Forgive me for the brevity of this post – I’m so backlogged from moving (which is an administrative nightmare in Japan on top of all the other ways it sucks) that I’m utterly exhausted.  I did have a thought about Odd Taxi after I published last week’s review, though, and it’s this: I’ve been calling this series surrealist since the beginning, but I think that’s actually wrong.  That terms suits something like Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita or Kai Byoui Ramune better.  What Odd Taxi is, in fact, is absurdist.  There’s overlap but in fact they’re very different things – and the absurdist tag in fact placed OT even more comfortably in the Woody Allen category.

So much continues to happen here, and if my core tenet of Odd Taxi – there are no coincidences – turns out to be correct, this is gonna be one whopper of a finish.

• Baba is someone in this cast who stands out as being exactly what he seems (presumably).  That’s what draws Nikaidou, living a lie and all naked ambition, to him.  I still can’t place any deeper connection between Homesapiens and the main plot than that, however.
• The first half here was very reminiscent of the Tanaka episode in some ways.  It was remarkably stifling and claustrophobic to watch – really doing a brilliant job of putting us in Nikaidou’s shoes.
• The burning question here, it seems to me, is who actually killed Mitsuya-san.  Nikaidou-san could be an unreliable narrator but I don’t get that impression from her (in this case, at least).  Considering where she was found, it’s obviously not a random act of violence.
• The only other person with a motive, that I can see, is Wadagaki Sakura, the karaage-loving Kyuushi girl.  Unless it was Yamamoto himself, trying to foil the producer’s order to make Mitsuya the center.
• On the matter of Odokawa’s parents, I’m assuming for the moment that their death wasn’t a double-suicide.  And back to that core tenet, it would have to be tied into the current situation somehow.
• Whatever Goriki finds in Odokawa-kun’s diary  it’s going to be important.  I’m skeptical that he really did forget everything about the accident.
• Mitsuya being Danraku’s father ties in rather nicely with that no coincidences thing…
• Big Daimon is now working with Odokawa?  I feel as if I missed a connection there somewhere (or not – I guess they’re allies on Dobu’s Oddtaxi plan).

I can honestly say I have no idea how Odd Taxi is going to tie this Byzantine tangle of plot threads together (and there’s still that whole people being animals thing, too) in only two episodes.  But I guess that’s better than having to do it in one.