Mayonaka no Occult Koumuin continues to be the quiet workhorse of the spring.  It delivers an awful lot in its unprepossessing package – tonal diversity, smart writing, top-notch acting.  It would be so easy to completely miss this show’s existence – as indeed the overwhelmingly majority of the Western anime audience seems to be doing – but it’s a secret those of us who appreciate it are very glad we’ve discovered.

We have what starts out looking like it’s going to be a fairly standard Another-of-the-week story here, but it turns into something much more than that.  This is a ghost story, for starters – a boy is having nightmares, and has told his mother and older brother that if the creature he’s playing hide-and-seek with in his dream finds him three times, he won’t wake up.  Two of his friends have already suffered this fate and Ryou is convinced he’ll be next.  As his mother works in the same building as our heroes, word eventually reaches Senda-san, and he recognizes the M.O. from similar cases in other Tokyo wards.

Because Seo has lost an expense report he’s spend a week collecting hanko for (it’s almost unbelievable how obsessed the Japanese are with hanko), they send Arata off to investigate alone – a scene which very much reminded me of Kotarou going off on his first errand in Gakuen Babysitters.  Against this backdrop Arata is also being loaned out to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in a sort of annual exchange program,, so he takes the case with him and enlists the help of two members of their office.

How a show that’s so minimally budgeted can hire almost as many huge-name seiyuu as Kimetsu no Yaiba I don’t quite get, but the key player here is played by Sakurai Takahiro – Kanoichi Satoru (cousin of one of the Shinjuku Ward employees, Akane).  It’s pretty clear right away that something is off with Kanoichi – despite the oily smile he paints on, he does a poor job of hiding his distaste for Arata and his abilities.  To him, Anothers are like “rats or earthquakes” – they’re a problem to be dealt with, not beings to be conversed with.  And the scar above his eye he continually worries is evidence that his animosity comes from personal history.

I kind of knew where the story of the “dream demon” was headed as soon as Kanoichi’s true stripes were shown, but I was still hoping things wouldn’t break that way.  This is obviously the fundamental divide in Mayonaka – Kanoichi’s approach on the one extreme and Arata’s on the other – and while theoretically the mission statement of their departments aligns with Arata’s position, in practice he’s pretty much on an island (maybe he’s breaking Theo and Kyouichi down slowly, but I think their instincts would still push them into Kanoichi’s camp).

I really, really wanted Arata to punch Kanoichi’s lights out after he exorcised (or destroyed) the child demon Arata had just reached a settlement with.  The thing is, I don’t totally disregard Kanoichi’s position, because relying on Anothers to act as humans would in similar circumstances is highly risky (and yes, Arata’s connection to Kohaku does call his reliability into question).  But ultimately what Arata says is right – what Kanoichi is doing is executing criminals who’ve confessed on the chance that they might commit a crime in the future.  Since he doesn’t consider them sentient beings that’s fine for him, but in addition to being morally reprehensible his approach seems to me completely counterproductive in the long term.  This struggle is obviously not over – it’s just getting started in fact, and as mild-mannered as he is I’m not sure Arata is the sort of man you want to get really pissed off at you.  So much for City-Special Wards relations…