At this point my take on the Yomi no Tsugai mythology is basically “screw all these people, seriously”. Or more pointedly, screw all the adults. The faultlines in this story are crystal clear – adults and children, humans and daemons. Adults are all, to one degree or another, deceitful and selfish and delusional. Kids are tools in their hands, to be used for their purposes. Daemons too, and while there are clearly differences in temperament among tsugai and some are nasty, they don’t lie. I don’t think they can.

A case like Asama’s mother and her origin story is interesting. She originally acquired Kin’ugyokuto when she went to the woods to kill herself, and they proved the only ones in the world who treated her with any kindness. Outcast from her family and shunned as a kook, she’s ready to try again – though Yozakura says he’ll stop her – when Gonzou happens to be driving by. You can’t take his actions as anything but pure opportunism – this woman is a potential asset, and he exploits her weakness to lure her in. She might in the end be better off, but that’s purely incidental. As to the circumstances of how they came to conceive a child together, that’s left to the imagination.

Back at the mansion Haruo is pleading with Jin to spare Akio’s life, but that’s clearly a non-starter. Gonzou never spares traitors or enemies (as he defines them). Haruo and Natsuki refer to themselves as siblings but that’s in the yakuza sense. Akio is a weird one – he apparently lacks the ability to feel pain, and saw the Kagemori as the only place he could be without society eliminating him as a deviant. It’s still not totally clear why he betrayed them, but he was communicating with a group of other people who shared his peculiar trait, among whom may or may not have been one of his parents.

There’s more to the Akio thing, that’s a certainty. For now he seems to have escaped, as Yama no Kami somehow revived itself from relic form and… turned itself into a bomb? Not sure what happened there. Hagure is already aghast at the damage that was done to his studio, though Gabu seems mainly concerned that the coffee machine survived. Hagure is the adult human in this story we probably know the least about – maybe the one who might actually be decent and trustworthy. Or this could all be an act. As a member of the Kagemori who makes no attempt to rein in their criminal acts, he’s at the very least complicit in them.

The staredown between Dera and Gonzou just makes you want to pound your head on the desk. We learn some interesting details here, like the village children have no idea about the twins until they become adults. Then, if the reject the manifesto, they get exiled and go to the real world to work – where the Kagemori consider them fair game for elimination. Fuck both sides here, they’re both despicable. A crime family vs. a cult – choose your poison. The fact that they come together to oppose Ivan and whoever’s pulling his strings just clues you in to how awful that unknown party must be.

I think what’s most grating in exchanges like this is when the Higashi side or the Kagemori turn self-righteous in condemning the other, as if their own hands weren’t doused in blood. I do like Dera on an individual level, and I do believe he personally cares about Yuru. That sort of thing seems to be in his DNA, based on what we know of his father. But his hands are dirty too, make no mistake, and for his own sake Yuru is probably going to have to divorce himself from Tadera control in order to pursue a decent future for himself (just as Asa will the Kagemoris). But how the hell can that happen? As Woody Allen said, “Boy, what a world… it could be so wonderful, if it wasn’t for certain people.”