A word if I may about Tanezaki Atsumi, who plays the hell-bunny Karashi in Hoozuki no Reitetsu.  Tanezaki may be the best seiyuu most anime fans have never heard of.  Her performance as Natsume in Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun is one of my favorite in recent anime, and her resume is full of wonderful roles (almost all supporting), many in truly excellent series.  Karashi is a pretty unique role, obviously – mostly comic but requiring a good deal of range – and Tanezki-san is more than up to the challenge.

Of course, Hoozuki no Reitetsu is full of great performances by superb and relatively unheralded seiyuu, so that’s nothing new.  And this is the sort of episode that made me fall in love with the show in the first place – gleefully absurd, scholarly and irreverent at the same time, full of delicious tidbits about Japanese and world folklore, and gorgeous to look at.  I rarely have a problem of too many screencaps with comedies, but Hoozuki no Reitetsu is the stark exception.  With really beautiful and clever eps like this one, I end up with way more than I could ever use.

Karachi is indeed the subject of the first chapter – and of Koban’s feature story (he gets a tip about her from the lazy fox demon who borrowed money from him in lieu of repayment).  I’m somewhat familiar with Karachi’s backstory of course – it’s been explored in Hoozuki before, and I actually visited the mountain Kacki-kachi Yama where it was said to have happened – but having her recount it here is an excuse for a comic tour-de-force by Tanezaki.  Perhaps my favorite part of this was the little montage of terrifying folk songs (I agree with Hoozuki-sama, it would have been even more terrifying to hear that one of it had been children singing it) Karachi, Hoozuki and Koban regaled us with.

This part of Hoozuki’s deep comic bench is involved in the B-part as well, which sees us paying a visit to Hakutaku’s apothecary.  This is more sublime Hoouzki silliness, with adorable bunnies nibbling on the pumpkins the shameless Hakutaku has displayed as part of his plan to lure cute cosplayers to Shangri-la.  The first to show up are Ichiko and Niko, who while generally indeed cute are somewhat terrifying in this guise.  They’ve come in search of turnips – for turnips were the first root vegetables carved up to celebrate All Hallows Eve, and the Zashiki Warashi want to do Halloween old school.

Again, the magic of all this is very hard to capture in words – I think you have to see it, and even then you’ll either feel it or you won’t.  The absurd imagery, Hakutaku and Hoozuki trading verbal punches, the rabbits wandering about working, the riffing on the historical and modern takes on Halloween – for me, this is just genius.  It’s miraculous and odd that anyone would have thought to write a scene like this, and that it would end up as part of a series that’s insanely popular – but there you go.  As for Halloween, I’m with Hakutaku – it has become a cosplay matsuri to the point where even worrying about cultural context is pointless.  Celtic, American, Japanese – who cares, when it can be the subject of material this entertaining?