It’s back to comedy mode for Fruits Basket 2019, with another episode that stuck in my memory from the 2001 series.  That usually hasn’t been an auspicious portent, and this episode certainly isn’t especially memorable.  But among the throwaway chapters it’s at least among the upper echelon I’d say, despite the usual problem of trying too hard to sell the joke and to stretch a thin gruel into a seven-course meal.

I’ve always found the eps focused on Arisa and Saki to be pretty pedestrian, as both of them are on the one-note side and so are their characters.  Plus, the whole “waves” thing is a silly affectation that I was never sold on, even in the manga or first season.  Add in the Prince Yuki Fan Club – surely one of the most annoying side dishes in the Furubuffet – and the results are surely going to be less than spectacular.  But the one element that sort of saves this ep is Saki’s younger brother Megumi (veteran Fujii Yukiyo – quite different here from her recent turn as Mana in Gegege no Kitarou).

I seem to remember – though I wouldn’t swear to it – that Megumi made an earlier appearance in the manga, which added a little more context to his behavior here.  In any event he’s a fairly funny kid – in many respects a younger clone of his sister but somehow even more sinister in a “Village of the Damned” kind of way.  His specialty isn’t waves but curses – he hides in Saki’s closet to learn the names of the trio who’ve come to visit on the pretense of an article for the school paper but in reality, looking for a weakness in the “demon queen” who’s seen as Tohru’s main defender.  Names, you see, are the key to Megumi being able to curse someone (as I said, this is all pretty silly).

All that is fluffier than fluff, but I kind of like the dynamic between the siblings.  And Megumi telling the trio off on the grounds that obsessive love is disrespectful and frightening to its subject was actually kind of a profound (and predictive, given when it originally appeared) moment, since that sort of thing is a huge problem in Japanese culture.  There’s more to Megumi than the mostly-caricature version we see here, which the extended length of this adaptation presumably means we’re going to see on-screen eventually.