I would class this week’s episode of Koukyuu no Karasu as both interesting and odd.  Rather than a traditional three-act structure it was more a series of semi-connected scenes stuck together.  It also played the OP at about the 18-minute mark and skipped the ED, for some reason.  The vagaries of adaptation can be hard to fathom sometimes, so perhaps there was some reason behind all that.  This doesn’t seem like the sort of series that would go that route as a stylistic choice.

At first it looked like we were headed for the usual formula – the emperor bringing Shouxue sweets and asking her for ghostbusting help.  He has his own ghosts to worry about of course, but those he wants kept secret from her – this request regards a silver-haired apparition which appears under a willow tree in bloom.  He seems not to know anything about it (even the gender), so one might surmise that it’s because of the hair that he specifically brought her in on the mystery.

At this point, though, the episode takes an abrupt left turn and the remainder focuses on the emperor’s attendant, the eunuch Wei Qing.  He and  Shouxue have a rather terse exchange where he basically warns her to mind her Ps and Qs around his master, lest her lineage land her in real trouble, and she insults his temperament in reply.  They do patch that up later in the episode, but not before Wei Qing goes through rather a tough time trying to track down a sorcerer possibly connected to the willow ghost.  It involves a search in the red light district, where he grew up the son of a prostitute – a place with extremely unpleasant memories for Wei Qing.

Wei Qing had a tough childhood, to say the least.  Orphaned when his mother killed herself, he chooses castration so that he can enter the inner palace and avoid going into prostitution himself, only to find that it doesn’t spare him from sexual abuse.  The reason for his loyalty to the emperor is obvious, and it’s something Wei Qing takes seriously.  So much so that he goes behind his master’s back to request the Raven Consort’s help in freeing him from the ghosts who haunt his bedchamber and rob him of sleep.

The world map Shouxue sees in the storehouse seems clearly tied into the larger plot Raven of the Inner Palace is slowly establishing, though just how isn’t clear yet.  Ultimately I think the series will stand or fall based on how compelling that larger plot turns out to be.  The individual mysteries are interesting enough, but not enough on their own to sustain the narrative for 12 episodes.