Holy plot twist.
There are certainly some very good shows airing this season (most of them on Sunday, sadly for me). One can argue which is the best overall (or not – it’s this one). But I don’t think there’s much of a case to dispute that Karasu wa Aruji o Erabanai is the best-written. When you grow up reading fantasy, your palate becomes pretty sensitive about it. Some series just have it – that essence of greatness in creating a living, breather folkloric world that seems more real than real. There is a particular Japanese subset of this – The Moribito novels are the most obvious example in anime or out, and Shin Sekai Yori is another masterpiece. But they have more in common with great Western fantasy than differences from it.
In makes sense that the series which has easily the grandest literary ambition in anime at the moment would go big when it comes to its major plot twist. It’s a whopper, no question about it. But this episode takes its sweet time building up to it. There’s the matter of survival to deal with for starters. Nazukihiko has dispatched the monkey that was throttling his young comrade, but there’s more where it came from – and he and Yukiya are on the clock to escape the caverns before Saku’s incense clock (what a cool concept that is) chimes their funeral knell.
As it turns out, Wakamiya has sent a message to Saku. He’s basically bypassed Tobi, knowing Natsuka’s approach was doomed to fail. But the idea was for Saku to prevent Natsuka’s meeting from failing catastrophically, with Wakamiya investigating the caves on his own. Sending the boy in was Saku’s own twist – as Yukiya says, they’ve been dancing to the old man’s tune. Yukiya has laid down a thread to find his way back (well-read in Greek mythology or just clever that way), and he and the Kin’u follow it towards the exit, with Wakamiya ordering Yukiya not to focus on what might be behind them.
The issue – one King Saku surely knew about – is that all or most of the caverns exist outside the boundary protecting Yamauchi. This “thin membrane” of protection let them leave, but it’s not about to let them back – suggesting it’s not a conscious entity in its own right. This is obviously a problem, all the more so when the pursuing monkeys catch up to at the dead end the barrier has been herding the pair back to. Perhaps Saku intended this as a test to see if Yukiya was clever enough to think his way out of trouble (though why he felt the need to test the boy in such a way is a puzzle in its own right).
Nazukihiko designates Yukiya to think of the solution while he fights off the monkeys. Which the lad does, albeit as he’s mid-plummet after a misstep (was there simply no time to transform, or is transforming even possible if a Yatagarasu is outside the boundary?). They escape the simian horde when Yukiya kills the ghost light (not even monkeys can see in total darkness) and he tells the Kin’u the solution – follow your nose. The clue to survival Saku gave Yukiya was sandalwood and cassia incense, the smell of which leads them back into Yamauchi and towards the clock.
Yukiya having survived his challenge, the onus is on Saku to share what he knows. And it turns out that Wakamiya knows a fair bit too, and this is where the huge plot twists really start raining cats and dogs. I think it helps to think of Yatagarasu as a chronicle of a very smart young boy being educated about just how little he knows (which is definitely one of its core identities). It makes sense that the world outside Yamauchi should be much larger than what’s inside the barrier. But Yukiya has never really though about it in those terms. The bone he’s brought back for Saku didn’t belong to a monkey – it’s human.
Yukiya has never heard the term “human” before – which seems odd at first but then, why should he have? The world of the Yatagarasu is just one small, sheltered bubble in the human world. A world the Kin’u or his predecessors has seen – and documented, in texts Yukiya has seen even if he didn’t understand what he was looking at. That changes everything, obviously. But in fact as terrifying as that is from a Yatagarasu perspective, humans aren’t the problem at the moment – if anything they too are “victims”, Nazukihiko says. The monkeys are like Yatagarasu – creatures who mimic human form (which suggests both are connected to humans in some way). But they feast on humans – and to them, a crow in human form may as well be one.
There’s one more bit of information Saku by rights should share, given the terms of his deal with Yukiya. And Wakamiya isn’t about to let him off the hook. By this point I’d guessed that the Yatagarasu working with the monkeys was Jihei. By Saku and Wakamiya’s reckoning, he brokered a deal to trade village girls for human bones – bones which hold no value for the monkeys, but are valuable in the drug trade. They, it seems, are the basis of sagecap – the “senningai” drug (I can’t find any evidence the word actually exists in Japanese so I have no idea how it was translated) so dangerous the Underground won’t allow anyone under its control to traffic in it.
Whew. That’s a lot to take in, especially with only two episodes remaining. This was going to be hard for Koume anyway you slice it (I don’t think there’s any way she knew), but it appears Jihei may already have met his end after he was made the subject of a bounty. These events make it absolutely clear – both to Yukiya and to the audience – just how great a burden Nazukihiko has been bearing. Yukiya’s loyalty to him has been steadily growing, based on an increasingly personal connection between them. But it seems safe to say that the boy is now as staunch an ally as the Kin’u could ever hope to have.
animealex
September 8, 2024 at 6:08 pmSo, this takes place in our world and in our time…wow! The “Monkeys” use the boundary zone between our world and the Raven world as their hideout and act as opportunistic attackers on both, presumably because they have no other way to survive. And Nazukihiko drops another bomb, that the Raven world is about to collapse.
Well, why the heck does this only have two episodes left? “Sigh” I guess chances for more seasons are slim to none, so I’m grateful for what I got, but remain hungering for more. As far as I know, there are no translations to the novels available, so that is also a no-go.
Beato
September 8, 2024 at 6:14 pmI only found it out recently myself but “senningai” is actually a real word and not something Abe made up for the series! It is a rather uncommon term (tenreigai was more commonly used) for medicine made from human bones (specifically the scullcap) in Chinese medicine.
Guardian Enzo
September 8, 2024 at 6:15 pmWow, that’s wild. You don’t have a reference for further info, do you?
Bel
September 8, 2024 at 11:32 pmI dug around a bit and found out the term came from “Bencao Gangmu”, a Chinese medicine and natural history encyclopedia compiled by Li Shizhen in the 16th century. There’s an entire chapter on using human substances as medicine.
Nadavu
September 9, 2024 at 12:08 amAs for the sagecap translation, I found this:
https://bishogai.com/pic_book/data14/r001370.html
It does look like a wizard’s hat…
Guardian Enzo
September 9, 2024 at 7:37 amI saw that too but couldn’t make any connection between a mollusk and the context of use in the story.
Nadavu
September 9, 2024 at 10:24 pmMost likely the translator wasn’t aware of the esoteric Chinese medicine practice and instead found this mollusk on Google. Having done subtitles for TV myself way back when, I know firsthand that you are not paid enough nor given enough time to do extensive research (extensive = anything more than a few minutes of browsing top search engine results)
Beato
September 9, 2024 at 10:44 pmI wrote a comment with references but it appearently never got published, weird. Well, other people thankfully ended up adding the reference so no need. The mollusk mentioned in the other comments has the same “sennin” but the last character is the character for “shell” instead of “lid” (or (skull)cap). I guess you could translate it to sageshell.
Nadavu
September 10, 2024 at 3:37 amDid you include any kanji in the unpublished comment? They don’t get saved if there are non-English characters
Beato
September 10, 2024 at 4:41 amWell that certainly explains it. Good to know.
Guardian Enzo
September 10, 2024 at 6:39 amThat’s news to me, too. Is that a WP thing generally?
Guardian Enzo
September 10, 2024 at 6:41 amTest comment.
センニンガイ 仙人貝
Scampi
September 9, 2024 at 4:40 pmI want to add that the setting of a small world in a bigger world is similar to the Buddhism’s three thousandfold worlds system, where 1000 small worlds make up a middling world and 1000 middling worlds make up big world to include billions of worlds. So the sagecap is a bit more literal in this series, a euphemism for an immortal’s skull, in this case not really an immortal but a being from the higher world.
Also sennin’s nin is writting in the hanji character for human in EP14 but most regular yatagarasu just don’t know what the word actually meant I guess.
Guardian Enzo
September 10, 2024 at 10:36 amThis is an interesting notion. A very difficult concept for my Western mind to grasp – hard-core Buddhist in concept. But Abe is clearly pretty deep as a writer so for sure, she could be going for that.
Scampi
September 9, 2024 at 5:58 pmSpoiler warning in the next episode preview btw. Caught me off guard, that sneaky preview.
Nicc
September 10, 2024 at 7:29 amWell, I didn’t see that coming. Yep, I’m talking about that big twist, but first Wakamiya and Yukiya have to get out of there. Wakamiya is not able to get out in the same way that he got in and so he follows the string that Yukiya left. They’re not just racing against time as some of the monkeymen are on their tailfeathers too. Wakamiya already knew that the negotiations with Natsuka will fail and so he was able to discreetly contact Saku and get him to intervene. However, sending Yukiya into the caverns wasn’t part of the plan and now it’s the both of them who are being tested. About Tobi, I was wondering where I saw him before… That’s it, he looks like Thanos from the MCU! When he got dusted, he was reborn in this world.
The two of them then reach a certain point where they cannot advance. For some reason, they just loop back to the same place over and over again. Wakamiya figures about that at least this section of the cave is beyond the boundary and the barrier is keeping them out. They better figure out something fast as the monkeymen have tracked them down. Yukiya remembers something about the incense and, yep, the answer is to follow their nose. They’re able to make it back just as the clock expires. Yukiya was able to make it back with a white shard and so it’s time for Saku to talk. Saku examines that piece and explains that it’s an adam’s apple from a human. What’s a “human”, Yukiya asks? Saku is talking about actual humans, not the yatagarasu or the monkeymen that resemble them (Later on, Wakamiya dodged the question twice when Yukiya asked why they look like humans). The monkeymen have been able to cross the boundary to eat humans and they’ve found a way to get to the yatagarasu.
The giant pile of “white shards” are human bones. Another twist is that the human world is a modern one, at least late 20th century. Putting on my writing cap, how does this look like on the other side? In the human world, there are mysterious disappearances that nobody can solve. The clues lead to nowhere, like they vanished from the world. Sometimes, sometimes, there are these tufts of fur. DNA testing shows that they are from apes, but they’re not from any species that they know. Some eyewitnesses claim to have seen apes or humans with apes. Or, some even claim to have seen them change from one form to another, but are dismissed as crackpots. Then, there are probably some people who can perceive the boundary.
Alright, taking off the cap now… Indeed, there is one more thing. Wakamiya has already guessed that the monkeys are coming from Central. But, how did they get up to the North? There must be somebody helping to move them there. This is something that Saku should have shared, but it was indeed Jihei who arranged this. The sagecap is made from human bones, which are of no value to the monkeys. We also learn that Jihei was alive up to this point and has been laying low. That’s until a price is put on his head and we see that somebody has made an example out of him. That was a huge twist to drop with just two episodes left and I’m wondering where the show goes from here.
Raikou
September 10, 2024 at 10:23 amWow, Yatagarasu never misses. Each episode just getting better.
The twist is a big thing. I mean, there are outside world is obvious, but the term ‘human’ is not commonly known? and the outside world is actually modern world? I did not expect that.
Two more episode… I hope there’s 2nd season announcement.