple that inspired the series. So lifelike!

Kyousougiga – 04

During a “station opening”, when the denizens of the Mirrored City throw all their unwanted items into the sky, a demon thief steals Yase Douji’s treasured teacup and throws it into the stream of detritus. Koto, A and Un join her retinue, but when they can’t find it, Koto convinces Kurama to provide a replacement. Yase loses her temper and grows into an enormous monster, but Koto subdues her with her hammer, from the handle of which hangs a stuffed rabbit Yase’s mother made her, which Kurama threw out years ago.

When we lose someone important to us, it’s natural to want to treasure an item or two as a symbol of that person. Yase, as is her wont as a demon, takes this practice to the extreme, having a massive custom storage facility built under her gaudy mansion to preserve virtually every object, big or small, that reminds her of her beloved mother. She lives in constant fear of tossing or losing anything, her teacup in particular, believing she’d also lose the memories those items evoke.

Kurama has a different take, and has no qualms about tossing out things that aren’t practically necessary. He believes throwing away the very items that mean the most to her can play a role in their mother’s return. Yase didn’t agree when he forcefully threw out the stuffed rabbit her mom made from the tatters of her yukata, and she still doesn’t agree in the present, at least until Koto arrives and quells her tantrum with a hammer sporting that very rabbit, another clue connecting Koto and Lady Koto.

Rating: 8 (Great)

Kyousougiga – 03

Koto visits the Kurama temple, lending Shouko her hammer, Aratama, and meeting with Shouko’s assistant Fushimi and the Chief Priest Kurama. In a flashback, Yakushimaru meets the siblings his father created for the first time. Kurama excels at his studies, calligraphy, and woodworking, and his father creates the Mirrored World so Kurama and Yase can visit the capital. Shouko loses her PSP, in a retelling of the second OVA. Meanwhile, Kurama is hopeful the arrival of Koto could lead to the fulfillment of his dream: to see the outside world.

This series is taking events from the earlier OVAs and adding material around them that augments and refines the overall story. It blends events in the present with Koto to events of the distant past with the three siblings, this time from Kurama’s perspective in both timelines. He was clearly designed to be a model older brother; when his siblings sobbed when their parents were suddenly gone, he took up the dual mantles of family head and watchful guardian of the town. He keeps Myoue and Yase in the loop, but he runs things.

Kurama sees Koto, the first-ever visitor to the Mirrored City, as his possible key to the outside world. He envied his brother’s actual humanity; and envies Koto’s as well. He’s pretty much achieved all he can in the Mirrored City; and yearns to leave the drawing and return to the real world he only had the slightest glimpse of as a child. That could have untold ramifications for both worlds, but we really can’t see Kurama as a villain executing a grand evil scheme here. He has just as much right to follow his dreams as Myoue, Yase, or Koto.

Rating: 8 (Great)

Kyousougiga – 02

This episode documents the young Koto’s life prior to entering the Mirrored Kyoto and becoming the ward of Myoue. Abandoned at a very young age, she was taken in and trained by Inari (AKA “The Fox”), and despite early complaints by his peers, she proves to have a great deal of talent. When Koto suddenly appears in the Mirrored Kyoto with her two familiars, A and Un, the Council of Three (the siblings Kurama, Myoue, and Yase), they debate whether she is related to them, or could actually be the reincarnation of their mother, who shares her name and eyes.

It’s just a fact of anime that whenever there are two characters with identical eye color (in an anime where not all characters have the same eye color, that is), it almost always means they’re related. So it’s no coincidence that lil’ Koto has the same red eyes as the departed Lady Koto or Myoue Shounin, just like it’s no coincidence that Inari also has the same color eyes. The narrator in the very first moments of the episode is also quite clear: “This is the story of one family’s love and rebirth.” Meaning Inari and Koto could well be Shounin and Lady Koto, reborn.

Mind you, the episode doesn’t come right out and confirm anything one way or the other, while the dream-like sequences of Koto and Inari in the secret room with the drawings of Mirror Kyoto and Koto the rabbit don’t make things much clearer. But whether she’s Myoue/Kurama/Yase’s mother or sister, she’s definitely a member of their family. Her appearance represents a sea change, both in their lives and in the world they preside over. The first major change since their parents left. We’ll see how each of them end up dealing with it.

Rating: 8 (Great)

Kyousougiga – 01

In ancient times, monk Myoue Shounin leaves Kyoto to resid in the mountains of Takao. What he draws can come to life, including a black rabbit named Koto who falls in love with him. Koto makes a deal with a Buddha who gives her human form. She and Shounin have a family made up of Kurama, a drawing, Yakushimaru, a human, and Yase, a demon. This strange family garners derision from the town, so they move into the drawing of Kyoto, “the Mirrored City”.

They live there for hundreds of years, until Koto starts to dream of the world’s end, a warning to return her human form she borrowed from the buddha. She and Shounin depart for parts unknown, leaving their three children. Fast-forward to the present day, when Myoue Yakushimaru has replaced his father as Takao monk. The sky fills with unusual lightning, which he thinks could be a sign of Shounin returning, but it turns out to be a girl named Koto from a parallel dimension, looking for her guardian.

This stylish, engrossing, inventive series has been teasing us with small tastes since December of 2011, but has finally gotten a run of ten episodes in which to expand its already dense and tantalizing story. We’ve been licking our chops for some time, and this first non-recap episode takes us all the way back to the beginning with Myoue’s father. It’s a charming, romantic tale that turns bittersweet when Koto, the rabbit who became a lady, then a wife and mother, has to leave that ideal life. There’s an alarming abruptness to going from happy family to three kids on their own, but Mirror-Kyoto is devoid of war or suffering, so the kids fare fine.

Once we’re in the age of cell phones and video surveillance (this episode covers a formidable length of time), the three now run the city like their parents once did, in the configuration we’re familiar with from the OVAs. Then, out of the blue, a girl who vaguely resembles their father suddenly makes a big, Terminator-style entrance, flanked by twin demon brothers, brandishing a big hammer, hunting a black rabbit we know to be Myoue’s mom’s original form. Just as suddenly as he lost his parents, Myoue gains a family.

Rating: 9 (Superior)

Kyousogiga – 05 (Fin)

Myoue first meets Lady Koto, the human form of a black rabbit his master once painted which came to life. The three lived in seclusion as the seasons passed. Lady Koto stands on an unknown world with the earth in full view, holding an infant that looks like Koto, promising her they’ll meet again someday.

This was probably the most cryptic of the five Kyousogiga segments – one in which the majority goes without spoken dialogue, only a song sung in English. The different seasons are beautifully rendered in the frame of the temple, and we liked the concept of the entire strange city we’ve seen thus far being a painting by Myoue’s master, painted piece by piece and pasted to the wall.

There are probably a lot of ways to interpret everything that went on in this last few minutes (carrying lady Koto with a trail of blood behind her, followed by the appearance of a young Myoue…was she pregnant?) but it drove home the point that the whole series, brief as it was, was a nice, trippy, ephemeral look at another world and the colorful lives that inhabit it – and didn’t get bogged down in excessive explanation.

Rating: 7 (Very Good)

Kyousogiga – 03

One of Douji Yase’s animal-like youkai records video of a special day in the world on the other side of the looking glass: a day when unwanted or unneeded…stuff is relased into the air, where it drifts away towards a train station which will take it further away still. One of these objects is a stuffed animal a mother wants her daughter to let go, but she won’t, and floats off with it. Koto, A and Un fly up to grab her, and it isn’t long before Shouko and her suited legion also assist; finally Shouko shoots the plushie, and the girl and Koto fall back down to earth. Also among the objects that shouldn’t have flown away: Douji Yase’s favorite teacup.

This really captured the grandeur and whimsy of the strange world Koto is now at home in (the awesome soundtrack really helps sell it). There’s a very fable-like vibe to it, and it’s also very much the opposite of how the real world operates. Our waste falls to the earth, both due to gravity and due to the nature of municipal sanitation and decomposition. We as a modern society toss out a lot that may still be useful to others, but is wasted anyway, due to convenience. Still, it would be great if, once a year, all the unnecessary clutter that had accumulated that year could be released into the sky, to find its own way…somewhere else.

Rating: 9 (Superior)

Kyousogiga – 02

We got so hung up with Fall series that Kyousogiga almost slipped through the cracks. Well, with one episode left to air, we’re taking the opportunity to catch up on this excellent ONA.

In this piece, Shouko, the geek who runs Kurama Temple, has lost her PSP. She suspects she lost it when she was tackled post-lunch by Koto/A/Un. She deploys legions of well-dressed henchmen to leave no stone unturned. They spot a PSP in the talons of a bird, but after a sustained pursuit and much discharging of firearms, when they catch the bird, the PSP is not hers. Eventually it’s found by a man named Fushimi, who simply searched for its GPS signal. The tracking device is a must for Shouko, who is very active and has a tendency to lose things.

Like a rich dessert, this episodelet was dense, compact, and full of complex flavors surrounding a very simple concept: losing something important along one’s daily travels. In Shouko’s case, having her PSP is a matter of utmost importance, and she is also fortunate to have virtually unlimited resources at her disposal for whatever petty purpose she chooses. We liked her brief, outwardly pleasant, inwardly tense chat with Douji Yase, as well as her knee-jerk reaction to remembering she was jostled by Koto:  destroying her house and holding her at gunpoint.

Rating: 8 (Great)