Where the heck is Micchan?

Fall’s weirdest show (and there are a few) keeps amping it up.  I started out being fairy convinced this was satire, and that the really wild stuff was the product of overactive boyish imaginations.  But we’re reaching the point now where there’s some legit weird shit clearly happening here.  Migi to Dari is still satirical, but perhaps not to the extent and not in the precise way I imagined.  I’m not convinced that extends to murder (much less in the way it’s suggested this week) but weird even by suburbia standards.

This whole bondage age regression thing with Migi  never clicked for me I have to say, so I’m glad it’s over.  Compared to the other strange twists that one just seemed gratuitous and unnecessary.  It certainly shows Migi’s commitment to the cause, though – and his belief in his own abilities as a mimic.  Unfortunately Ichijou Reiko isn’t quite as easily manipulated as Migi imagines.  I think I pretty much nailed it in saying she was doing this to Migi because she enjoyed it, and nothing more.

I’m not surprised Eiji still wets the bed (and not just the bed), with Reiko as his mother.  Or is she?  Who the hell knows.  Just when it seems as if Migi has wormed his way into Reiko’s confidence (he’s grown up to five now) she announced she’s going to send him home.  There’s one night left in the Ichijou mansion and the brothers decide they’ll make the best of it.  This time around it’s Migi who puts on the wig and dress (he’s sure gotten his fill of cosplay in that house), the the boys stage a ghost story to try and whittle down the suspects list.

The father, Ichijou Akira (Kawashima Tokuyoshi), who’s barely made an appearance, is their first target.  His reaction – he’s in fact very glad to see Metry (that’s Migi and Dari’s mother’s name, apparently) and betrays no indication he thinks he’s seeing an apparition.  Occam’s Razor suggests he didn’t kill her, and that they were having an affair.  Reiko is next, and while she’s terrified (who wouldn’t be, to be woken up that way), her response correlates with the Akira one.  Reiko wants Metry dead, but you wouldn’t bother with that if you knew she already was.  The mysterious part of this interaction was “you’ve finally come to steal it” being the first words out of Reiko’s mouth.

That leaves us with Eiji.  And while his encounter with Metry is accidental, he certainly acts the guiltiest of the Ichijou trio.  That doesn’t mean he killed her of course, only that he thinks she’s dead.  I’m still inclined to believe no one killed her (though my confidence is weakening a bit).  And even if someone did, Eiji would have been like 5 at the time, which seems like a stretch.  This family is a total freakshow, no question about that.  They’re fetishistic and dysfunctional and apparently spying on the whole town, and Metry certainly seems to have been there with her sons.  But did someone in that house actually kill her?

The bizarre cherry on top of this strange sundae is Shunpei being at the Sonoyama house when Hitori comes home.  He certainly acts like he belongs, but everyone else seems mystified by his presence.  As with so much else in Migi and Dali one is left to wonder whether this weirdness is genuinely sinister, or just the “normal” eccentricities endemic to upper-middle class suburbs full of freaks with way too much time on their hands.