I imagine I’m going to be pretty much as Hyde sings about in the ED even making the suggestion, but I wonder if Mars Red is going to make a run for the best vampire anime ever.  When I look back it strikes me that while there are a ton of them, very few are really, really good.  It’s a tough genre to get anything distinctive out of, especially these days.  Shiki is the only one that springs to mind for me as a clear standout (I was never a huge Hellsing fan, and Blood+ isn’t quite on the same level), and Mars Red will have to go some to be considered in the same class as that show.  But I think it has a chance.

It’s now abundantly clear to me that the vampires are both the protagonists and stars of Mars Red, and Maeda effectively the antagonist.  We’ve seen a fair number of sympathetic portrayals of vamps over the decades but this is one of my favorites because it feels so natural.  These men are so human, yet inescapably aware that they no longer are human beings.  In a way this is a sort of “Slice of Death” series, as these vampires deal with the inconveniences and heartaches of their lot, and with discrimination based on what they are.

The message Nakajima receives about his time running out is an ominous one, given how he and Maeda obviously view their vampire corps as an expendable resource.  Meanwhile the narrative returns to Yoshiwara, as it so often has lately, where more bodies are turning up showing all the signs.  In particular the Chayaro brothel seems to be a hotbed of activity, and Suwa infiltrates it to see which way the wind is blowing.  There he meets a 15 year-old prostitute named Akesato, who sees him as a boy little more than her own age and seems to be Yoshiwara is the safest place in Tokyo.  Their interaction could have been maudlin, but it’s charming and tragic thanks to the restraint and poetic bent of the writing.

As the investigation begins, we learn a very interesting bit of vampire trivia in this mythology.  To wit, vampires can only sense other vampires of higher rank because they fear them.  That means Shutaro can’t sense them at all, as he’s the highest-rank around (or so everyone thinks), but poor Yamagami can sense all of them.  That makes him a natural for recon work – alone, so that the vamps he spots have no idea they’ve been spotted.  Yamagami is the standout character of the series for me, and Yamadera Kouchi is a big part of the reason.  He humanizes Yamagami in much the way Hirata Hiroaki does the men he portrays (and hearing Yamadera as Yamagami trying to master ultrasonic communication is worth the price of admission all by itself).

What exactly is going on here?  A British vamp named Rufus Glenn (Furukawa Makoto) is clearly at the heart of whatever it is, seemingly smuggling the vampire drug we saw last week in Scotch whisky barrels.  This doesn’t sit too well with Deffrot, who speaks of a “promise not to turn Tokyo into a hunting ground” and his desire to spend his nights in peace.  Deffrot’s role, then, because an interesting one and difficult to pin down.  These “zombie vampires” wandering the alleys of Yoshiwara hardly seem conducive with that wish, so Deffrot may be about to come off the sidelines and take matters into his own hands.

In a different sort of way, I get the same sense of tragedy with Mars Red that I did with Shiki.  It feels as if this can only end very badly, with the real tension coming not from suspense about that, but about what course events will take to get us to that point.  Layer in the fascinating depiction of 1923 Tokyo – and the addition of Frank Lloyd Wrights’s Imperial Hotel this week pretty much guarantees the Great Kanto Earthquake is going to a major factor – and the stunning music, and you have one of the most immersive and intellectually stimulating anime of the year.  Mars Red isn’t getting a lot of attention, but it certainly has mine.