Your serve, Tengoku.

The best anime double-bill in years chalks up another flawless Saturday, as Heavenly Delusion once again holds up its end of the bargain and then some.  This too is kind of a difficult series, for reasons completely different than BokuYaba.  It’s both lighter and darker, and the two make for a fascinating contrast.  Tengoku Daimakyou goes to many places that will make viewers uncomfortable – again much like BokuYaba, and again for very different reasons.  In the setting Ishiguro-sensei is depicting here, the morality of our world simply doesn’t apply.  It can’t, no matter how arrogantly we might think otherwise.  And he goes to great pains to remind us of that.

There are man-eaters, and then there are man-eaters.  In a post-apocalyptic setting like this, bears – the apex predator in Japan – would certainly be an animal to be mindful of.  One has been rampaging in the “100% clean water” spot on the map  (which turns out to have been a trap set for Kiruko and Maru).  After it attacks two men in an underground bicycle garage now partially under water (one dead on the spot, the other fatally wounded) it goes after our heroes, lured to the spot by the map.  Kiruko brings their quick wits to bear here, using the Kiruko Beam to bonk it with a concrete pillar (after their first shot misses).  At this point it’s just a matter of Maru doing his thing – except it isn’t, because this isn’t a hiruko, just a wild beast.

Mostly, this first section is just our main pair being hilarious together (“Fatal Dive” is a definite swing and a miss).  It’s undeniably one of the strangest pairings around – a boy with unexplained superpowers, a guy trapped inside his sister’s body, the first in love with the second (or not).  They have something, these two, even if neither is exactly sure what it is.  They’re irreplaceably goofy, both of them, and most of the time the vibe is more like a couple of teenage boys road tripping, hanging out, and doing dumb stuff (which in a way is exactly what they are) than anything.

But then you have the whole “you can touch my boobs” thing, which is played for comedy but is also a reminder of how weird this dynamic is.  Fundamentally Maru is a normal 15 year-old boy and as such, well – is he really going to say no, even knowing what he knows?  The whole dropped battery/brilliant plan thing is kind of a comedy of errors (there’s no way Maru is ever going to flee and let Kiruko fend for themselves), and I don’t know what would have happened if the gun hadn’t fired.  Fortunately it did and we never had to find out.

The hotel (I use that word loosely) scene is Ishiguro at his most shameless.  The innkeeper is Totori (Matsuoka Misato, who also plays Anzu) a girl of 13 or 14 who dreams of becoming the “king of hotels”.  While they have separate rooms Maru isn’t keen to go to his, reminding Kiruko of their earlier promise.  Various attempts at distraction prove fruitless, and just where this would have ended up if Totori hadn’t broken it up is hard to say.  But break it up she does (indignantly citing the house rules) only to literally throw herself at Maru once he’s back in his room.

Again, morality is subject to circumstance, no matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise.  It’s cringier than anything Ishiguro does in Soramachi but just as hilarious, and Maru, for the record, has no intention of taking Totori up on her offer.  The odd part is that when she forces him to cop a feel he finds that the Fatal Dive Maru Touch works on Totori.  Is she actually a hiruko?  Can he actually use it on humans (but not other animals) and didn’t realize it?  In any event this is all enough to put the boy on “tilt” and he screams for Onee-san to help.  What they walk in on (“It went in!”) is considerably hard to explain, however.

Totori is honest about what happened, at least.  And as far as she knows she’s “just a regular orphan”, which leaves the incident as a mystery for Maru to chew on for the moment.  Speaking of mysteries, back inside the school Tokio gets a clean bill of health, but while she’s taking an enforced nap she has a very weird dream.  Asura comes to her, and it would be fair to say she doesn’t look like a normal human.  She asks Tokio “what are you good at?”, and then the latter sees her body start to behave very strangely before waking up in a cold sweat.

One of the scientists has put two and shoe together and identified the mysterious footprint.  But he has no idea that what he sees on his monitors is not what’s actually happening – again, Tokio seems able to move undetected by the security cameras.  And where she moves is to Kona’s room, where the two of them are obviously doing more than talking.  They do that too – about Asura, who Kona apparently liked, but in a “different” way than he likes Tokio now.  Morality may be flexible, but teenagers will always be teenagers – and in this important way, at least, these seem like very recognizable ones.