Dagashi Kashi 2 – 03

Dagashi Kashi is certainly still pleasant and fun, but it’s definitely lost something in terms of heft since the first season.  Chapters like this week truly are like dagashi – inconsequential and lacking in any real substance, gone almost before you start them and sure to leave you still hungry when they’re gone.  I love snacks and I love Dagashi Kashi, but I couldn’t live on either of them either as a biological organism or an anime blogger.  I’m going to try to keep blogging this series because of the affection I feel for the characters, but it may prove to be a serious challenge to find much to say in weeks like this one.

I did learn something this week at the very least – I’d never heard of a Beigoma before.  This strikes me as the kind of toy that was old school and out of favor in Japan until some kid showed up doing amazing things with it on Youtube (in the Kendama vein).  No surprise, of course, that Saya is the master of games like always, even with Hotaru’s Death Star of begoima for a challenge.  Also props for the double-skirt – nice unintentional troll by Hotaru there.

The B-part gives us a glimpse of chibi-Hotaru (5th grade, maybe?) and what strikes me is that she’s changed very little since then.  She’s a smaller version of herself, literally – a dagashi otaku and a know-it-all, and more than a little sentimental about it.  This, perhaps, does help explain why she’s so emotionally vested in the Shikadas’ divey little shop, which is nice.  For me, though, more of the character stuff with the Endou siblings is what’s really needed to take this series to the next level.

Itou Junji: Collection – 02

Without a doubt, this was the most conventionally horror-driven episode of Itou Junji: Collection, delivering two chapters that were both rather creepy and disquieting.  I rather like the ghoulish humor that a lot of Itou-sensei’s stories seem to have, but there’s something to be said for straight-up freakiness too – especially when it relies on psychology rather than gore.

First up was maybe the scariest chapter so far, a tale of a boy with a very strange girl living next door.  This one is pretty self-explanatory, but the whole business about the holes, the swarming insects and the mysterious doctor who shows up whenever someone finds the cursed jade was creepy as fuck.  Also, big-name seiyuu are pretty much the norm with this series, but it’s quite a thing to have the two kids played by Kimura Ryouhei and Sugita Tomokazu.

Nobunaga Shimazaki and Namikawa Daisuke are the stars of the next piece, as the sons in a family of traveling puppeteers.  This one is pretty creepy too, largely because anything with sentient puppets is creepy, and Jean-Pierre is a freaky-looking little ningyou.  One thing I’ve noticed about Itou’s stories so far is that as bad as things get, the protagonists tend not to die – they’re around to observe, and the really bad stuff happens to the people around them. It’s happened in pretty much every chapter so far, and I’m noticing that it has an almost subliminal effect on how I watch these horror vignettes play out.  I wouldn’t say I’m 100% sold, but this show is really starting to work for me – if nothing else, it’s quite unlike anything else on the schedule.